Jesus is Coming! Repent! The Kingdom of heaven is near!
Bible Passage:
Matthew 3:1-12
Pastor:
Pastor Glen
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Sermon Date:
2010-12-04
In the name him who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit and with fire, dear friends in Christ: We all know that during his earthly ministry our Lord Jesus did a lot of his teaching in the form of parables; that is, he’d tell stories using familiar items and experiences drawn from people’s everyday lives in order to explain heavenly mysteries. And certainly some of the parables are among Jesus’ most popular and, more importantly, best remembered teachings. There’s something about being taught in story form that makes the instruction easier to hear and retain. Also, the mental images of a parable serve to reinforce the point. I mean it’s one thing to talk about God’s forgiveness for his lost and wayward children in an abstract, clinical sort of way, and quite another to be able to see and vicariously experience it in the actions of the prodigal son’s father. It’s truly a case of a picture being worth a thousand words – which no doubt is why Jesus so often taught in parables.
But it would be wrong to think that Jesus was doing something new and novel by teaching in this way. In truth, he was only following a rich tradition that permeates the entire Scripture. The writings of Moses and the prophets are full of parables and parable-like images that the Lord uses to help us get a better understanding of him and his will for us. Well, it just so happens that in this morning’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist is tapping into some of this same imagery. It’s no coincidence that he chose the low lying Jordan River valley – the deepest place on earth, some 1200 feet below sea level – as the place of his ministry. His job, remember, was to prepare people for the coming Savior by bringing them low. He wanted to make them feel the guilt and burden of their sin, and help them to understand just how far they were from the Lord and his righteousness. So anyone going out to hear John preach would have to physically descend, and thereby be forced to enact how they were coming down off their hill of pride and the mound of their imagined goodness. To hear John you’d have to leave behind your comfort zone of cool breezes and shade trees and mountain streams and go down low into the parched and gritty desert. And then, when you arrived, after blistering your skin and scorching your soul with one of his hellfire and brimstone sermons, he’d take you lower still, into the murky Jordan River water, in order to show your baptismal death to sin and your rising to new life. So you can see how John utilized the lay of the land itself to illustrate how his hearers must be brought low and made to feel the heat of God’s wrath against sin before they could be lifted up in God’s forgiveness and mercy.
Going first to John the Baptist, we heard how people from Jerusalem and Judea and the surrounding areas were going out to hear him. And we can picture this: they are people from all walks of life; but in particular they are for the most part people who already feel a sense of spiritual dryness. They know something isn’t quite right with their spiritual health. And so they’re going out to John to hear a doctor’s diagnosis. They know they’re sick. But John puts a name on their sickness. He proclaims God’s holy law and he calls their sins what they are. And then he prescribes the antidote: confession, repentance, and trust in the soon to be revealed Savior.
Ah, but then he spies among his hearers some Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees were strict legalists who strived to observe the whole law of God – which sounds good, I suppose; the trouble is that they did it in a cold, mechanical sort of way. They were obsessed with the minutiae of the letter of the law; but were unable to capture any of its true spirit of love. Nevertheless, they imagined that their extreme devotion to following rules made them better than everyone else. The Sadducees, for their part, were the theological liberals of the day. They thought of themselves as being more enlightened than run of the mill believers who accepted the Word of God in childlike faith. They had rationalized away what they saw as the myths and superstitions of Scripture, boiling it all down to a few simple ideas that involved living your best life now by trying to be nice, taking care of your family, and seeking a comfortable compromise with the philosophies and ways of the world.
So the Pharisees and Sadducees together represented both ends of the Jewish religious spectrum, and they were bitter enemies of each other. The irony is that from John’s point of view they are the same: both sides are in error. Both sides imagine that they are somehow morally superior to others in the crowd around them. And so both sides have missed the truth of God and the purpose John’s ministry, which is to call desperately sick and dying sinners to repentance. These outwardly religious people had come down off the mountain with their feet; but their hearts and their opinions of themselves were still high up in the clouds. And that’s why John reserved his fiercest verbal assaults for these whom seemed to be the most religious. First he calls them “a brood of vipers”. The picture is of a nest of snake eggs hatching and all the little creepy things wriggling and writhing about in a confused mass. It’s a pretty unpleasant description – one that’s sure to get their attention—especially since by it he’s essentially saying that they are the offspring of the serpent, that is, Satan himself. And in a spiritual sense, they indeed are, for they have been thoroughly infected with the deadly poison of his deception
And now that John has their attention, he introduces the metaphor of the trees. There’s only one kind of fruit that has any value around here, he says, and that is the fruit of repentance – of heartfelt sorrow over sin. Nothing else matters: not the struggle of the Pharisee to achieve godly perfection or the Sadducee’s pursuit of worldly wisdom and the good life. As eye-pleasing and mouthwatering as such fruit looks from the outside, inside is only death. It’s all bad fruit. And there’s only one solution for a tree that produces it: chop it down and chuck it in the fire. John’s message to the Pharisees and the Sadducees is the same message he has for us: you prepare to meet your Savior by letting go of everything you think you have to offer. Your works, your achievements, your enlightened understanding of things, your goodwill for your fellow man, your tolerance, your desire to live and let live, whatever it is you value about yourself and think God ought to be pleased with—it’s rotten fruit. And the tree, that is you who produce it, needs to be cut off at ground level. The axe is at the root of the tree, John says, let the Lord swing away. Then and only then can you begin to produce the good fruit of repentance.
Can you hear the voice of John the Baptist in the desert this morning? He is calling to you. Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is near! Repent! Repent! Oh all of time and history can change those words coming from the desert. To repent is not simply to be sorry that we got caught sinning. To repent is not to just come up with a make up list of actions that will appease God and his wrath. To repent is not just turn away from sin in a one time emotional experience. The writers of the Augsburg confession lead us to God pleasing picture of what John the Baptist was proclaiming in the desert. In the twelfth Article the writers of the Augsburg Confession wrote: “Now, strictly speaking, repentance consists of two parts. One part is contrition, that is, terrors striking the conscience through the knowledge of sin. The other part is faith, which is born of the Gospel or the Absolution and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven. It comforts the conscience and delivers it. Repentance is a life time activity of turning away from our sinful pride, hatred, gossip, doubts, fears to the forgiveness that Jesus alone can offer.
Remember that graphic picture in the Old Testament lesson this morning. Nebuchadnezzar looked to himself as King and Lord. He was humbled until he recognized God as His Lord. Repentance means coming to grips that we have nothing to offer God and so many times we have trusted ourselves. Repentance means to cling to him who alone that can wash away our sins and give us his righteousness.
Remember the words in our Epistle lesson today that help us to understand what John meant when he said the kingdom of heaven is near. “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, 20 and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. 21 He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets ( Acts 3:19-20).” Jesus is our King of Kings who comes to rule in our hearts. We are his servants who serve him as our King and Lord. As our Advent preparations continue, may our gracious God bring us to true repentance and faith that we may enjoy a foretaste of its fruit now in time and savor its fullness in eternity. Live in and with Jesus our King. Amen.
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