A Homily for Advent 2A
December 8, 2013
From the words of the Gospel:
"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."
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That’s one of our “one-question-I-want-to-ask-God” questions that someone turned in last spring. It’s was the focus question for the sermon last week, and it is the focus question for the sermon today. The Advent readings, especially early in the season, lend themselves exactly to questions like this.
So here it is: Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?
It may seem like a simple question with an obvious answer, but like we talked about last week, our hearts have had years of conditioning that keeps this question alive and burning inside of us.
So let’s listen to Matthew, and to John, and to Jesus, and then to our hearts, and then to each other, as we work in this question… Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t?
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For Matthew, that might have really been a tough question. Of all the Gospel storytellers, Matthew is the most likely to resonate with John the Baptist. And yet, Matthew belongs to the Jesus movement, not to the John movement. Matthew is a good Jewish Christian, who values obedience to the Jewish law and the ethical and ritual purity that comes through faithful following of the law.
Matthew is the one who quotes Jesus as saying things like, “I did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” Matthew is among those who believe that a day is coming when all the nations will be judged, when, as he tells it, they will be separated like sheep and goats, some to eternal reward and some to eternal punishment.
So among all the Gospel storytellers, Matthew is the most likely to resonate with John the Baptist and with his fiery, end-of-the-world kind of preaching. But Matthew didn’t join the John movement, which was still alive and well in his time. He was a leader of the Jesus movement. So he is careful to tell the story from the perspective of the Jesus movement, which saw John merely as a forerunner of Jesus.
He starts with the Mark version he has in hand and elaborates on the superiority of Jesus, who, for Matthew, fulfills John’s prophecy, pretty much the same way as he fulfills the Jewish law.
And that’s what we get from the storyteller we call Matthew. If Matthew’s Jewish Christianity had become predominate rather than the Gentile Christianity of Luke and John (especially Luke), we might all have a different perspective of John and Jesus.
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But Gentile Christianity, as well as the modern “quest for the historical Jesus,” (the literary analysis by bible scholars which has begun to recover the Jesus of history, the Jesus as he was in his own time, before the memory of his life and teachings was projected and elaborated in different directions as we now have in our bible) - Gentile Christianity and the modern “quest for the historical Jesus” expose the contrast between the historical John and the historical Jesus.
They see John and Jesus more like this… John, on the one hand, still had one foot in the Old Covenant, where God was so often portrayed as jealous, vengeful, and as inclined to punish as to succor. Many of the storytellers of the Hebrew history told of a God who punished Adam and Eve, Cain, Lot's wife, the people of Sodom, Noah, David, the Israelites, and on and on, up to the new era. John also, from this perspective, seemed to suffer from his own lack of imagination to see how Messiah would deal with sin. John could only see lines separating good from evil, sheep from goats, wheat from chaff, and God punishing those on the wrong side.
Jesus himself, on the other hand, took a different path. Even though he was thoroughly Jewish, Jesus did not stick with the stream of Judaism he received from the one who had baptized him in the Joran River. He forgave sins. He ate with sinners. He stood by a notorious sinner when a righteous mob turned on her. He touched the untouchable, healed the unworthy, loved his enemies and commended his people to do the same.
John expected Jesus to burn the wicked with "unquenchable fire." Instead, he died on the cross for them. John expected Jesus to hold a "winnowing fork," not a loaf of bread. He saw Jesus taking an ax to fruitless trees, rather than giving the tree one more chance, as Jesus put it in one of his parables.
In other words, from the perspective of the Gentile Christianity we know from storytellers like Luke at near the turn of the second century, and from the perspective of the Bible scholars who have uncovered the first century Jesus of history in our time, John had it exactly wrong He didn't see what a break with the past Jesus represented. John speaks to the hardness of our hearts. Jesus softens and changes our hearts.
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So there you have it: Matthew’s version of a Jesus who fulfilled the spirit and the prophesy of John the Baptist, and the version of the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, in which Jesus is pretty much the opposite of John the Baptist, and which is more like the version of early Gentile Christianity.
For better or for worse, even the church of Gentile Christianity soon enough began to resemble John more than Jesus. Driven by the institutional need for uniformity and control, the early church, particularly in the West, soon enough began to turn to fear and guilt, and a heavy emphasis on sin, as the way motivate its flock and keep everyone in line.
To this day, we lose touch with the radical Jesus who, although he never thought of himself as anything other than Jewish, represented an outrageous break with the past. Jesus actually disrupted that "old time religion" - and still does.
He spurned tradition, created a cadre of change agents and insisted that all things become new. While we value continuity, elevate historic tradition, reward pillars of stability, fight to prevent change, and use fear and guilt to keep each other in line.
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So where does that leave you? After listening to Matthew, to John, to Jesus, to second century Gentiles to modern day scholars, and to the institutional church, what do we hear when we listen to our own hearts? What do we hear when we listen to each other?
Let’s take a minute to see. After a moment of quiet, let’s share what touches us from the Gospel reading for today, or from the question - Should we follow the Lord because we love him or out of fear for what he will (or might) do if we don’t? What are your thought or feelings or observations? Where does this touch you?
[DISCUSS]
What came to me in my personal reflection, was that there is a natural tension between the language of responsibility and the language of grace. I think that John the Baptist probably had an understanding and appreciation of grace. And I think that Jesus had an understanding and appreciation of responsibility.
Here is a story from a contemporary author, William Muehl, that puts grace and responsibility together for me in an interesting way:
One December afternoon… a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school
waiting to claim their children after the last pre-Christmas class session. As the youngsters ran from their lockers, each one carried in his hands the “surprise,” the brightly wrapped package on which he had been working diligently for two weeks.
One small boy, trying to run, put on his coat, and wave to his parents, all at the same time, slipped and fell. The “surprise” flew from his grasp, landed on the floor and broke with an obvious ceramic crash.
The child… began to cry inconsolably. His father, trying to minimize the incident and comfort the boy, patted his head and murmured, “Now, that’s all right sone. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all.”
But the child’s mother, somewhat wiser in such situations, swept the boy into her arms and said, “Oh, but it does matter. It matters a great deal.” And she wept with her son.
Responsibility says that what we’ve done and what we’ve left undone, does matter. That is matters a great deal.
Grace weeps with us.
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