A couple weeks ago I put up a post called “God is in the real,” talking about a lesson God had been bringing home to me that week; it was a point I had seen made somewhere before, but I could not for the life of me remember where. Yesterday afternoon, my lovely wife was good enough to point me back to the original post, and indeed, the author there put it much better than I did. I’m not posting an excerpt out of respect for her posted request, but I encourage you to click through and read it, as it’s well worth your time.
Monthly Archives: December 2010
Impertinent question of the month
When people find out my wife and I have just had a son after three daughters, most of the time we get some form of the same basic reaction: “Oh, so you kept trying until you had a boy, huh?” In a lot of cases, I suspect it’s people trying to make sense on their own terms of the fact that yes, we just intentionally had a fourth child—they can’t imagine themselves doing such a thing, except perhaps with some particular and significant provocation. In a sense, it’s not completely false; as it happens, we picked out a boy’s name years and years ago, and we rather felt that it would be sad if we never met the person to whom the name belonged. Aside from that, though, we would have been just as happy with a fourth girl. The gender isn’t the point.
I don’t want this to come across wrong, because I believe male/female differences are real and important and valuable; I believe the reality of our two sexes, and the deeper and more profound reality of gender of which our biological sexes are a concrete instantiation, matters more than we know. But my children are not abstractions, they are not generalities, they are not case studies—they are themselves. They are particular specific people, and the fact that three of them are girls and one is a boy is very much part of that, but it’s only part of who they are as whole people, and I wanted them for themselves.
Yes, they are created in the image of God, male and female, as are their mother and I; but that’s not all that defines them. They are creators and destroyers; they are accomplished sinners and saints in training; they are capable of genius and prone to folly; and so am I all of those things as well, and heaven help all of us as I try my best to do my part to raise them to be better and more faithful and more loving disciples and friends of Jesus than I am. Trying for a boy? No, as well say we were trying for a pianist (though judging by his infant fingers, we might have managed that); we were trying to welcome the child God intended to give us in trust, as his stewards, to raise in his name and for his glory, to join the others whom he had already given us in the same way. It’s not about us or what we want at all, it’s about him.
Though I will say, it’s nice to have a baby sleeping on my shoulder again.
A new Day for the tax code?
Before Stockwell Day was a screamingly ineffective campaigner for Prime Minister of Canada, he was the treasurer of Alberta; and back in those days, when I was a graduate student in BC, he came up with the simplest and best tax system I’ve yet run across.
Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day is proposing to de-link Alberta’s provincial tax system from its federal counterpart. Instead of Albertans paying provincial tax on a percentage of their federal tax payable, a tax on a tax, they will instead pay a single rate of 11% on their taxable income, a tax on income.
This move to flatter taxation is to be applauded and Mr. Day has ensured that the move is beneficial to all income groups. [Part and parcel] with the planned move to the single rate tax is a substantive increase in the provincial basic personal exemption and spousal exemption to $11,620 up from $7,131 and $6,055 respectively. And Mr. Day has pledged to index the exemption to inflation to ensure that the hidden tax increase known as “bracket creep” is vanquished from the Alberta landscape. . . .
Alberta has now ensured that those with incomes under 11,620 pay a rate of 0% and everyone else pays 11% on their income above the basic personal exemption. So the effective provincial rate on someone earning $30,000 is 6.7% and the effective rate on someone at $100,000 is 9.7%.
Tweak the numbers to fit the current American situation, but the basic idea is right on: put all income into one bowl, exempt the first $X per person, and tax all the rest at the same rate. Cut the tax form down to a page, make the tax code transparent, drastically reduce the IRS payroll (and trim a lot of corporate bureaucracies as well) . . . what’s not to like?
Oh, yeah, and boost the economy, too.
Photo © 2006 Thorfinn Stainforth. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Atheism as dogmatic fundamentalism
This isn’t a new observation around here, of course, but it’s interesting to see an atheist come out and say it—in this case, conservative commentator S. E. Cupp; and in case you think it’s because she’s a conservative, in my observation, conservative atheists (such as the Denver Post‘s David Harsanyi) are no better about this than liberal ones.
Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great,” respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today’s militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don’t seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers.” . . .
Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a “neurological disorder.” His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithful’s expense in the documentary “Religulous.” . . .
It’s these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn’t seem to have much sociological meaning for them.
