St Giles' Church, Durham
    Advent 3, Year C                                
Luke 3; 7-18

Rev. Ruth Thomas
                                  

Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke

John said to the crowds coming out to be baptised by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.
John answered, “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.”
Tax collectors also came to be baptised. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”
“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”
He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.”
The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ. John answered them all, “I baptise you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” And with many other words John exhorted the people and preached the good news to them.

When we introduce the gospel reading we do it with the words ‘Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to…’  and then give the name of the writer. The important word in this sentence is ‘according’, because the piece of the Jesus story which we hear is from the record which has been written for us by either Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. And although much of their material overlaps – as you would expect it to when telling the same story of one other man - they are actually remarkably different in the way in which they tell this story of the life of Jesus. And I don’t just mean in their styles of writing.

Common theological thinking has it that Mark is earliest and that the others used Mark’s record as a basis along with other sources of their own to get their information, their content.  One of Luke’s most powerful other sources was St Paul himself. Indeed there is strong evidence to suggest that Luke travelled with Paul on at least one of his journeys.

And the great gift to Christianity of having four different gospels is that each is their human perspective and reflects their personal emphases in their summation of the fact and phenomenon which was the life of Christ the Messiah. For the fact that binds them so firmly and powerfully is that they all believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah, Israel’s hope and consolation, the one whose birth, life, death and resurrection gave creation its new start and after whose life among us nothing could ever be the same again in our relationship with God.

The classically held view is that Matthew was writing as a Jew to the Jewish nation to persuade them that this really was the promised Messiah. And it is equally commonly thought that Luke was a Gentile, a cultured man, clearly well educated and knowlegable, a physician, an artist and an historian. He knew a lot about Jewish religious practice (so he could have been a Jew), had an association with Paul and contact with a variety of people socially as a physician.

Luke the historian prepares us chronologically in his account for the unique message of his gospel – his message that Christ is for everyone and anyone - his message which is universal. It is for everyone. His emphasis and purpose in writing was to place the birth of Jesus firmly at the centre of the whole of creation and not as an event specifically meant for the People of Israel, amongst whom it happened. And he does this by giving us a full account of the birth of John the Baptist and with it the clues to his message. But in our haste and excitement at Christmas when we traditionally meet these early passages we miss this profoundly powerful piece of theology which is unique to the Gospel of Luke and which has been the underpinning of the whole Christian message ever since.   

Which is why we are urged to stop and examine the place of John the Baptist at this time. But the passages the Lectionary gives us are of Jesus’ baptism when he is 30 years old – for Luke- John the Baptist’s last appearance before he leaves the stage and the Messiah himself takes over.

So thinking of John the Baptist’s life as a vehicle around which Luke works his theology let us take it all together and see what Luke has to say.

Neatly - and beautifully for us, - Luke weaves John the Baptist’s prophetic message through four songs. Starting at the beginning we have the song of John the Baptist’s father, of old Zechariah the priest. We know this now as the Benedictus - and say it every day at morning prayer -because it talks of ‘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 and to guide our feet into the way of peace’. This is not the talk of a sectarian faith but one which speaks to all in darkness and all who seek peace.

Our second song comes from Mary’s visit to Elizabeth.
Luke stands us on a pivotal point in history with the meeting of these two women - one expecting the birth of the last prophet, John the Baptist, three months ahead of the other - who is carrying the Saviour of Mankind. (I like to think of Luke as an obstetrician with this much feminine detail). As the baby prophet leaps in his mother’s womb at his first meeting with the unborn Jesus, Mary bursts into that great song which we call the Magnificat. And here Luke really plays out his universalist theme - with what has been called one of the most revolutionary songs of all time.

Three times in the Magnificat Mary speaks of the revolution for all people which her child will bring. First, when she says ‘he has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’ she speaks of a moral revolution – a revolution, a revolving or re-evolving way of patterning the way in which people behave in their moral relationships with each other.

Secondly, Mary speaks of a social revolution. She says ‘He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the humble and meek’. She is going to give birth to a child in a land ruled by the mighty powers of the Roman Empire so this is strong talk indeed.

And thirdly, Mary speaks of an economic revolution when she says ‘he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away’. Mary refers directly to the hungry, the meek and those of low degree in this song about her baby. This is inclusivism – this holds up the worlds humblest and poorest within the bounds of the ministry of her Son.

