+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
I think it’s easy for us not to appreciate how radical Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist is, how counterintuitive a prophet this seemingly crazy man in the desert would have been.
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”
This is an incredibly subversive way to begin the Christmas story. Perhaps if we translate this into contemporary terms, the point will be clearer… In the fourth year of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Mike DeWine was governor of Ohio, and Anne Jolly was Bishop of Ohio and John Drymon was Rector of Trinity, Findlay, the word of God came to a seemingly mentally deranged nobody out in a corn field in Putnam County.
You see, with John the Baptist, God’s message was not coming through the expected channels, through the institutions set up to be the agents of God (in the case of the high priests) or through those in positions of temporal power, such as the Emperor or the Governor. Rather, the message of God, the call to repentance, was coming from this strange figure, this apparent madman, John, to whom few of us, if we were honest with ourselves, would have probably listened.
Now, John the Baptist was subversive in a manner wholly different from the cultural subversion which we’ve come to see in our day and age. Whether we’re talking about radical religious traditionalists or militant atheists, about far right or far left political movements, about this team or that, the spirit of our age seems obsessed with labels dependent on a combination of personal autonomy above all else and a simplistic moral dichotomy between the goodies and the baddies, in which the former is anybody who agrees with me about everything and the latter are those who disagree with me about anything.
John the Baptist was not the personification of some Ancient Judean zeitgeist. He was not countercultural in a way to which our contemporary sensibilities would apply. He was not even anti-establishment in the same way that either the anti-Roman zealots or the pro-Roman collaborators of his own day were. He was much weirder even than that.
In Matthew’s account we read “the same John had his raiment of camels hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” This was almost as strange a way to dress and eat in those days as it would be now. What’s more, John didn’t go to the temple or to one of the gates of Jerusalem to preach his message where it might be heard by those with some political or economic power. He remained in the desert.
This would have been reckoned very strange by the people of the first century, even the counter-cultural people of the time, who would have been used to self-proclaimed prophets. John was not like them, but those with any sense of history would have recognized that he fit the bill, as it were, a great deal more closely than these other so-called prophets.
It had been more than four-hundred years since a legitimate, canonical prophet had preached in Judea, but if one were to look back at those Old Testament prophets, one would notice the similarities between them and John. John’s message was not self-promoting, as were the sermons of first-century pseudo-prophets, who claimed a messianic identity for themselves. Rather, John, like the legitimate prophets of the Old Testament, pointed away from himself and always to another, namely Jesus, as the longed-for Messiah. Like so many of the Old Testament prophets, chiefly Amos, John arose from obscurity to take on the prophetic vocation. And his message, like those prophets of old was not “feel good.” His was a message of repentance and of apocalyptic expectation–preparation for the day of the Lord. This reminds one of the legitimate Old Testament prophets, particularly Elijah, the prophet with whom John was most readily identified.
We’ll hear more about John the Baptist next week, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But what can we learn from the little introduction to John which is this week’s Gospel? It seems to me that the most important lesson we get is that the Word of God comes to us from sources we might least expect. Certainly, we should be attentive to the normal modes in which we’ve come to experience that Word. We should be attentive to the Scriptures and to the teachings of Church Fathers and Councils and even (to a lesser extent) to trusted religious leaders in our own day. But sometimes, and maybe more than just sometimes if we’re paying attention, the grace and love of God is made even more apparent, presents itself even more tangibly, in unexpected ways from the people we least expect.
Of course, this must always be judged in the context of the deposit of faith–weighed against first Scripture, then Church tradition, and then our rational capacity as beings made in the image of God. We mustn’t fall prey to charlatans, to wolves in sheep’s clothing, or to use a Japanese idiom I just learned this week which makes more sense to me personally (since I deal with neither sheep nor wolves) a “neko o kaburu”, one whose put a cat on one’s head. Now that is a winsome image of one to whom I might be inappropriately drawn to trust and follow. So perhaps the corollary to applying scripture, tradition, and reason (in that order) is to beware the message which we want to hear when there is a harder lesson we need to hear.
So, keep watch. Open your eyes. Look for those signs of God’s message, which both calls us to repentance and promises the sort of Grace which is not, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, “cheap.” We hear over and over again, and especially in Advent, to be watchful. Baruch tells us “look toward the East”; the Prophet Isaiah is quoted in today’s Gospel as saying “all flesh shall see the salvation of God”; we hear in an ancient Latin hymn this morning “Lo [look, behold] the Lamb, so long expected, comes with pardon down from heaven.” Let us be watchful, though, not only for Christ at his return, but for the risen Christ in our midst, right now, being made present in ways and through people we do not expect. Pray that God may give you the eyes to see his messengers for what they are, and ask Him to give you faith in the message they preach, and that John the Baptist preached, and that each of us should be preaching: namely that great message of hope in our Lord’s return, for
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.