The truth is, folks like Maher and Silverman don’t want to know about actual belief—in fact, they are much more certain about the nature of the world than most actual believers, who understand that a measure of doubt is necessary for faith. They want to focus on the downfall of a gay pastor or the Nativity scene at a mall. . . .
When the esteemed theologian David Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked C.S. Lewis when he would write another book, Lewis responded, “When I understand the meaning of prayer.” It was an acknowledgment that he—a thinker with a much sharper mind than, say, Maher’s—didn’t know everything. I implore my fellow atheists to take this humility to heart. There’s still a lot to learn, but only if you’re not too busy being a know-it-all.
Size isn’t everything
I’ve mentioned before the pet store that I pass on my normal way to work. A couple weeks ago, their sign read as follows:
GUINEA PIGS
DWARF
HAMSTERS
As if hamsters don’t have enough self-esteem problems as it is . . .
He Pitched His Tent Among Us
(Exodus 40:34-38; John 1:14-18)
The Jews knew how the world worked: God was up there, and we’re down here, and that’s the end of it. He was certainly involved in the world he made—he was at work within it to accomplish his purposes—but the fundamental separation between him and his creation was always there. The pagans around them might believe in gods and goddesses who were part of the natural world and lived within it, but the Jews were too wise for that; they understood that the distance between God and the created world was simply too vast to bridge. The physical world could never contain him—he was far too great, too bright, too glorious, for that. Whatever else might change, that truth never could.
And then in one staggering moment, it did. The eternal Word by whom God created the world, the one who kept the universe from dissolving back into chaos, became flesh. Eternity took on the limitations of time; spirit put on skin and bone; the one who held all creation in the palm of his hand accepted the confinement of the womb; the one who sat on the throne of heaven took a feed trough for his bed; and so Mary’s creator became her son. The unlimited, all-encompassing, holy reality of the life of God took shape in all the messiness and limitations of human flesh, the God who could not be seen became very visible indeed, and we could never think of him in the same way again.
What’s more, if we really understand what he did, we can never look at our world in quite the same way again. If something like this could happen, if the God of the universe could break into our reality in that way, then what else could happen? If that isn’t impossible, how dare we say anything else is?
The unfortunate thing about Christmas as a cultural holiday is that our culture tries to make it safe, when it’s anything but. Christmas is not just about being loving and caring, nor is Christmas faith about seeing the best in people and trying to make the world a better place. Those things are good and noble, but they are far, far smaller than Christmas—they are, I think, efforts to reduce Christmas to something safe and comprehensible and controllable. Christmas is more like wading out into a river and seeing a log floating toward you, and then suddenly realizing that the log is an alligator—look out, it’s alive! Christmas faith is the faith that God can and will do the utterly inconceivable, that nothing is truly impossible.
It’s also the faith that this is true because of his deep love for us, for all people, and for all that he has made. God made us to love us; he made us to know him and to return his love. He created us in relationship with him, but our rebellion alienated us from him, blinding our eyes and darkening our minds; his purpose in opposing our rebellion has always been to repair what we broke, to reconcile us to himself, and thus to everyone and everything else. He doesn’t just want us to know about him, or what he wants us to do; he wants us to know him, and for that we needed more than just to hear about him. It wasn’t enough for us to be told the truth of God, it wasn’t enough to be told about his grace; we needed to see it—ultimately in the cross, but also through all the rest of Jesus’ life. We needed to see it so that we could understand his purpose: that we might know God, not just that he exists, but that we might actually know him personally, and not just as acquaintances or servants, but as his children.
And so, in order that this might be, the Word became flesh, and he pitched his tent among us. Our English translations read so generically here, as we saw a few minutes ago, that we miss the punch of this. This doesn’t just mean he lived among us—the word here really does mean to pitch a tent. Which might seem odd, until you combine it with the line “We have seen his glory,” and then you get the key: John is talking about the tabernacle, the tent sanctuary where the people of Israel worshiped God during the years they were wandering around in the desert. The tabernacle was the center of Israel’s worship from that time all the way through the time of King David, until Solomon succeeded his father David on the throne and built the first temple in Jerusalem; it was the place on earth where God lived and where his glory dwelled, where his people came to worship him and offer sacrifices.
