FINDINGS II

Advent II - A - December 5, 2010

Matthew 3: 1-12

 Matthew 3: 1-12:

In the time of which we are speaking John known as The Baptist came to public attention in the desert area of Judea, and he was telling anybody who would listen, "Change your mind and your ways, for the rule of heaven has come close to us." This fellow is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah told when he said, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of Yahweh, make his paths straight.'" At that time John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his diet consisted in locusts and wild honey. Crowds of people from Jerusalem and, indeed, of all Judea were streaming out to where he was, i.e. the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the waters of Jordan, whilst confessing their sins. But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism he turned on them and said, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is coming? Bear fruit commensurate with a real change of mind and heart. Do not presume to tell yourselves that your have Abraham as your ancestor. I am telling you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham, [i.e. they are a dime a dozen.] Even now the ax is laid at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear the fruit it was meant to bear is to be cut down and throw into the fire. I am baptizing you in water as a sign of your change of heart and mind, yet one who is more powerful than I is coming later; I am not worthy to carry his sandals for him. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, harvesting his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn in a fire nothing can extinguish. (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)

RUBRIC

Early on in the occasional novel the reader will encounter a character that is at first writ large and then disappears from the narrative, seldom, if ever, given mention again. The literary analyst may point out that such a character was needed to set up the plot or as a basis upon which questions yet actually to be posed can be credibly dealt with when the time comes. Or the analyst might say that the character in question is important to setting an otherwise timeless story in an actual historical setting. We meet an example of that character in the gospel reading set out above. The name given him by all four canonical gospel compilers was "John," and he is called "The Baptist," as in the one noted for baptizing.

WORKSHOP

We are so accustomed to the figure of John the Baptist that we do not readily see what an odd-man-out character he is in the gospel narrative. He would have been a contemporary of any Jesus figure during the first third of the first century C.E. Mostly the two of them are depicted as mere acquaintances, if that; and the story of Jesus' insistent  submission to the former's baptismal ritual suggests that John was for a time the more dominant of the two figures. But by the time According to Matthew was compiled, the Baptist (long dead at Herod's hand) had been relegated at best to a secondary position in the larger story. Not, of course, in According to Luke in which John and Jesus are depicted as being related by blood through their mothers.

The burden of John's message is "metanoia," meaning "change of mind." The outward sign the evangelists provide for that change is baptism. Mark, Matthew and Luke depict the Baptizer offering that sign, reminiscent of the episodic ritual cleansing bath. John's role is sometimes that of the precursor. But to what extent that was actually so cannot be known. It seems clear that if the Jesus character as variously accounted for in the canonical gospels was once a follower of the Baptizer, he departed from him at some point and took a different path.

The Baptist appeared to have belonged to the apocalyptic school of thought, i.e. that the end was near, the world was beyond salvation and that people should "change their mind" along with their ways and prepare for the judgment. The Jesus figure in the synoptic gospels was depicted largely as a dispenser of ethical wisdom, in a sense saying to people: "You have what you need to save yourselves," as in this saying credited to him by Luke at 17:21: "The rule (or dominion) of God is in your midst." See also According to Thomas (2): "The rule is inside you, and it is outside you" and also in Thomas (113) "the rule of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

It is almost a humanist approach suggesting that human beings could manage themselves, making use of the wisdom they possessed, its source being that rule or domain that was already among them, indicating that such management is and should be a communal, not an individual thing.

Meanwhile, it seems safe to say that the Baptist's movement was a real thing, but was superseded, at least in the minds of the evangelists, by the Jesus movement. In any event, it was the latter that eventually came to claim the loyalty of non-synagogue Jews after 70 C.E., though it may be that the Baptist had as intense a posthumous following as Jesus'. Josephus' mention of the Baptist appears in Book 18 of The Antiquities (5.2) as does that of Jesus (3). Josephus treated both of them as figures of history.

The question remains as to why the evangelists found it necessary to include the Baptist in the varied narratives, which so clearly have their set destinations in the passion and resurrection stories in which he figures not at all. Perhaps given the tenor of the post-70 C.E. times they did not dare to omit the Baptist, especially when he could be co-opted as an Elijah-type, thus setting up Jesus as messiah.

Certainly the world had gotten considerably crazier and more threatening by 70-90 C.E. than it had been during the lifetimes of John and the Jesus figure. Hence a little apocalyptic couldn't hurt. It appears that the ethical sayings of Jesus as found in Q (therefore in Matthew and Luke) as well as in Thomas had borne up the Jesus Jew communities prior to the Jerusalem Temple debacle.

But that event seemed to have sparked the need for something beyond a catalog of sayings, e.g. a narrative along the lines of the popular dying-and-rising son-of-a-god myth that Paul had already proposed two decades earlier and that was a familiar motif of the day. The Baptist and his apocalyptic fit well into that scheme, and thus he became an abiding figure in the drama.

HOMILETIC COMMENTARY

What we make of the Baptist today is somewhat of a puzzlement for the homilist or lay student who wishes not to insult the intelligence of a congregation or study group. One angle might be to explore the strains of apocalyptic and wisdom literatures that endure in the so-called Abrahamic religions and to inquire how humankind may best be served by those religions. A further proposition would be that the proto-church of the late first century did, after all, make the right decision to go with the worldly wisdom of Jesus rather than the world-resignation of the Baptist.

It is not for nothing that someone has contrasted the Baptist with the Nazarene in the competing metaphors of shouting from a fire escape and a quiet fireside chat.