Texts: Isaiah 11.1-10; Ps 72.1-7, 18-19; Rom 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12
Like most all of the lections we read during
Advent, the Scriptures for today describe two kinds of reality. First they describe the world as it is now, a
world dominated by the rich, the unscrupulous and the powerful at the expense
of the poor, the principled and the vulnerable.
Then they imagine or look forward to a day in which the tables are
turned, a day when the poor, the vulnerable and the faithful will rejoice in
God’s salvation, while their enemies are done away with forever. In the Matthew reading, for example, John the
Baptist announces God’s supreme displeasure at the behaviour of the Jewish
elites who governed Judea in the first half of
the 1st century. These royal
and priestly classes had chosen to collaborate with the invading Romans in
order to preserve their status and wealth, even though this meant turning a
blind eye to the way in which the invaders exploited and robbed the ordinary
folk of their very livelihoods. John
castigates them for their poisonous hypocrisy.
Like the prophet Isaiah before him, John warns that a ‘day of the Lord’
is at hand, a cataclysmic day in which all their faithless and self-serving
ways would be exposed, while the faithful ones, those who suffer because of the
sins of these elites, would be vindicated forever. I quote:
I
baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is
coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with
the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear
his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff
he will burn with unquenchable fire.
Get the gist?
The day of the Lord is like a deluge of fire. The faithful ones are like wheat, preserved
from the fire and taken to God’s own heart.
But the deceitful ones, who only want to protect themselves, are like
the worthless chaff that is thrown into the fire and burned. The outcome of that purgatorial cleansing is
beautifully described in the song of praise we heard from the vision of Isaiah. There the prophet imagines a world in which
the remnant of God’s people, the righteous and the weak, who survive the
punishment of their oppressors, are gathered to God in such a way that their
experience of misery and shame is transformed utterly. The song imagines a future where the people
of God will experience reconciliation with their enemies and with God,
rejoicing in God’s gift of peace for all time to come: ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard
shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them.’
It’s a wonderful vision. So wonderful that I sometimes feel that it’s
all too good to be true! Of course, I
have no difficultly with the part of the story that describes the evil and
self-serving corruption of the elites.
Who could deny it? At this time
of year our political leaders come out with platitudes about peace on earth and
the importance of defending human rights and democratic freedoms. Right now, at
this moment, Nelson Mandela is being lauded as a champion of such Western
values. At the same time, both at home
and abroad, political prisoners are being denied their democratic rights to
legal representation and a fair trial. American drones are bombing large
populations of non-combatant civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The folk
who flee the brutal conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria are being
detained for up to five years while their cases are being examined. And our domestic gaols are overwhelmingly populated
by two groups of suffering people for whom the wider community seems not to
care: Aboriginal people and the mentally ill. These facts completely undermine the West’s
apparent commitment to justice and human dignity. In the face of such hypocrisy, I feel angry,
I feel powerless, and eventually I succumb to what some have called
“hope-fatigue.” Bono – from the rock
band U2 - said it all in his memorable song from 2001:
Jesus won’t you take the time
to throw this drowning man a line
“Peace on earth.”
I hear it every Christmastime
but hope and history just won’t rhyme,
so what’s it worth,
this “peace on earth”?
The fact that Advent coincides with Australia’s
summer festival doesn’t help the situation, for me. As a child summer was the time when all our
family friends went to the beach for a holiday.
In summer, we knew that we were poor and that neither our church nor our
community really gave two hoots. I still
feel that. It still hurts. The feeling is compounded by all the rampant
consumption that dominates our cultural landscape at this time of year. Because of what I experienced as a child, I
find it difficult to see anything in all of this consumption apart from a
complete indifference to the suffering of other people. In the Philippines, right now, there are kids
starving because they don’t have enough to eat.
In Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines
and Columbia,
kids are being sold into sex-slavery so that the rest of their families will be
able to stay alive. Even here in Australia, there
are thousands and thousands of families who find it difficult to put a roof
over their heads or pay the grocery bill.
Yet, each summer, middle-class Australians escape to their second or
third homes at the beach and indulge in an exchange of goods which is surplus,
entirely surplus, to anything they might possibility need. Again, I feel sick to the stomach. I feel overwhelmed at the enormity of this
indifference. In the middle of all of
this nausea I simply find it difficult to believe that a day of salvation is at
hand. Very difficult.
Now, part of my anxiety about all of this is
clearly emotional and psychological. It
is tied up with my experience of the world, and the narratives I create to
account for that experience. But part of
the anxiety is also theological, and has more to do with a puzzle which the
bible itself sets up, and puts into play.
Let me try and spell it out for you.
Here, this world: evil, corrupt,
rich getting richer, poor getting more miserable. There, world to come: peace, joy, no more bad guys, vindication for
all who suffered at their hands. Great
distance from here to there. How is
the distance crossed? How do we get from
here to there? On this
particular point, the “how” bit, the bible doesn’t seem to be very clear, almost
as though it doesn’t actually know
how. On my worst and most cynical days,
this does not inspire confidence!
Of course, the theologians have tried to fill in
the gaps in the biblical witness.
Theologians like to do that. The ‘evangelicals’
say that Jesus will return with a whole army of heaven and whip the nasty
people’s backsides. Then he’ll wave his
kingly sceptre and the world will return to an Eden-like state in which we’ll
all love each other the way that God loves us.