Now, if you were here when we went through the book of Hebrews, you’ll remember the strong emphasis we found there that Jesus has replaced the temple and the old sacrificial system. John is saying much the same here, but he’s taking it a step further: the Word who was God became flesh and tabernacled among us. He offered the final, once-for-all sacrifice for our sin, he replaced the temple as the place where God is present and may be worshiped—but he didn’t replace it with another temple, someplace high above us; instead, he pitched his tent among us, right down in our midst.
This might seem like a minor distinction—the tabernacle moved, the temple stayed in one place—but it really isn’t. The tabernacle went with the people of God as the physical location of his presence with them on the journey—wherever they were, it was, and there was God. The temple, by contrast, meant that God’s presence was located permanently at one particular location, and his people had to go to him. As a consequence, the people of Israel came to regard that particular location as holy in and of itself, and to consider that the farther away places were from the temple, the less holy they were. That’s why Nathanael heard about Jesus and immediately asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—because Nazareth was about as far from Jerusalem as it was possible to be and still be in Israel. Clearly Messiah would come from someplace much closer to the temple than that.
With the coming of Jesus, however, the idea that one could only worship God at one particular place, through one particular set of rituals, was no more. Now, the presence of God was once more out among his people, walking and talking with them, right in the middle of their daily life. We see this most clearly in John 4, in Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well; when the woman brought up the old disagreement between Samaritans and Jews—where was the proper place to worship God, Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim?—Jesus dismissed the question: soon, it would be irrelevant. “The time is coming—in fact, it has arrived—when that won’t matter anymore; the only thing that will distinguish true worship from false worship is whether people are worshiping God in spirit and truth, because that’s all God really cares about.”
The key here for us this morning is that the Word didn’t become flesh and then hole up in one place, where he could avoid all but the most worthy; he went out into the world, seeking out all those who would admit their need of him. The religious leaders of his day had erected all sorts of barriers; he could have used them to avoid people like that Samaritan woman, who had been through almost as many husbands as Elizabeth Taylor. Instead, he went out on the road and sought them out. He would accept anyone who would pay the price to follow him, because he loved everyone, not for what they could do for him, but for what he could do for them; and despite the rejection he suffered, he kept at it. To quote a Christmas card I received some years ago, “The miracle is that God dwelt among us and would not leave”; the leaders of his people did everything they possibly could to make him go, but even when they killed him, he came back. And why? Because he loved them. Because he loves us. Because of his grace and mercy, who will not stop loving us no matter what we do. This is the good news of Christmas.
The One for Whom We Wait
(Isaiah 9:1-7; Matthew 2:1-12)
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest . . .
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
Luci Shaw’s poem “Mary’s Song,” which Barbara read for us, captures something of the unimaginable step the Son of God took when he became a man. For nine months, Mary bore God in her body; and now he is born, a baby seemingly like any other in Bethlehem that night. Psalm 121:4 declares, “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep”—but now he does, nestled in his mother’s arms. The eternal Word of God is now wordless, capable only of an infant’s coos and cries; the omnipotent one by whom all things came to be is now impotent, dependent on his mother and father for his every need. And why? The thoughts Luci puts in Mary’s mouth capture it perfectly: “caught that I might be free, blind in my womb to know my darkness ended, brought to this birth for me to be new-born.”
From the point when Adam and Eve fell into sin, dragging all creation with them into death and decay, the world waited for a savior; but the savior God sent wasn’t any savior we would ever have expected. This was no king to forge a mighty empire, nor a great general to slay his enemies on the field of battle. Indeed, he was a man of no power in society at all, and when the powers that be dragged him into court, he neither raised a hand to stop them nor said a word in his own defense. He was born powerless, laid to sleep in a bed of harsh straw, he lived the powerless life of a penniless itinerant, and he died powerless, murdered by the authorities with little more than formal attention to due process. In short, he did not come demanding admittance, forcing salvation on all in his path; rather, in a kind of spiritual judo, the Savior of the world came quietly, in humble state, asking to be let in. He did not, and does not, knock the door down; he chooses instead just to knock.
We need to remember that, as we—quite rightly—emphasize the sovereignty of God, that our salvation is his work, that even faith comes to us as his gift; we need to remember that when he saves us, he doesn’t simply overpower us, dominate us, overawe us into cowed obedience. He doesn’t do it by shattering our wills, but by transforming them. He loves us, he cares for us, he heals us, he draws us to himself, and he sets us free, breaking the hold of sin on our lives, taking our old life and giving us his own in exchange, placing his heart and his Spirit within us, so that we are able and joyful to welcome him in gratitude for all he has done for us.
