NewCreation

Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent, Year C The third Sunday in Advent. Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the third Sunday in Advent – Gaudete Sunday, as it's sometimes called, because of the reading from Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord, always, and again I say rejoice.” This is a Sunday of great gladness, when priests get to dress in pink vestments, if they have them – always an entertaining spectacle. But today we're celebrating Gaudete with Luke, and today's Gospel follows on pretty much exactly from last Sunday's Gospel, with a little jump that I'll have to cross for you, because it's quite important in understanding what's going on. But first, to say that what we're being asked to celebrate here by the Church, with the reading from Zephaniah – a glorious reading, telling about how the Lord is coming, how the Lord rejoices in us and wants to come, wants to rejoice, wants to bring back the people to Israel, wants the daughter of Zion to rejoice – and Saint Paul telling us about how it is important that we rejoice. All of this is a sense of something that is to come, to prepare us for what is to come. Now, what we've jumped over: you remember last time we left off with John repeating and preaching from the words of the prophet Isaiah about “every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be laid low, the way made straight, the path of the Lord,” and so on – “the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth.” Splendid. But so, he's announcing – that's what he's announcing – he's announcing the coming in of the Lord. But then he speaks to the people and he says to them, “You brood of vipers – who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” So let's remember that, in another Gospel, the brood of vipers is transferred to the scribes and Pharisees rather than to the people. But here in Luke's Gospel, it's the people themselves. John is engaging in standard prophetic critique of the people. You give them a rough time in order to get them to repent. “Who warned you to flee from us? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin 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.” So, no identitarian goodness – that's what he's saying. It's a strong message to us Catholics, who are very inclined to identitarian understandings of goodness. “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear fruit, good fruit, is cut down and thrown into the fire.” So again, he's taking texts from prophets here. But he's got a very, very strong sense of wrath that is to come. And we're going to see why that's important in just a second, because it's one of the things that makes it difficult for him himself to realize whether Jesus is in fact the one he'd been prophesying about. But so the crowds, innocently enough despite having been called a brood of vipers, say to him, “What then should we do?” So in reply he says to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.” So here we see actually how he interprets in practice those passages from Isaiah — “make straight the paths of the Lord, the valley shall be filled in, the mountains and hills shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth” — saying that all that geographical imagery, splendid as it is, comes down to us making things more level amongst ourselves. That's the kind of change he wanted to produce in the people. Sharing, caring for the weak and the marginalized. He says “even the tax collectors came to be baptized”, and they asked him: “Teacher, what should we do?” Now remember who these tax collectors were. These tax collectors — the system of Roman occupation decided that it was cheaper for them to outsource their tax-gathering exercise rather than themselves set up a Roman bureaucracy to get the taxes out of the people. They outsourced that. They would sell the rights to farm the taxes to certain rich people, locals in the countries under their rule, who themselves would then hire their local thugs to go out and collect the taxes. So you can imagine the local thugs were probably not very important people, but they were slightly mistrusted and feared people, and of course their profit depended on them getting too much. In other words, the tax collector's boss would have made a calculation with the Romans to say that the whole area was worth, let us say, 50,000 — whatever the source of money was — or 50 million, it doesn't matter, we're talking about arbitrary sums here. And so he would then say to his subordinates, “Okay, in order for me to satisfy that, I need to collect 70 billion from it, so that's my profit.” And they would then say, “Okay, in order for us to be able to do that, we need to make more than 70, because we need to make it for ourselves.” In other words, it was a profit-making racket all the way down. And everybody knew it. So here is what John the Baptist is doing. He's saying that this is about straightening out the crooked. This is a classic and indeed a proper way of making sure everyone knows that taxes are going to be paid, that they're certainly going to be paid by someone. So the idea that there are tax collectors is not in itself a criminal activity, but you've got to decriminalize it at every step of the way. This is what he's suggesting, what he's ordering. So he says to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him. Soldiers, again, probably not Roman soldiers, but once again, locals, maybe Jews, maybe non-Jews, but hired by the Romans to be their local police force, to be their local enforcers. They may have been under the leadership of a centurion, they may not. They may have been Temple guards. There were a whole variety of different forces of armed militia to keep the people in order in these querulous