Rejoice!
Tradition designates the third Sunday in Advent the “joyous” (sometimes called Gaudete, or “rejoice”) Sunday. It’s the day we light the one pink candle (symbolizing joy) on the Advent wreath, amidst the three purple, i.e. penitential, ones. Certainly, the first three lessons designated for this Sunday have a joyful tone. The prophet Zephaniah tells us “The Lord has taken away the judgments against you; he has turned away your enemies. The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.” Isaiah uses the word joy twice. And Paul urges his Philippian friends to “rejoice in the Lord always.”
But then we get to this week’s gospel reading, from the 3rd Chapter of Luke, where we encounter John the Baptist. Were we reading Luke’s gospel for the first time, when we reach Chapter 3, we might think we have an idea of what comes next. John’s father Zechariah has already celebrated John’s birth and circumcision with his Benedictus: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
But most of us have read the story before, so we know a bit about John. I doubt many of us regard John as a particularly joyful person, or that pink dominates his color palette. Nevertheless, the ferocity of his message surprises us each year. Judgment, not joy, is his theme. Wrath takes the place of tender mercy. Condemnation replaces forgiveness. When John goes into his rant, our holiday cheer dips a bit, perhaps? It’s like having the DJ at your Christmas party play nothing but Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine, starting with everyone’s holiday favorite “You Brood of Vipers!”
If John wants to scare the crowd into repentance, it works. Fearing divine judgment, the people, even tax collectors and Roman soldiers, call out to him, “what must we do?” Here, the story takes another twist. John turns down the volume, and his reply is surprisingly mild, given the tone of the rest of the message. It comes almost as a whisper between the fire and brimstone outbursts that precede and follow it. To the crowd, John says "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise." To the tax collectors, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." And to the soldiers, "do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation and be satisfied with your wages."
In other words, be generous with the poor, play fair, don’t shake people down. In comparison with the rest of the diatribe, this is Hallmark-worthy, things we learned in kindergarten. It’s as if our holiday DJ suddenly replaced Alanis Morissette with Amy Grant, or Fred Rogers did a guest host gig on the Howard Stern show. The crowd, “filled with expectation,” feels joy kindling in their hearts, wondering whether John is the Messiah. Not so fast, he says. I’m just his herald, not worthy to untie his sandals. And then, as his parting shot, John delivers a final warning about the threshing floor and unquenchable fire.
Luke wryly comments “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” We’re not kept waiting to find out what Luke means by the “good news.” Jesus tells us in the very next chapter, from the lectern in the Nazareth synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then, in Chapter 7, John, now in prison, asks Jesus, through a messenger “Are you the one who is to come or should we expect someone else?” You can’t blame John for being a bit anxious; he must have wondered whether he got thrown in prison for the wrong Messiah. Jesus reassures him: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; those with a skin disease are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; the poor have good news brought to them.” No mention of threshing or unquenchable fire. So, has John misunderstood Jesus’s mission (or his own)? Did he get the good news wrong? I don’t think so. Jesus confirms that God is on the move, enabling (and sanctifying) precisely the sorts of things that John urged on his listeners. There was no mistake: John was indeed the prophet of the Most High.
Perhaps a DJ playlist is the wrong metaphor. Maybe a symphony would be better, with the good news found in the middle, quiet section. Listen to the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which sometimes sounds like God’s comforting word to us, and you’ll get a sense of what I mean. After the bombast of John’s opening, this message is so simple, so uncomplicated, so comforting that we cannot resist closing our eyes and letting it flow over us. This yoke is indeed easy, this burden featherweight. This path from repentance to salvation is straight rather than crooked, smooth rather than rough, leading us through the wilderness of our lives.
Except, of course, that as simple as it is to know what a decent human being would do, it can be devilishly hard to do it. Giving away clothes is easier than boxing them up. Sharing a little cash with a street person is much easier than averting our gaze or crossing the street. Doing our job and collecting our pay is easier than spending our time figuring out ways to game the system. You can even put John’s message to the test. Try this experiment: give some money to the first street person you meet, stiff the next one, and see which makes you feel better about yourself.
Yet, we don’t do the right thing, and it’s hard to explain why. The gospels are littered with people that make the wrong choice. Herod, Mark tells us, protected John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man, and even liked to listen to him. Yet, when John calls him out for his marital irregularities, Herod throws him in prison, and then, to save face in front of his dinner guests, chops John’s head off. Rather than celebrating Jesus’s healing miracles, the Jewish leaders seek to kill him because he did those miracles on the wrong day of the week. Caiaphas tells the council that it’s better for Jesus to die than to risk provoking the Romans. For reasons that to this day are unclear, Judas betrays Jesus in exchange for a few coins, then almost immediately regrets what he’s done and kills himself. Pilate finds no fault in Jesus but ignores his wife’s advice (always a bad idea) to have nothing to do with “this righteous man,” and sentences him to death.
The gospelers attribute much of this to the devil. Perhaps. But this cast of all-too-human characters seems to me to have one thing in common: fear. Herod feared for his own inflated sense of grandeur. The temple authorities feared Jesus’s challenge to their status and authority. Caiaphas (understandably) feared Roman retaliation; Annas, his deposed predecessor, was his father-in-law. Judas, it has been suggested, feared that Jesus was the wrong kind of Messiah. Pilate feared for his own career if the Jews started an insurrection. But blaming the devil and blaming our own fears are not incompatible. Fear is one of the devil’s favorite implements in his well-equipped toolbox. Which is why, perhaps, Jesus tells us repeatedly not to be afraid. I can imagine him, in fact, standing at the edge of a crowd, listening to John preach, smiling and whispering to those around him: “you should listen to my dear, but slightly manic, cousin, but you don’t have to be afraid.”
There is a difference between being scared and being afraid. Scared is what happens to you in a horror movie. Afraid is what happens when you leave the theater, believing that the horror movie is real. Children cry in the dark, too scared to turn on the light and look under the bed, until their parents come in and comfort them. It’s not until we’re adults that those nighttime frights turn into twenty-four-hour fears that disable us.
John scares the crowd, to wake them up to the good news. Jesus tells them that they don’t need to be afraid. But we don’t listen, because we’re afraid also. Afraid to be generous because we might run out of money one day. Afraid to quit a job that makes us miserable, because we lack the faith that something better will turn up. Afraid to be fair because sometimes others aren’t fair to us. Afraid to send an estranged friend a text, because we might end up having to apologize. Afraid to look the poor, the homeless, the troubled, the wounded in the eye, out of fear of seeing our own reflection there.
So, when Gabriel tells Mary, and when the angel tells the shepherds, and when Jesus tells the disciples, or Jairus, or Mary Magdalene that they need not be afraid, this is indeed good news. But it is more than that. It is the truth on which everything depends. The choice between fear and faith is completely up to us, but ultimately, we must choose one or the other. And it is the most important choice we will ever make; our very lives depend on it. Zechariah was right. His son John will announce that our Father is sending a light to we who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, a light that will set us free from the fear of evil and death. When we choose faith and reject fear everything else falls into place. Let’s all light a pink candle to that.