But that raises the question: who is it we’re called to welcome? First of all, we’re called to welcome the child who has been born for us, which is simply to love him; and that’s more than just warm feelings. One thing I’ve learned from having children, they take over your life. They go right to the top of the list of priorities, because they need so much from us; caring for them and raising them takes so much time, energy, thought and attention that they affect every single thing we do. In their vulnerability and need for our love, they open our hearts in a way that nothing else can. I think that’s one reason God sent Jesus as a baby, born like any of us, so that we would see that he wants our love, and that he intentionally left himself vulnerable to us—even to the point of allowing us to crucify him. A child has been born for us.
But what a child! Unplanned pregnancy, single mother—yes, she was engaged, but she wasn’t yet married, and that pregnancy could have cost her everything; and though her fiancé stuck with her, they were still second-class people living in an occupied country, very likely poor, vulnerable to the occupying army. This baby Jesus was the definition of a problem pregnancy, and once he was born he was the least of the least. This is the child who has been born for us, a child it would be far too easy to write off as unimportant and inconvenient (which is fitting, in a way, for the leaders of his people found the adult Jesus equally inconvenient); and in his name and by his example, these are the children he calls us to welcome today. There shouldn’t be any unwanted children, any neglected children, or any children undefended in the face of abuse, not if the church is doing its job, for we are called to welcome and care for them in the name of the child who was born to us in that neglected place so long ago; for that child says to us, “Just as you did it for one of the least of these, you did it for me.”
We don’t worship a God who came to earth as one of the beautiful people, or who demanded the nicest home in Israel for his Son’s birth; in fact, we worship a God who deliberately chose to be born among the animals so that the shepherds would be just as welcome as the magi. We don’t worship a God who sides with the rich and powerful, but one who commands them to care for the powerless. We worship a God who could have come to earth and claimed everything because he made it, but who didn’t even reserve himself a shack in which to sleep. We worship a God who came to earth to identify himself with the poor, the powerless, the outcast, and the oppressed, who died in part because of that, and who calls us to do the same.
Second, we are called to welcome the king who has come to us. The child is not ours to command, we are his to command; he is ours not to lead but to follow. This is both a blessing and a warning, because Isaiah tells us he comes to bring justice for our unjust world; this is why he is the Prince of Peace, for true peace is founded on justice, on being in line with the perfect will of our just and holy God. This is a blessing for those who truly desire justice, even as we fight the injustice in our own hearts, because it’s a promise that at the last, our hearts will be refined until they shine like pure silver, and we will be vindicated. To those who do not seek justice, to those who treat others unjustly, it’s a warning that the time to profit from injustice is brief, for perfect justice will be done in the end; the pleasures of sin may be sweet in the mouth for a moment, but its consequences are bitter in the stomach, and permanent.
To welcome the child is to love him; to welcome the king is to obey him; and in John 14:15, Jesus showed us that these come to the same point when he said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” We are called to obey him out of love, because he is our God and he knows what is best for us; which means in part that out of love for him, we must trust him enough to believe that he knows what is best for us. Obedience born of love is a radical thing, unlike anything else, because there are no limits. Obedience to law goes only so far—its commands reach a certain point and then stop; obedience to love may require anything of us. Love may call us to fulfill our dreams, or to give them up; love may direct us to set aside our strongest desires; love may summon us to trade in our entire life for a life we would not have chosen. Such is, after all, the story of Abraham. But God knew what he was doing, and Abraham was richly blessed for his obedience; and through him, God changed the world.
As we stand tonight before the infant-king in the straw, let us welcome him with our whole heart and our whole life. Now native to earth as we are, nailed to our poor planet, caught that we might be free, brought to this birth for us to be new-born, he has given us his life that we might live; he has given everything, no strings attached. Let us do the same.
From the Rising of the Sun . . .