times. So soldiers asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.” In other words, they were, as police have been in all places as far as we know, liable to make false accusations in order to take bribes, in order to get people to buy themselves off their problem rather than actually have to go through and face a judge. So basically anyone who has power over anyone else is able to use intimidation to get something from them. This is standard in many places in the world, including several in which I've lived. So John is saying that there be forces of law and order is not a bad thing, but they've got to keep law and order rather than profit from it. This is a strong teaching. Remember that this would have gone to the core of lots of people's lives. So the people are filled with expectation of the one who's coming in, the one who is going to see how everything is being done, and that they are therefore under the judgment of the one who is to come. These are the questions which are on their mind. So when the tax collectors — and other places refers to the prostitutes, but not here. Here it's the tax collectors and the soldiers. When they go out, the sense that a real social upheaval is going to be produced by the coming of the Lord is expected. And John encourages that. He says, as the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John whether he might be the Messiah — he might be the anointed priestly one, you see, they had reason to think that he might be, he was after all of priestly family — he was a lowly member of a family, Zechariah's family — that was related to Caiaphas and Annas. He was the local branch of that, if you like. So not a stupid supposition, not simply a piece of fake news. But John answered all of them, saying: “I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than I” — and here he quotes, as in much of this passage, Saint Luke quotes Saint Mark — “he is the one who is more powerful than I” — ischyroteros (ἰσχυρότερός) —, which is a way of referring to the powerful one, the Most High himself. The one who's coming to you is from the Most High, if not the Most High himself. “I'm not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” And this — the untying of the thong of the sandals — could be a way of saying “I'm not even worthy to be a servant to him,” or something richer than that, because in the levirate marriage system, if one of the brothers whose elder brother had died refused to marry his widow — if the elder brother hadn't had children — the widow had the right to undo his sandals and throw them at him as a public sign of contempt, and he would then be shunned by everybody, because he was refusing the marriage. So here John is, strangely — or maybe not so strangely — occupying the place of the woman who is not thought worthy of marriage, because the one who is coming in is the bridegroom, the one who is going to marry. So the two references in this little passage are worth following for the sense of who John thought he was and what he thought was coming in. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” It's not the first time, I think, that John has talked of fire. It certainly won't be the last. But the Holy Spirit and fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So there we get the fire again. So he clearly has a strong image of the one who's coming in. He uses the image of the winnowing fork, which is from the prophet Amos, from Amos chapter 9, and then he refers to the threshing floor — to clear his threshing floor. And remember that his threshing floor is Jerusalem: that was the threshing floor on which David had the vision of the Lord, which established Jerusalem as a Yahwist site rather than a Jebusite, rather than a pagan site. So “his threshing floor” means that he's going to be conducting a purge in Jerusalem as well as in the rest of the country. That was one of the reasons why John was in the desert. He was, in a sense, facing down the iniquities of the Temple. So he was announcing judgment on all that. But John clearly has a very strong sense of something really quite punitive arriving. So it says: “So with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people.” So with many other exhortations — the word is parakaleō (παρακαλέω) —, it's actually the same word as used for encouragement, consolation, as in the famous passage which we hear at the beginning of Lent usually, and which appears in Handel's Messiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” It's the same verb. So it's the comforting announcements and the good news that's coming that he's announcing. But it doesn't yet sound like good news. And the bizarre thing is that he's telling them to prepare: to lower the mountains and bring up the valleys, to straighten the crooked tax collectors and the equivalent with the soldiers, the rough ways being made smooth. He's getting them all to do that so that they will see the salvation of their God. And yet, when Jesus comes into their midst in his baptism — which of course we won't see for a few weeks yet — he will scarcely be noticed. “All flesh will see the salvation of God.” That's going to take some time to be worked out. So here we have John, who still has a vindictive vision of God, a punishing vision of God, whose wrath he announces. And yet part of the good news that we know has come in — which led John himself later to be concerned that something was right — is that the coming in is not the vindictive God. There is no wrath in God. There is no cataclysm coming from God. This is something that Jesus will be bringing in. This is the good news that is really going to come for us, and which Luke is so keen to bring out, as we will see as we read his Gospel over this year. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.