On this second Sunday of Advent, which season of the Christian year consists of the five Sundays leading to Christmas Day, the Gospel and the
Epistle forcefully remind us of the meaning of Advent. It literally means ‘Coming’. While Advent speaks to us of Christ’s coming as the promised Messiah of Israel it speaks to us today of the Lordship of Christ as the coming Revealer of His kingdom as the Lord of all future time.
The exhortation to watchfulness in the lessons from the gospel for today is an exhortation not to take God’s grace for granted. We are not to think that the fulfilment of God’s purpose is an automatic process and that some how or other we are on the winners’ side because of who and what the church or we are. The kingdom will come as a thief in the night precisely because it is God’s free and unmerited gift. And that day will bring many surprises.
Until we appreciate this background to the account of John the Baptist’s preaching and his subsequent baptism of Jesus in the Jordan river, we will find it difficult to understand John’s preaching as ‘good news’. Who of us would regard what he has to say as decisively helpful in understanding our relationship to God. Who of us are helped by the knowledge that the truth of our life before God and each other in the final analysis depends upon the depth and truth of our repentance. John proclaimed to the people who came to hear him that they should repent in the light of the immanent appearance of God’s righteous judgement; the coming of God’s kingdom.
If we are tempted to think that John’s preaching of the coming judgement was directed at those who may be thought to be concerned only with outward works of righteousness rather than inward motivation of the heart,(the traditional examples being the Scribes and the Pharisees for whom John did indeed reserve some very special criticism in the other accounts of his preaching in the gospels: Mat 3:7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?) This view only intensifies the problem of John’s preaching for us. For who can be sure of the motives of any of our actions done or left undone? We know that the motives of our actions are at best mixed and at worst an expression of our preoccupation with our own self-interest. This was an intense problem for Martin Luther, alone with God in his monastery cell. How do I know that I have repented enough to receive the grace promised in the Eucharist.
He kept his vow to, “Help me, Saint Anne. I will become a monk.” only 15 days later July 17th, 1505. There were seven monasteries in Erfurt. He joined the most rigorous one. It was the Augustinian order of friars. He was 21 years old, and he had a singular focus on saving his soul.
“If I could believe that God was not angry with me, I would stand on my head for joy. When I was a monk, I wearied myself greatly for almost 15 years with daily sacrifice, torturing myself with fasting’s and vigils and prayers and rigorous works, like self-freezing, not having any blankets, and I almost froze myself to death, earnestly thinking to acquire righteousness by my works.”
His problem is shown by Freud and others to be a universal problem of human consciousness. Freud called the boiling cauldron of our unconsciousness the Id and we spend our life attempting to put a lid on the id of our unconscious mind. This causes all sorts of neurosis by which we attempt to deceive ourselves about the reality of our thoughts about ourselves and others. Luther thought he could solve this problem by some drastic measures, such as by freezing himself in the snow or by flagellation, beating himself with a whip. All to no avail for him he remained his miserable self.
To transfer the source of repentance from outward actions to inward motives only intensifies the problems created in attempting to understand John’s preaching of repentance as “good news”. His proclamation of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in the light of the coming judgement is extremely “bad news’ for all who hear his words. For none can come and stand before the judgement seat of God confident that the truth of their life can be understood as grounded in our capacity to repent. We all know what the prophet Jeremiah knew and Sigmund Freud confirmed for us, that the human:
(Jer 17:9) “the heart is deceitful above all things; and desperately corrupt– who can understand it?”
But when we reach this rather melancholy conclusion concerning the medium and the message of John the Baptist, we must remember that we have left out of consideration the one vital factor which enables John’s preaching of repentance to be heard as exceedingly ‘good news’ and not ‘bad news’ at all in this time of Advent.
This factor is the presence in the crowd who came to hear John preach of the one-man Jesus of Nazareth. With the rest of the people, He heard John’s exhortations in view the coming judgement; with them he had himself baptised in the Jordan; with them he received a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
The good news in the Baptists proclamation and action is this unheard-of action of Jesus, the Holy Son of God who though He knew no sin, by His action in accepting at the hand of John the Baptist a Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, He begins his public ministry by declaring His solidarity with sinners. No one came to the Jordan that day to hear John’s call for repentance more laden with sin and guilt than He, no one needier before God than he. He who is God’s Son. He who is different from all other people, in the inexplicable freedom of His grace negated the distance between Himself and all other people by becoming in His Baptism wholly one with us: not in our holiness in our alienation and estrangement from God and each other. He does this by receiving from John the Baptist a Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.