(Isaiah 9:1-7, Malachi 4:1-3; John 1:9-13)
Israel was a nation waiting for the light. Isaiah had promised it; looking forward to the time when idolatry and disobedience would plunge Israel into darkness, he said, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who lived in a land of shadows, light has dawned.” That light, he saw, would come in the birth of a child, a child who would re-establish David’s kingdom, breaking the power of Israel’s oppressors and reigning in peace with perfect justice and righteousness. In the darkness of exile and foreign rule, Israel waited for the light.
Malachi had promised the light, too. In the darkness of a nation dominated by evildoers grown arrogant in their evil, the light would come. For those who rejected the Lord, it would come as a flash fire through fields of stubble, reducing them to ash; but his faithful worshipers would see the sun of righteousness rise with healing in its wings. They would go out restored and re-invigorated, leaping and dancing like cattle released from their stalls, free to move and exulting in their freedom. The righteous would dance for joy, exulting in the light, while their former oppressors would be nothing but ash beneath their feet. In the darkness of Roman oppression, Israel waited for the light.
And in God’s perfect time, the light came. Israel had been waiting so long, they’d fallen for a lot of false lights over the years; but now, at last, came the true light, the one whom God had promised so long before. This wasn’t another fraud, or delusion, or false hope, this was the one for whom Israel had been waiting. Indeed, he was the one for whom the entire world had been waiting, though many didn’t know it. This was the giver of all life, the light of all people, the hope of the world.
And when he came, they didn’t recognize him. He came into the world—the world he made—and the world didn’t have a clue who he was. Not just the world at large, either—which is understandable, since they hadn’t really been looking for him—his own people didn’t know him. “He came home,” John writes, “he came to his own people, and they rejected him.” He was the long-awaited king come at last, and the door should have been thrown wide open for him; instead, it was slammed in his face. This was the purpose for which God called Israel, but when the time came, they refused it. The writer and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner has a wonderful little sermon from the point of view of the innkeeper in which he has the innkeeper say, “All your life long, you wait for your own true love to come—we all of us do—our destiny, our joy, our heart’s desire. So how am I to say it, gentlemen? When he came, I missed him.” That’s Israel’s story: when he came, they missed him.
Of course, not everyone did; there were those who recognized him, however imperfectly, and believed in him. To them, John tells us, Jesus gave the right to become children of God—which is an interesting statement. First, note that word “gave.” John doesn’t say, “Those who received him earned the right,” he says that Jesus gave us the right. This isn’t something which can be earned by works—even by the “work” of faith in Christ; it’s something which can only be received as a free gift of God’s grace. Indeed, even our faith is not our own work, but God’s gift to us as he enables us to respond to what he has done for us. Second, the word here translated as “the right” is a word which we most often translate “authority” or “power”; here the idea is one of status, that those who believe in Jesus are given a new status as children of God.
Third, that change of status is a process; it doesn’t say “to be children of God,” but “to become children of God.” This is an important point, because there’s a tendency to think of salvation as just something that happens at a particular point in time: I give my life to Christ, I’m saved, OK. There’s truth to that, to be sure, but that point in time isn’t an end, it’s a beginning. When Christ gives us the right to become children of God, from that point on, the rest of life is about that becoming. In theological language, the terms are justification and sanctification. Justification is the point where our sins are wiped away and we are given that new status as children of God; it’s the point where we are spiritually reborn. Just as physical birth is the beginning of the process of growing up, justification is the beginning of the process of sanctification, of being remade holy in God’s image, as our new heart, the new life within us, transforms us from the inside out.
The truth we tend to lose sight of here is that this story isn’t just about what has already happened. Jesus came, and he has saved us, but that’s not the end of the story, or the end of his work; that will only come when he returns. We have been saved, we are being transformed, we are being made ready; what we are is not the point, but what we will be. What has happened points us forward to what is yet to come. That’s why, as I said last week, this season of Advent isn’t just about preparing our hearts to celebrate Christmas, to welcome the child in the manger—it’s also about preparing our hearts to welcome the conquering king on a white horse, the one who will overthrow the nations and all earthly powers, and reign over all creation forever and ever.
