Advent 3, Year C | Luke 3:7-18
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 12, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
No recordings available this week.
“So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” – Luke 3:18[1]
If someone asked you to pick one of our readings this morning as good news, you might have trouble choosing. Zephaniah’s prophecy, our canticle from Isaiah, and the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians each practically jump off the page with positivity. But I doubt our Gospel lesson would be anyone’s first choice. It’s hard to hear any good news when someone starts their message with, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”[2] That sounds more like an introduction to some very bad news. And it doesn’t get much better reading on from there: “the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire!”[3]
Yet this is the only one of our passages the Bible itself explicitly describes as “good news.”
I’ve heard people explain that bad news like this is “the Good News,” that we must deeply recognize and mourn our sins before we’re able to find ourselves in a positive relationship with God. If we never come to regard ourselves as “sinners in the hands of an angry God” or publicly confess there’s no “such…worm as I,” we can’t fully comprehend just what Jesus has done for us. And if we don’t genuinely understand what Jesus’ death accomplished, we can’t really be “saved.” The idea is that no one can truly appreciate a gift unless they know exactly how much it cost. Therefore God—and those who serve God rightly—show us genuine love by beating us down so we can later be lifted up.
People might tell you that kind of thinking and behavior is love. You might even tell yourself that it’s love. But no matter how you try to interpret it, that is not love. It’s an attempt to impose order and control through threats and fear. Put bluntly, this practice is a covert face of abuse—psychological and emotional abuse on the receiving end and abuse of power[4] on the other. It’s essentially a form of mind control.[5]
Recognizing this potential for abusive, cult-like behavior, John’s message and approach probably sound even less like good news now.
Some people like to explain John away with the idea that the Old Testament features a God of Wrath while the New Testament shows us a God of Love. John, as the final “Old Covenant” prophet, brings warnings of judgment and destruction to a climax before Jesus finally reveals God’s true nature.
But that concept, rooted in centuries of anti-Semitism, is wrong. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God shows Godself to be merciful, loving, and kind—a God people want to know and are honored to serve. That God of Israel is the same God we find revealed through Jesus. And just like the supposed “Old Testament God” gets a bad rap when people attribute cruel or negative behaviors to God, John might not deserve the imposing image we often picture either.
That doesn’t mean John doesn’t use strong language—he does. But once we brush centuries of presumption off the words and give them a bit of the attention and room they need to breathe again, it’s surprising to realize how hopeful he actually is. In fact, most of what we might hear in the text as threat may in fact be genuinely good news.
No matter how you spin it, “brood of vipers” is never going to be a good way to start talking to people. While still probably not a great choice of words, there is a colloquial interpretation of the phrase[6] that suggests John was pleasantly surprised that anyone was interested in his message in the first place. And though he immediately moves on to the looming wrath, John isn’t threatening anyone. He’s simply emphasizing what the people can already see for themselves but have been trying to ignore. Interestingly, this wrath also doesn’t necessarily belong to God. Its source is completely undefined, with the wording suggesting someone or something is actively preventing it from approaching. When he gets to this axe laying close to the root of a bunch of trees, he shows us it’s resting there by itself—no one is swinging or even carrying it. And the trees aren’t facing some kind of organized external threat: each of them are chopping down and setting fire to themselves!
So if John’s proclamation has nothing to do with an enraged God coming to destroy the world and cast people into Hell, what is he trying to say? John is encouraging the people that, although they can all see something ominous heading their way, God is giving them the chance to prepare. They have a real opportunity. They don’t need to keep rushing down their dangerous path. No one has to cut down themselves or each other. No one has to burn down their own society and relationships. The tools are certainly available, but no one is being forced to use them. Instead, if the people can stop their self-destructive behavior and learn to work together and support each other, they can all become prepared for the next great storm life is throwing at them.
John’s message really comes down to one hopeful word:
Change.
Even in a society as unjust and inhumane as Roman occupation, people have a choice: change is possible. In a land where government leaders encourage the oppressed to subdue themselves by hating and killing each another, you have a choice: change is possible. And in those situations where those of us with power discover ourselves preying upon the weak, we always have a choice: change is possible.
It doesn’t matter who you are or how you or others see yourself either. The two groups of people Luke explicitly mentions coming to John were among the most despised in Israel. Tax collectors were locals who had sold out by working for the occupying powers. They were rumored to make their living stealing money from their own people by imposing illegitimate taxes and fees. Yet these presumed dregs of society are among the first ones to ask for John’s guidance. And the soldiers who came to John weren’t just turncoats. They were foreign troops the Empire brought in to subdue local populations. But even the people charged with enforcing their own system recognized it wasn’t sustainable. They too hoped for change. And John responded to these completely unexpected allies exactly the same way he does to everyone else flocking to him for hope: he shows them a path toward honorable, equitable, and just behavior—simple acts of honesty and decency that could disrupt or even overturn a social system built on selfishness, greed, and oppression.
Selfishness, greed, and oppression still sound awfully familiar today. Delusion, exploitation, and willful blindness run amok around the world. It isn’t hard to see the storms overshadowing our political and social systems. They’re as clear as the ice caps melting, our rivers drying up, and the earth’s forests continuing to burn. Wrath is looming just as much now as it was then—it may have become even more ferocious. But for some reason, someone or something has continued to hold the worst of it back.
Advent is halfway over, and on this side of its conclusion, that means we’re less than two weeks away not from the promise of Christmas but from the end of the world. The King is coming, and there’s still an overwhelming amount of work we need to do to clean up ourselves and prepare everything for his arrival. But John’s message resounds today as loudly as it did two thousand years ago. He continues to call to us, not with threats, accusations, and words of damnation but with hope: “Things don’t have to be the way they are—you don’t have to keep doing this! We have a choice: we can still change!”
“So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Luke 3:7b
[3] Luke 3:9
[4] Whether perceived or actual
[5] You overwhelm and break down the subject to the point of exhaustion, and once that person has lost their sense of reality, you build them back up in a way that causes them to be devoted to you. Now convinced that their oppressor is their savior, they perpetuate the cycle on others, becoming complicit in the original lie. And the more complicit someone becomes in those kinds of cycles, the harder it is to see the abuse for themselves and the more their brains need for the lie to be true, which works to further enmesh them and prevent them from escaping the system.
[6] “Scorpion nest,” the idea from Aramaic culture being that scorpions have no parents and therefore have no one to guide them or teach them what’s right as they grow.