The Fiery Axe

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, AD 2022 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

John the Baptist is certainly the prophet for these times.

John is a wonderfully irascible figure, wild-haired, wild-eyed, desert-dwelling, locust-eating. Every record we have of him, either within or without the Bible, speaks to both his righteousness and the power of his oratory.

People came out from the cities, out from all over the land, into the wilderness, into the desert, to hear his prophetic word, to receive his baptism of repentance. Sinners and soldiers, Pharisees and hierophants, all alike came out to him. And he held nothing back. He poured out upon them all of his judgment, all of his mercy, all of the fire of the Holy Spirit burning deep within the marrow of his bones.

He clearly caused a sensation. Josephus, Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Mandeans, all acknowledge him, all venerate him as a prophet of God—the first prophet in 400 years. Now that’s something, isn’t it? From the time of Moses, the archetypal prophet of Israel, through the Judges, the Kings, the Exile, the Return, there had always been prophets of Yahweh, prophets of the Lord; men and women who spoke truth to power, especially to priests and kings.

And then, one day, they just stopped. The Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of prophecy, receded with Malachi, last of the canonical prophets. Such was the tradition, at least. The Bible mentions false prophets after Malachi, but none that were accepted, none that stood the test of time. Malachi closed out the canon. Yet he left them with this prophecy:

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings …

See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

This the people took as a messianic promise, that before the arrival of God’s chosen Anointed priestly king, a prophet like Elijah would arise; a prophet like Moses, in whose mold Elijah was cast. And he would herald the Messiah, herald the Christ. Then would come the Messianic Age, when the restoration of all the cosmos to the Kingdom of Heaven would begin with the reconciliation of God and humankind.

Thus, for 400 years they waited, they watched, they hoped. They counted down the centuries, as prophesied by Daniel. They knew that the Messiah was coming, and that Elijah would go before Him, as His Forerunner, as His herald. And wouldn’t you know it—just when the clock was about to run out, just when all of Israel and even the Empire of Rome were looking alike for a Savior from Judea—along comes John.

And John is the walking talking incarnation of the entire Hebrew Bible. Everything about him recapitulates the long and tawdry history of God’s chosen people Israel. John calls them out into the desert, as Moses led the people in the Exodus. He baptizes at the Jordan River, the threshold over which Joshua led the Hebrews to their Promised Land. He dresses like Elijah, the greatest prophet of the north, veritably a second Moses. And he preaches with fire! The Spirit is in him!

“Repent! Repent! For the Kingdom of God has come near!”

Oh, and they come running. Because this, here, at last is a prophet. This, here, at last is truly a man of the Lord. They can see it in him. They can feel it. He sounds like Isaiah, he sounds like Malachi, he sounds like Moses. And he has no fear! No fear of hunger, thirst, or want. No fear of violence, oppression, or shame. No fear whatsoever of the high and mighty, the armed and angry, who come out to him. “You brood of vipers!” he cries. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” Fearlessness is the mark of the man of God. Fearlessness and truth.

And what does he say to the sinners about him? No, go home? I shall not baptize the unworthy? Hell, no. He gives it to them straight. Don’t rely on your ancestry, he chides them. Not everyone who is of Israel is Israel. You ain’t your daddy. “I tell you,” he says, pointing to the ubiquitous stones littered about the Holy Land, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” And it’s a pun, you see; a play on words. In Aramaic, the word for stones sounds like children.

No, the axe lies at the root of the tree. And in the Hebrew Bible, in our Old Testament, trees stand for people, especially in groups, in kingdoms. Trees rise out of the earth in Genesis the same as human beings do. And the axe is at the root. It doesn’t matter source of the tree, the ancestry of the tree. God does not care for blood and for soil. What matters is its fruit, the produce that it offers. A good tree bears good fruit, while a bad tree cannot help but produce that which is rotten and sour.

Fire, fire is the destiny of the bad tree, that it might at least be useful for something. And that is the baptism, promises John, of the one who is coming after him. “I am not the Messiah!” he thunders. “I am not fit to carry His sandals, to do the work of His slave! I baptize you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire!” —a fire that destroys all evil, and purifies all that is good.

And yet for all his thundering judgment, John turns not one away. Not one Sadducee, not one Pharisee, not one Roman. Anyone who comes to John is going to get both barrels, both the Law and the Gospel, the Teaching and Good News. The Kingdom is for them all, without exception, without limitation, but John will make sure they know, eyes wide open, that the healing can hurt worse than the wound.

John will kill them and resurrect them with the Word of God. He will turn them to the one to whom he points, turn them to the one for whom he himself is but the Forerunner, he himself is but a slave: he turns us all to Jesus Christ. “Behold,” says John of Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” —another Old Testament reference of course, this time to the Passover. And what follows Passover but Pentecost, our baptism in Spirit and fire?

John’s world was a mess, you understand. For centuries the people of Israel, his beloved people, had suffered what felt like one long, slow, catastrophic defeat. They were conquered and exiled over and over again—by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans. There were no more prophets. There were no more kings. Just pretenders, just conquerors and their petty puppets.

And religion, ugh. Schisms and scandals, failings and follies. The Essenes—a sect of Judaism with which John was almost certainly associated—refused to acknowledge the Temple in Jerusalem because of its pervasive corruption. They went out into the desert, out into Exile, waiting for the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the paths of the Lord!” And they replaced Temple sacrifices, mind you, with a sacred communal meal at which all who participate were treated as a priesthood of believers. Sound familiar?

John is the prophet for this age, because no century has looked so much like the first as this twenty-first. Broken, feuding religious sects. Disillusioned people. Government run by kleptocrats with endless foreign wars. It’s all there. And John says, this is perfect! John says, now you’re ready. The Messiah is right behind me, and He’s coming for us all; coming to inaugurate the Kingdom of God; coming to gather in the least, the last, and the lost; coming to bring fire to this world as a flame of love that cannot die and a truth that can’t be quenched.

You’re broken, you’re tired, you’re pessimistic, and everything’s falling apart? Perfect, roars John. The axe has cleared the way! You’ve seen how everything else fails. You’ve seen the fall of every idol, every false god that promised you happiness and worthiness and worth. Now prepare your hearts and homes, your societies and your souls, for the one who cannot fail, the one whose death will sunder death, the one who claims us all.

I am not worthy to untie His sandals. And He will baptize you with fire.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.