Which is why we need to keep ourselves ready for his return, to live in anticipation. We are waiting for the light to break fully upon our sin-darkened world, for the sun of righteousness to rise with healing in its wings; and the dawn for which we wait will be the last, as the promises and warnings given through Isaiah and Malachi will finally be completely fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven will be established on earth at last. We are waiting for the light, just as Israel was waiting; and just like Israel, we must keep faithful watch if we want to be ready when Jesus comes. As he said in Matthew 25, “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. . . . Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
Keep awake, Jesus tells us; keep alert. Remember that the Light of the World has come, and is coming again, and that when he comes, all that has been done in secret will be revealed for all to see. Remember, and do not lose heart, for to you who received him and believed in his name he has given the right to become children of God, who have been born anew by his Holy Spirit. This is not something that you have earned, and therefore it is not something you can lose; by his own grace and love he has given you the right to become children of God, and he has put his own Spirit in your hearts who has the power to make you children of God. The gift is yours, the work is his; and he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it, to make you ready for the day when he will come again to bring you home to be with him forever. This is the promise of the gospel for you this day, and every day.
God is in the real
I was reminded today of an observation I ran across somewhere—unfortunately, I have no idea where or whom to credit, and I know I won’t be able to put it as elegantly as the original—that has been very helpful to me. God promises to give us everything we need to face every trial he sends us. He does not promise to give us strength for possible future trials we conjure up in our own imagination. If we live in the present and face the trials he sends us as they come, he is with us; if we project ourselves into the future to worry and fret about all the things that might go wrong later, we go alone. And in truth, we don’t need to worry about the future, because God’s in control of it—and when it becomes the present, he will be enough for us then, too.
Can I Get a Witness?
(Isaiah 40:1-11, Malachi 3:1-7; John 1:6-9)
Did any of you wonder, listening to our gospel passage this morning, what it’s doing here? You’ve probably heard it many times before, but maybe this time you suddenly wondered why the apostle John stops talking about Jesus for a while and starts talking about John the Baptizer instead. Or maybe you’ve wondered about that all the way along, and never really gotten an answer. Why does the gospel suddenly take our eyes off the Son of God, the Word, the source of all life and light, and start talking about his PR guy? One paragraph in, and we’ve already changed the subject.
The thing is, though, there are good reasons for this. For instance, there were folks floating around who thought that John the Baptizer was the Messiah, so the apostle John is taking a minute to draw the distinction. At a deeper level, though, is this truth: it matters, profoundly, that Jesus had someone going ahead of him to announce his coming. That’s a very, very important fact, in two ways. One, this is part of the evidence that he was in fact the promised Messiah, because God had promised that the Messiah would not show up unannounced; and two, God had made that promise for good reason. If people were unprepared for Jesus’ coming, or if they’re unprepared when he comes again—and there are plenty of warnings in Scripture about that—it isn’t because God likes to catch us by surprise. Whenever God is going to do anything big, he gives us plenty of advance warning; if we’re not ready, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
Consider this. Yes, Jesus’ arrival was missed by most of the powerful people of this world, because he didn’t come on their terms—he wasn’t born in a palace, or to a rich and influential family; he didn’t do it the way they would have done it. But they could have seen him, if they’d been watching, because God gave them the chance to pay attention. The angels announced Jesus’ birth, even if it was only to mere shepherds. The star alerted the powerful court astrologers of the great Persian Empire; they recognized the sign that someone important had been born, and sent a delegation to see who it was. Along the way, they tipped off the Jewish leaders (who didn’t react well, on the whole). And as the time drew near for Jesus to begin his public ministry, up popped John to let Israel know that the Messiah was close at hand. Jesus’ appearance was no sneak attack, designed to catch the people of God off guard; it was no pop quiz. His people had advance warning, time to prepare themselves, just as God had promised. John was important because he was the fulfillment of that promise.
If you look at the two Old Testament passages primarily associated with him and his ministry, you begin to see why that mattered so much. Both look forward to the day when the Lord would come to his people, but they see that day very differently. In Isaiah, when the voice calls out, “Prepare the way for the Lord,” it’s a joyous moment: the Lord is coming to reveal his glory to the whole world by delivering his people from exile, and all will be well again. Malachi, by contrast, asks, “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?” When God comes, he will cleanse and refine his people—and especially the priests—washing and burning away all their impurities. Those who have been faithful to him will come out of it shining like gold and silver; but those who haven’t, those who have done evil, will be harshly judged.