But this theory raises more questions than it solves. Amongst other things, one must ask why Jesus
would behave so very differently on his second visit than he did on his
first. The first time around he didn’t
force anyone to do anything. He invited,
he loved, he argued forcefully, he exampled a different way to be. But he didn’t compel anyone to do
anything. That would have been to
override the human freedom we have, apparently so prized by God that he allows
us to use that freedom to do evil.
Wouldn’t a powerful army of warrior-angels kind’ve undermine that whole
God-is-love image, God as the supreme protector of our responsibility to
choose?
“Damn right,” say the ‘liberal’ theologians, “let’s
attend more closely to the story as it’s actually told.” That God became a child, one of us. He was born in our midst, full of grace and
truth. He went about the place healing,
driving out our demons, and teaching us how to love one another. But then the rich elites got hold of
him. They tortured him and nailed him to
a cross. Sure, there was a resurrection,
but it’s all rather mysterious. Now you
see him, now you don’t. He lives on in
the world as a kind of memory or spirit of the good. Perhaps this suggests that God is like our
deepest and best self? God changes the
world only when we decide to change the world. God prompts and pricks our conscience, but
refuses to do anything other than what we choose to do for ourselves. Giving our second coat to someone who needs
it, to pick a relevant Scriptural example.
But again, I’m really not sure that this theory solves anything
much. It makes a mockery, for instance,
of all those bible passages which insist that it is not we, ourselves, who make
the world’s salvation, but God alone. By
grace, the action of God, are we saved through faith, and this is the gift of
God, not of human works, lest any man should boast (Eph 2.8,9). If the liberal theory were believed, then I
would personally consider the whole hope-of-salvation thing to be no more than
a cruel joke visited upon us by a God who raises our hopes and expectations,
but never intends to meet them with anything real.
Well. What’s
to be done with all of this? What am I
to do with the anxiety of my lived experience?
What am I to do with the theological conundrum? When in doubt, I have often considered it
wise to take a break from all the anxiety and tell a story. A story takes you out of yourself, and here’s
a good one I came across one day.
The time has come for St. Peter's annual three-week vacation, and Jesus
volunteers to fill in for him at the Pearly Gates. "It's no big
deal," Peter explains. "Sit at
the registration desk, and ask each person a little about his or her life. Then send them on to housekeeping to pick up
their wings."
On the third day, Jesus looks up to see a bewildered old man standing in
front of him.
"I'm a simple carpenter," says the man. "And once I had a son. He was born in a very special way, and was
unlike anyone else in this world. He
went through a great transformation even though he had holes in his hands and
feet. He was taken from me a long time
ago, but his spirit lives on forever.
All over the world people tell his story."
By this time, Jesus is standing with his arms outstretched. There are tears in his eyes, and he embraces
the old man.
"Father," he cries out, "It's been so long!"
The old man squints, stares for a moment, and says,
"Pinocchio?"
This story is not an ordinary story. It is a joke.
A joke distinguishes itself from a story as such by introducing an
unexpected element into what would otherwise be all very familiar. In this story, we expected that the old man
would squint and say “Jesus?” We were
set up for that by everything that went before—the religious setting, the
details about the old man’s son. But the
story transcended its own boundaries and became a joke by taking
us by surprise, by shocking us with the arrival of something entirely
unforseen. Parables are like that as
well. They subvert the rules of the
game. And the greatest parable of all is
Jesus.
You see, John’s hearers expected that their messiah
would come along to whip the Romans with superior military strength. They were wrong. And our own expectations, all these years
later, are probably just as misguided.
Whether we are evangelicals who expect that Christ will change things
one day by the might of his superior power, or whether we are liberals who
expect that Christ is so much one of us that he is only able to help those who
help themselves, we are probably all mistaken.
For the story of Christ is still in motion, and we are not privy to the
punch-line. In another part of Matthew’s
gospel, a part we read last week, we are told only that we cannot know what is
to happen, or how. For the punch-line is
God’s. As Jesus shocked the Greeks with
his human weakness, and scandalised the Jews by his failure and cross, so this fool
from God will appear a second time.
And while we moderns may pretend to have followed the story so far, the
joke, the punch-line, will surely leave us all so gob-smacked that the only
response available to us will be to be astonished, to laugh, to rejoice.
For that is what we humans do when we are genuinely
surprised. We absorb the shock, we
adjust our imagination, and then we laugh!
Like Sarai at the announcement of her old-age pregnancy with Isaac. Like the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary came near with the
Christ-child. That is why Paul counsels
the Romans to cease their sniping at each other and rejoice. Stop trying to control the outcomes, stop
trying to whip your opponents with their lack of understanding, he says. Instead, surrender your concerns into God’s
hands. Relax into that surprising peace
which surpasses all understanding. The
peace that is absurd. The strange peace
that we have cannot have manufactured for ourselves, because it defies every
effort at human reasoning.
On my better days I see that Advent hope is a
choice. It’s about believing in the
possibility of surprise. It’s about
believing that our tragic and repetitive history has an unforseen and unpredictable
punch-line which will fly in the face of everything that either the evidence or
our secular reason might cause us to expect.
And that’s the hope I encourage from you as well. The hope of a Mary of Nazareth who, in that
ancient time of Advent waiting, become a bearer of the impossible to a tired
and un-surprisable world. Rejoice,
people of God! For while the night may
be filled with tears, joy shall indeed come with the morning. How, I have no idea! But I believe it shall come.
This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church in December 2004.
