“The people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out
to John, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptised by John in
the River Jordan”
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| The Judean desert |
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| The plains beside the Jordan |
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| The baptismal site, with the State of Jordan on the other bank. |
It’s quite a trek to get
there from Jerusalem. It’s about 26 miles from the city, steeply down through barren,
rocky hills, on the same road that features in the story of the Good Samaritan,
the one which starts with a traveller being ambushed and left for dead, and it’s
easy to see how bandits could have lurked unseen in this landscape. Once you’re down in the Jordan valley you have
to cross a baking hot plain, and then drive down a road bordered by barbed wire
to left and right, and festooned with signs warning you that you are crossing a
minefield, the legacy of decades of warfare between Israel and Jordan.
Of course the mines weren’t
there in Jesus’ time, but our visit brought home to me how hard and dangerous this
journey must have been back then. And yet Matthew tells us that large crowds
went out to see John, ”people of
Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region along the Jordan”. It’s not the
only time Matthew describes large scale reactions like this. The Magi’s arrival
in Jerusalem, looking for a new baby king not only frightens King Herod, but “all Jerusalem with him” (Matthew 2). When
Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey, just before his death, Matthew tells us
that “the whole city was in
turmoil”. The events that surround Jesus’ life aren’t quiet and polite,
they are rabble-rousing, disturbing happenings, which no one can miss, whether
they approve of them or not.
At this point, though, it is
John the Baptist’s preaching which has electrified the area. Everyone wants to
go and see him, and they’re prepared to go to great lengths, quite literally, on
that long hard journey to do so.
Imagine you were part of that
crowd. What might have drawn you there?
There’s an old definition of
pilgrimage that says it is “a journey in
search of itself” – you only discover why you needed to make it as
you make it , through the thing the things that happen along the way, the
struggles and the joys, the conversations you have, the times you lose your way
and find it again. But something has to propel you out in the first place.
Some of the crowd might
simply have been curious or bored. It’s a long way to go for that, but boredom
can be a sign of a deeper restlessness, a search for meaning in our lives, so
it might have been enough. Maybe some were looking for guidance, wanting to know how they should live. Others
might have been carrying old burdens of shame or guilt – justified or not – and
set off to see John hoping that he, at last could wash their guilt and shame away where all the
others had failed, finally allowing them to feel clean.
But the implication of this
Gospel story is that some of those who came to John really hadn’t thought it
through at all. They knew John was a
fiery, challenging preacher, but they seemed to think that whoever John might challenge
it wasn’t going to be them. They were the good guys, the religious “in crowd”,
the ones who knew what was what, the gate-keepers. They came for baptism, we
are told, but they don’t seem to have thought there would be much to wash away.
That’s the only explanation I
can think of for the presence in this crowd of Pharisees and Sadducees.
Pharisees were religious experts, people who cared about the law, the word of
God, the heritage of faith that had been handed down to them. They had great
influence in the synagogues, among the ordinary people. Sadducees were more often
associated with the Temple and its rituals, drawing their support from the
ruling classes. They often seem to have had that effortless sense of
entitlement that ruling classes everywhere have. Both groups probably expected
John’s approval. It must have been a shock to them when they didn’t get it. “You
brood of vipers!” thunders John as
they come towards him, demolishing that
sense of entitlement it in a few fiery swipes.
“You think you are the guardians of the faith, the
true inheritors of God’s blessing, children of Abraham, because you can trace
your family lines back to the patriarchs God first made his covenant with? So
what?” says John. “God doesn’t care who your father and mother
were, how far back you can trace your family line, where you’ve come from. He
cares about where you are going, whether you are walking his path of justice
and peace, helping to create the world Isaiah spoke of where wolves live with
lambs and leopards lie down with kids, whether you are prepared to make the
changes in your own lives that will bring that about.”
Genealogy – family history -
was very important to ancient people. That’s why we get so many genealogies in
the Bible, long lists of people’s ancestors. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus,
which opens his Gospel, traces Jesus’ own family line right back to Abraham.