In both these passages, we see the firm conviction that the Lord has not changed and does not change. God’s people will be preserved and can trust him to do what he says he will do, because he’s faithful even if his people aren’t. He will purify his people so that their offerings are acceptable to him, and in the end, all things will be as they should be. This truly is reason for Isaiah’s rejoicing, but also for the somber tone we hear in Malachi, because it means that the coming of the Lord will be a time of judgment as well as of deliverance; thus the messenger going before him would bring words of warning as well as words of promise. We need to wrap our minds around this before we can truly understand what it meant for John to bear witness to the light; the coming of the light frees people from darkness, but it also exposes everything that has been done in the darkness, and for some, this is far from pleasant. For some, the coming of the light isn’t good news at all—it’s bad news.
That’s why John preached a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as Luke 3:3 tells us, because he understood what too many of his hearers didn’t: the coming of the Messiah wasn’t going to be an automatic blessing for the Jewish people. They, too, had to prepare their hearts to set aside their sins and obey him; they wouldn’t get a free pass. Thus John called his hearers to radical repentance, including giving away whatever they could to those in need, because the Lord was coming as he had promised, and his coming would bring judgment. Those who repented of their sins and sought to follow him would be blessed, while those who refused would be destroyed.
This might sound harsh to our ears, but it is the message the Baptizer was given; this is what it meant for him to bear witness to the light. At Christmas, we tend to see images of a nice, feel-good Jesus who wants everybody to be nice and happy, but that’s really not what Jesus was on about, and so that’s not what John was on about. Far from it. He disrupted the lives of everyone around him; he did whatever he could to unsettle people, to hook their attention and shake them up. This even—especially—included the religious leaders of his day; they were the chief moral authorities of his society, but he called them a nest of snakes. He shouted to the world at the top of his lungs that business as usual was no longer acceptable; he bluntly told people they needed to change their way of living, or else. He did everything in his power to capture his hearers’ imaginations so that when Jesus came, they would pay attention to him. He preached like there was no tomorrow because he knew that Jesus was coming to fulfill both Isaiah 40 and Malachi 3, and that it was literally a matter of life or death whether people were ready.
Jesus was the Messiah, but not the Messiah Israel expected—rather than challenging their enemies, he challenged the Jews themselves. He upset people’s expectations of who he was supposed to be, and sometimes he upset their furniture. He didn’t play to the crowds; when they wanted to make him king over Israel, he took off, and sometimes his teaching seemed calculated to drive away followers rather than to attract more. But after all, he had come to deliver us, not from political misrule, but from a far greater evil than that; he had come to win final victory over the devil, and the greater the deliverance, the greater the disruption. (Just ask the ancient Israelites; they were scarcely out of Egypt before they started complaining about the terrible things this move to the desert had done to their menu planning.) It shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus was such a disruptive figure; like his herald, he would do anything to show people their need for repentance—for forgiveness—for himself.
Put another way, Jesus came to bless us, but not to give us an easy blessing; as Malachi says, he came to refine us, to bless us with fire. We are full of impurities, and our beauty is marred, and so he comes to us to purify us with the flame of his Holy Spirit. It’s a telling thing that Malachi says, “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,” because refining silver takes great care and attention; the art of the silversmith is exacting, requiring considerable patience for the metal’s true beauty to be revealed.
There’s a story told about a group of women doing a Bible study on Malachi who discovered this in a wonderful way; they were puzzled that the prophet specifies a refiner of silver when gold is more valuable, and so one of them decided to do some research on the matter. She called a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him work. As she watched, he held a piece of silver over the fire to heat up, and he explained that in refining silver, it’s necessary to hold it in the middle of the fire, where it is hottest, in order to burn away the impurities.
The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot, and remembered that Malachi says that the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. She asked the silversmith if he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined. He said yes; in fact, not only did he have to sit there holding the silver in place, he had to keep his eyes on it the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver were left in the flames even a moment too long, it would be ruined.
The woman was silent for a moment, then asked, “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?” The silversmith smiled at her and said, “That’s easy. I know it’s done when I see my face reflected in it.”
That, you see, is what the Lord is doing with each of us: he’s refining us, burning away our impurities, until we reflect his face. That’s the message of Advent, that Christ came to earth to call us to himself and to begin that process in us, and that he’s coming again to complete that process and take us home with him. This is why in Advent we don’t just look backward to Christ’s first coming, but also forward to his second coming; this is why the call of Advent is to prepare our hearts for his coming by taking a good, hard look at ourselves, admitting our sin, and turning away from it, and toward him.