Advent 3

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

At the Friday reading group this week we finished our tour of the Minor Prophets, the twelve short prophetic books that conclude the Old Testament. They span about four centuries, from the eighth century BC, before the Assyrians invaded Israel and carted off its ten tribes into oblivion, to the return from a later exile under the Babylonians by the people of Judah. Theirs is a strange world to 21st century Western readers, of empires that have been subsumed into the tide of history, of worship practices that seem peculiar, of a coming judgement that makes us squirm. But there is much that resonates, too: a society in which the poor are trampled on, in which the powers that be seek their own interests over the people’s, in which the vulnerable are exploited and disregarded. There are recurring questions about where God is in all this, and what it means to be his people. Throughout the prophets is the call to return – to come back to God, to God’s ways, to his choosing of this people to be his. And the twelve books, and thus the Old Testament, end with Malachi, and God’s final words to his people: ‘Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.’

Elijah was a great prophet in Israel in the years after King David and King Solomon. He was a man who spent most of his time in the wilderness, a scourge of Israel’s faithless, feckless kings, a voice uncompromising in his commitment to God and his summons to a mostly unrepentant people to return to the covenant. Elijah’s ministry was full of wonders: fire called down from heaven against the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal, shutting up the sky so it didn’t rain, being swept up into heaven in a whirlwind accompanied by the chariots of God.

Enter John the Baptist. The Old Testament ends with the promise of Elijah’s return, and the New Testament opens with this strange figure of the wilderness, who has been set apart from birth: a man who is all muscle and sinew, austere in his diet, forbidding in his preaching; a man who proclaims with clarity and urgency that judgement is coming and the time for repentance is right now. We’re meant to recognise Elijah in John. And John knows his Old Testament and all its expectancy and promise of God acting to redeem his people, to come in judgement to vindicate the righteous and finally destroy evil for ever. This is why his preaching is so urgent: time is running out. The axe is already lying at the root of the trees. The promised one is coming, pitchfork in hand to separate wheat from chaff. Which will you be?

And John gets a response. As the New Testament opens people are flocking to him, drawn by his call to return to God, ready to be plunged into the waters of the river Jordan for a baptism of repentance, expectant that God is acting as he promised in sending the prophet Elijah in the person of John. Maybe now, they think, God is acting to vindicate his people, who for centuries have been oppressed by various foreign powers, taxed into poverty, and when not actively persecuted are merely tolerated. Now can they expect fire from heaven again, a sign that God is active, interested, on their side?

Here, just like Elijah, is a man of the wilderness. Here, just like Elijah, is someone more interested in holiness than in compromise. Here, just like Elijah who spoke with all the authority of God himself in judgement against Israel’s kings is a prophet who tells King Herod exactly what God thinks of him. And here, just like Elijah, is a prophet whom the powerful want to kill because they prefer to preserve their power than submit to God’s truth.

And so John, used to the wide open spaces of the wilderness, finds himself locked in a dungeon. He has given his whole life in response to God’s call to prepare his way before him, to make ready the way for the coming Saviour. But now, confined in the dark, he starts to wonder. The healing ministry, the exorcisms, the miracles were a promising start. But where’s the pitchfork and the fire from heaven? The one he’d thought was the Messiah seems more interested in eating with sinners than condemning them. He keeps dubious company and his spiritual practices, compared with John’s, are decidedly lax. Where’s the vengeance and the terrible recompense that Isaiah had foretold, and that John had come to expect? ‘Are you the one who is to come?’ he sends his disciples to ask Jesus, ‘or are we to wait for another?’

This salvation, this judgement, doesn’t look like what he expected it to. If it’s supposed to vindicate the righteous how come John’s the one who’s ended up in prison while Jesus is out there touching lepers and bleeding women and those with questionable pasts?

And what does Jesus do when John’s disciples arrive to ask for his credentials? He doesn’t, as he will later with disciples on the way to Emmaus, open up the scriptures to them by teaching. He doesn’t perform a miracle or call down fire from heaven. He points to this collection of overlooked people with dodgy hips and feeble knees and pasts they’d thought defined them and sins that have been wiped away. He points to people whose eyes are now opened, and people who have finally found their voice; people who were dead in their sins and actually dead and says ‘go and tell John about them’.

We don’t hear from these people who they thought Jesus was. But I’m pretty sure they recognised that salvation had come to them. Not in wrath but in mercy. Not with consuming fire but with healing. For them the wilderness blossoms and bursts into song. The holy highway John had been preparing by his preaching was opened up, but along it travel not the chariots of judgement but this motley collection of people who know in their bones and souls that their salvation has come through their encounter with Jesus.

John isn’t the only one who isn’t sure about Jesus. The crowds will clamour for signs. Even Jesus’ own disciples will ask if they can call down fire from heaven. They want a showy Messiah who will dazzle with his wonders and make his power plain for all to see. But Jesus keeps on drawing into the company of those travelling along Isaiah’s highway people whose lives bear witness to the salvation they have encountered: people who are merciful because they have encountered Jesus’ mercy. People who can support the frail and limping because Jesus has helped them to walk. People who can point to hope because Jesus has given them a new identity and future. It’s not as dramatic as fire from heaven. Some people, like John, will wonder if this really is it, if Jesus is who people say he is. But this is salvation, as God makes a way in the wilderness, and brings his people home.

So what of the pitchfork, and the fire, and the judgement? John, and the Old Testament prophets, weren’t wrong to expect it. It’s hard to look at the world around us, and, if we’re brave, into our own hearts, and not recognise that all is not as God intends. We see darkness, and violence, and oppression and sin, and often they seem to be winning. Advent asks us to face this truthfully, with confidence in the one who will come to judge the living and the dead. But in the meantime, which is now, which is always Advent, through the darkness God traces a path along which glow thousands and thousands of flickering flames: the redeemed walking along his highway. And when he comes, like John we might not be sure he’s what we were expecting. We expect the pitchfork and the fire and condemnation. When he comes it will be with hands scarred by the world’s violence, his glorious body bearing the marks of the judgement he takes upon himself. That’s why Isaiah greets his coming with song. The one who comes with judgement is the one who saves us. Our God comes in vengeance, as Isaiah foretold, against evil and sin and death. He comes in vengeance to save us. The wobbly, forgiven, curious company of those Jesus pointed to when John’s disciples asked him who he was knew this. They travelled along the Lord’s highway not in trembling fear of his judgement but in joyful gladness at the salvation he had brought them. They were witnesses to the sort of Messiah Jesus is, with their restored sight and forgiven sins and lives that had been turned around by mercy. And Jesus invites us to join them.