Jesus is the real deal, he says, to those who think it matters. But he mischievously
throws in five women who disrupt that neat lineage along the way. There’s
Tamar, who had to trick her father-in-law into fathering a child with her
because that was the only way of getting the support she needed. There’s Rahab,
a prostitute, who protected the Jewish people when they first entered the Promised
Land. There’s Ruth, a widow from the enemy territory of Moab, who came to
Israel with her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi. And there is “the wife of Uriah”, Bathsheba. King
David committed adultery with her, though as she probably had no choice it
would probably be more accurate to call it rape. She eventually bore him the
future king Solomon. And, of course, at the end of Matthew’s genealogy there is
Mary, who, scandalously, was pregnant before her marriage to Joseph, in
circumstances which looked pretty suspicious to those around her.
John the Baptist’s message to
the Pharisees and Sadducees reminded me of that subversive list. God can make a family out of whoever he wants
to, says Matthew, incorporating people who might seem very unlikely at first
glance. “Do not presume to say to
yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor’
for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to
Abraham.” There’s a play on words
here which we miss. In Aramaic, the language John and Jesus spoke, children are
“banim” and stones are “abhanim”. So much for the lineage you
are so proud of! It’s no more godly than a heap of stones, says John to these
Pharisees and Sadducees.
Paul’s letter to the Romans makes
the same point. It was written against the backdrop of bitter infighting
between Christians who had been born Jewish, and Christians who had been born
Gentile. The Jewish Christians looked down on the Gentile Christians, and vice
versa. Which of them was more important? Which group should have the upper
hand, the casting vote in this new community of faith? If you have to ask the
question you’ve already got it wrong, says Paul. Instead of fighting about who is top-dog you should “Welcome one another, as Christ has
welcomed you”.
The first bit’s fine. It’s
the second bit that should pull us up short. “Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you”. How did
Christ welcome us? What is it about his welcome which Paul is drawing attention
to? Paul is surely reminding us that
Christ’s radically inclusive welcome came at a great and terrible cost to
himself. Tax-collectors, prostitutes, Roman soldiers, riff-raff of all sorts
and varieties, anyone who wanted to be part of his movement was in, just by
wanting to be in. It scandalised the
respectable people, the ones who thought they were the gate-keepers of God’s family,
and they killed him for it. If we want to “welcome
one another as Christ has welcomed us” then it will almost certainly mean that we are
sometimes scandalised too, taken out of our comfort zones, challenged to open
our ears, our eyes and our hearts to people who we wouldn’t normally get along
with.
I was deeply moved this week
by the reaction of Jack Merritt’s parents to his murder along with a fellow
worker in Fishmonger’s Hall last week, by a man who his organisation had been
trying to help. In the midst of their grief at his death, his father said he knew
that Jack would “be seething at his
death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his
everything fighting against.” His
work had opened up a door, he said, to a place “where we do not lock up and throw away the key… where we focus on
rehabilitation not revenge” “Borrow his intelligence” his father went
on, “ share his drive, feel his passion,
burn with his anger, and extinguish hatred with his kindness. Never give up his
fight.”
I have no idea what, if any,
faith the Merritt family have, but these words could have come straight out of John
the Baptist’s mouth. They express kingdom values. We often say of a child, “he’s got his mother’s nose, she’s got her
father’s eyes”, but these words display the family likeness of God’s
people, that determination to love, to hope, to welcome in the face of all that
would destroy those things.
The readings we’ve heard
today can be uncomfortable, especially to those of us who are old hands at
Christian faith, and who all too easily fall into the trap of thinking we know
what’s what. Like those who made that pilgrimage to John the Baptist , that “journey in search of itself” these
readings ask us what draws us to God’s presence, and what we expect to
find when we get there? They challenge us to ask ourselves how we are being
formed into the family likeness of God, not just ticking the box marked
Christian on the census form but learning to welcome as he did, with costly
love that’s open to all.
Amen
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