Advent 3, Year C | Luke 3:7-18
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 8, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Due to technical difficulties, there is no audio or video available for today’s sermon.
“And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’” – Luke 3:10[1]
Welcome back to what one parishioner last week called “Tim Burton Advent.” This year, I’m encouraging us to lean into the reality we bury beneath all this season’s lights, greenery, ribbons, and wrapping paper. Culturally, we’ve been trained to assume that Advent is the time we spend getting ready for Christmas, and, on a secular, societal level, that may be true. However, the birth of Jesus is supposed to be a surprise ending—God once again disrupting our (appropriate) expectations of judgment with unexpected and unforeseen mercy. What we Christians should be preparing for right now is the Day of the Lord, which, in more modern parlance, we might call the Second Coming: the day the true King arrives to crush our longstanding conspiracy and rebellion and reassert his reign throughout the realm. And despite Modern American Christian fiction and fantasies, the Hebrew prophets tell us no one is going to find that to be a celebratory occasion.
Our Gospel reading continues with that theme of judgment this week. John the Baptist has arrived in full force, wandering the wilderness surrounding the Jordan River and preaching to all who dare to listen. His message, however, doesn’t sound particularly encouraging—greeting your audience as “a brood of vipers”[2] is unlikely to endear any speaker to his listeners. Yet despite the aggressive language and imagery, people keep coming. They keep listening to John proclaim what our Gospel itself calls “good news.”[3] And, even though his advice doesn’t sound particularly “spiritual” to us, they keep repenting.
For our ears, it can be difficult to hear anything particularly good about what John says, with his threats about trees being chopped down and burned. But the truth is, John isn’t making threats—nor is God menacing anyone with an axe, for that matter. The only action John ascribes to God is creative or generative: “rais[ing] up children to Abraham.” John never actually calls down condemnation on anyone, here or elsewhere. He’s simply warning people about what he already sees happening.
This is one of those situations where English limits our ability to understand what the Bible is saying. There are a few different issues to deal with here. First off, we have a hidden volitional “no,” and in the second case, the process of translation has completely obscured the grammatical relationship of one of John’s subjects and objects.
Starting with that negation, we’ve talked before about how ancient Greek had two words for saying, “no.” One is objective, meaning that it’s simple observation: a “no” regarding something that either did not or cannot happen. The other has an element of volition or will—a “no” in which a choice is involved. It generally appears either when the speaker is saying someone shouldn’t do something or when someone decides they won’t do something. For some reason I don’t understand, English translations rarely mark this distinction, although it appears frequently throughout the New Testament. Most of the time when we see Jesus saying, “If you don’t [A], you don’t [B],” he’s alternating the negatives, which means he’s actually saying, “If you won’t [A], you don’t”—or can’t—“[B].” If you won’t ask, you can’t receive. If you won’t love your neighbor,[4] you objectively and indisputably do not love God—that sort of thing.
John’s metaphor is built around willful trees. These aren’t trees that simply don’t or can’t grow fruit beneficial to humans, like a holly or a maple. These trees are refusing to grow any fruit. And in the process of their defiance, they get chopped down and burned. In English, the chopping and burning are in the passive voice, so we can only guess at who’s clearing the grove—most of us probably just assume that God is responsible. In Greek, however, the actors are clear: it’s the trees themselves. John’s statement actually says, “Each tree that won’t bear good fruit chops itself down and throws itself into the fire.”[5]
Again, that might not sound like good news to us, but it is if you think about it. These trees are not under siege by some unseen and unknown external force. There is no lurker hiding in the forest with a chainsaw or a supernatural adversary slowly poisoning the area’s water supply. Each tree is the perpetrator of its own destruction. And the good news in that is,
they can stop.
No one is attacking them. No one is forcing them to pick up the axe or to swing it or to hop over onto the bonfire. They can change. They can choose to act differently at multiple points along the process. And so can we.
How much of our lives do we waste trying to find someone else to blame? How much time and energy do we squander playing victims when we simply aren’t? How many times do we keep putting ourselves in the same destructive situations or head down the same devastating pathways and then cry about how unfair life is?
(Please note that I’m not saying victims are responsible for their abuse. Sometimes there are external actors who inflict harm on those unable to protect themselves. In those situations, please, please seek help. You do not deserve pain. You do not deserve to suffer. Anyone telling you that—even if it’s your own mind—is lying to you. There are resources to escape and find safety. We will help you connect with them if necessary.)
What I am saying is that it’s essential that we finally open our eyes and see clearly, that we look at reality, not necessarily as we’ve come or been taught to expect but as it actually is, and then that we respond accordingly. We need to set aside our presumptions and prejudices and psychological self-protections and false sense of martyrdom so we can evaluate, with brutal honesty, where and how we are choosing death for ourselves and those around us rather than life. To quote the prophet Ezekiel again, “why will you die?”[6] And upon grasping the truth of our situation, I urge each of us to take hold of our own responsibility and then implement those actions necessary to change.
And that’s all that repentance is: change. It isn’t just gaining new insight or reinterpreting how you see the world or even audible confession. It’s actual, measurable, physically observable change.
Maybe that’s why John’s message was so effective in its day. He wasn’t approaching the people with judgment or accusations. Nor was he offering some sort of magical escape from accountability. He was helping them see reality as it was. And once their eyes were open and they could recognize their own agency and their own participation in what was happening within their society, he pointed them forward—all of them.
“What then should we do?” the common people, desperately trying to scrape by, ask. John responds, “Share even your basic surplus with those who in need—whether or not you think they’re deserving.”[7]
“What should we do?”[8] ask the tax collectors, locals actively colluding with Roman occupation. “Minimize your participation in oppression,” he tells them.
“And we,” the foreign peacekeepers themselves ask, “what should we do?”[9] John pauses a moment and then says, “Act with integrity and honesty; seek contentment rather than greed.”
John offered his insight and aid to everyone who cared to engage with him: rich or poor; powerful or helpless; loyal, compromised, or even adversaries. I have to wonder what actions he might encourage us to undertake today, how he might open our eyes to the damage we even now inflict on ourselves and our society, and then what directions he might point us for practical, ongoing proof of true repentance.
As I’ve said the last few weeks, I repeat once again: Love is coming. We—as individuals and as a whole—still have time to prepare. We still have time to change. We still have an opportunity to finally and truly repent.
“What then should we do?”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Luke 3:7
[3] Luke 3:18
[4] through observable, physical actions
[5] Luke 3:9 | my translation: neither the “that” nor either “itself” technically appear in the Greek; however, both are necessary for clarity in English, especially regarding the medio-passive verb structure.
[6] Ezekiel 33:11
[7] John uses another volitional negative here, this time with the people who have “none,” which suggests to me people who have rejected help yet remain in need—sort of a “give it anyway” situation.
[8] Luke 3:12
[9] Luke 3:13