In St Matthew’s gospel it is precisely this anomaly, this scandal, of which John the Baptist becomes acutely aware. He says to Jesus that that it is he, John, who needs to be baptised by him, Jesus, rather than the other way around. But against John’s protest at the contradiction involved in Jesus “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” Jesus insists upon John baptizing Him with this baptism “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. Because Jesus insists by receiving such a baptism, “We fulfil all righteousness.” Here we must understand that Jesus fulfils “all righteousness”, by placing himself in the wrong. He does what is right by placing himself in the wrong before God, for the sake of all those whom He now represents who stand in need of repentance, for all sinners, for all of us.
So, when Jesus is baptised by John with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin in the light of the coming judgement of God it is not of His own sin that he repents and confesses. It is the people’s burden of guilt with which He identifies Himself as He goes down into the water of Baptism: as He receives John’s Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Precisely because He is the One who in this strange way identifies Himself with us, with our human alienated condition He is also the One, the only One who embraces the coming judgement of God; since He now embarks upon a public ministry through which He more and more becomes entangled in the godfosakenness of our human lot. Until at the end of His life He fulfils His strange journey into the far country of our alienation from God by crying out after his declaration of godforsakenness, τετέλεσται “tetalestai” “It is finished”. The glory of God, of which at Christmas we hear the angels sing, heralding Jesus’ birth, this glory is the glory of the humility of God. A God who does not count it too small a thing to declare His unity and solidarity with sinners. God’s glory is revealed here, as is made plain in the holy gospel of St John and the 17th chapter, as Jesus treads the ever-descending path of humiliation to the cross. It is in the cross that the unity of will and purpose of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit is revealed: And it consists in this: the mysterious delivering up of the Son by the Father together with the giving up of the Father by the Son for the sake of the threatened and lost human creature.
In this way also we come to see how appropriate it is that we understand the call to repentance by John the Baptist in the light of the coming judgement of God to be wholly good news. In the light of Jesus action in submitting to this Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins John becomes a harbinger, a witness, to the advent of the salvation of our God. A true messenger of the light that has dawned and shines upon us all. That light which St John the Evangelist tells us, in the first chapter of his gospel, which, “enlightens every person who comes into the world.” For in Christ our humanity has been restored to its wholeness in relationship to God and our fellow human beings and it is this restored humanity of Christ which is offered to us as the truth of our life as through the waters of our own Baptism as we are incorporated into membership of the very Body of Christ, His church, of which He is the heavenly Head.
As in the beginning God brought forth a cosmos out of the primeval chaos by means of His Word and Spirit, whom St Irenaeus calls the two hands of God: as in the beginning God triumphed over all that was opposed to the creature’s existence and brought life out of darkness and disorder, safeguarded the life of the creature from the encroachment of chaos, so here in the recreation of the creature God’s act of reconciliation is wrought by His Word and Spirit out of the water of Jesus baptism.
His descent into the waters of baptism signal Jesus’ descent into the watery chaos from which God called forth the cosmos. Here this chaos is identified. In Jesus condescension it is seen to reside in humankind’s alienation from God. In his baptism Jesus makes himself one with our rebellion by receiving at the hand of John a baptism of repentance: he who knew no sin, who is ever one with the Father, makes himself vulnerable for the sake of the creature, identifies himself with its existence. Threatened as it is by the impending abyss of nothingness to which it has committed itself in its grasping after the futile possibility of being its own saviour and helper: its rejection of grace.
Instead of our human lives crumbling away into meaninglessness of what Shakespeare calls our “dusty death.” Jesus gives to our human life it’s created meaning and purpose. As the risen and ascended One, the Victor of Gethsemane and Golgotha, He gives us nothing less than Himself and all that is His by means of His Word and sacraments: He promises Himself to us; He gives us back our true human being, restored in reconciled fellowship with God and each other.
Dr. Gordon watson.
Port Macquarie.