And our third song happens when Jesus is taken to the temple on the eighth day for his naming. Although we don’t know if John was there (he is three months old at this point but the family may have come to stay) we here dear old Simeon longing for the coming of the Messiah and believing so readily in the promise that he would see him before he dies. Simeon is a devout Jew and says the following in what we now call the Nunc Dimmitis. He calls Jesus ‘A light to lighten the gentiles and for the glory of thy people Israel’.

Three songs, found only in Luke, rich in their clarity that this child is for the whole world, the whole of humankind and not simply a new leader of the Jewish people. Yet we know that at the end Jesus was crucified for daring to call himself ‘King of the Jews’. Luke is writing with the historians benefit of hindsight -  after the big early arguments between Peter and Paul about the issue of who exactly was allowed to be a Christian - and did you have to be a Jew first etc etc. I am convinced that by weaving this great universalist theme into the early part of his gospel, and by telling it through the encounters with John the Baptist, Luke was neatly joining the old order to the new, standing John the Baptist on an historical axis - as both the last prophet of Judaism and the first prophet of Christianity.

And at the point of our reading today we come to the fourth song which Luke cites for his case. And this is the song of Isaiah – neatly linking the old with the new – as we have been hearing in the episodes we have read over the last two weeks - John the Baptist here makes his final exhortation as a prophet before the baptism of Jesus.

All four evangelists tell of the prophecy of John himself by Isaiah as ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness’ but only Luke goes on to add the part which says ‘and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’.

And then comes the culmination of the part Luke gives to John the Baptist in his record – his account – his story. John the Baptist actually explains what they –everyone both Jews and non-Jews will need to do to play their part in the coming revolution which is to be the imminent ministry of Jesus after his Baptism. He echoes Mary’s song of the Magnificat (but we are now 30 years later) by telling the tax collectors and soldiers who are with him how they too must function in the way the new Messiah will teach them – be they Jew or Gentile.

Earlier in this morning’s reading John the Baptist has not minced his words with them – saying it is no good any more saying that Abraham is your ancestor, if you are living the Jewish way of life  - for everyone has got to take heed of this new model of living if they want to live the full life which the Messiah will be offering them. Luke’s theme of universality, of access for all, speaks through John the Baptist again as he describes how Jesus will take an axe to the root of any tree that does not bear good fruit. Interestingly- but to force his point - Luke completes this section by taking Jesus’ ancestral heritage back - not to Abraham (as Matthew does) - but to Adam – the father of us all.

And I want us just to stop this morning and to focus on the remarkable gift we are given by Luke in his unique telling of the ministry of John the Baptist. The third Sunday of Advent is traditionally the one in which we focus on John the Baptist. But the trouble is we are so wrapped up in the great advent expectation of the birth of the Christ that it seems to be incongruous to be hearing about what happened to Jesus at the age of 30.

We are going to  hear the story of Mary and Elizabeth in the nine lessons and carols and we get the other bits about Simeon and Zechariah as we celebrate their feasts during the year – indeed we will be having a lovely service in February at Candelas when we hear about Simeon’s song - but I want us to stop today and give thanks for the great gift of Luke’s account of this man’s extraordinary life and the way in which he weaves it into his theology of Christ as a gift to us all.

We will see Luke’s theme echoed during the year as we go through the parables, see the place he gives to women and outcasts in his story, the ordinariness of the places Jesus visits and the people he meets and chooses to minister to, the importance to Jesus of prayer and of praising God.

But here today, with the birth of the Messiah so close, let us thank God for John the Baptist’s faith, his prophecy, the pivotal place he inhabits - as he stands on the edges of both the old order and the new. Luke uses John’s story to emphasise Jesus’ universal love embracing all mankind -  and then - after the reading we heard this morning- Luke takes John the Baptist off the stage completely- to leave the fulfilment of his, John’s,  prophesy- and the next great part of the story -to Jesus himself.

And thank God too for Luke’s great gift of storytelling so that through him we may come to know and learn that God’s gifts of love and forgiveness is there for us all, whatever kind of mess we may be in, or however far away from him we may be feeling. 

And so in His name we pray. Amen.

Rev. Ruth Thomas
13th December 2009   
ruththomas@stgilesdurham.co.uk