Getting Ready

One can hardly think about the season of Advent, which of course began this past Sunday, without thinking about John, the one who came baptizing in the Jordon River as people responded to his message of repentance.

It seems John’s primary mission from God was to stir things up among the religious people of the day as a way of preparing for the coming of Messiah. That idea alone is enough to occupy a considerable spot in our minds. Why was it that “religious people” needed to be stirred up?

We all know that rather impressive birth narrative associated with John’s coming into the world – another of those Hebrew stories of old, childless couples suddenly confronted with the reality of parenthood. That story, as impressive as it is, doesn’t quite match up to the even more impressive birth narrative of the One for whom John’s mission was “prepare the way of the Lord.”

In similar, but not identical, ways to what we know about Jesus, we know about John’s birth and the next thing we know he is this wild man preaching in the wilderness of Judea with a message that can be summarized with one word: repent. He was, to say the least, a bit of an odd character, but then so was Elijah who seems to be his model.

John simply isn’t very impressed with religious people. He calls the most religious of the religious people a “brood of vipers” and is utterly unimpressed with any sense of entitlement based on one’s gene pool. “I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children of Abraham” was how he indelicately put it to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees.

What Mark so quickly has Jesus saying (Mark 1:15) Matthew tells us of John’s preaching the same message to prepare for the preaching of Jesus. For John, it was all very simple: one greater than He was about the burst on to the scene of human history and there was but one word to say about that: repent!

If we take the season of Advent seriously in our own lives – a time of longing, a time of preparation, a time of anticipation – for the coming of the glorious Lord, then I wonder what our one word should be? How, for example, should we think about our own spiritual disciplines as sometimes very “religious people” in this season of anticipation?

Would that word perhaps be the same word John used? Repent? Seriously – is that the right word for us? Would we, in our desire to do all that we can to get all of us and all of those around us ready for His coming, would we find a way to focus on repentance?

I don’t know if we would, but I’m pretty convinced we should. I keep thinking about how odd it is that on the one hand we are told that Christ came to the world “in the fullness of time,” (Galatians 4:4) yet the very people who should have been most welcoming of God’s Messiah seem to be the most resistant. The biblical scholars who should have been most perceptive about who Messiah would be and what Messiah would be like, pretty much missed the boat on both counts.

Could that possibly be me? Or you? Or the churches with which we worship and serve? Is it possible in all of our efforts to be “religious people” that the one thing we easily miss is the one thing John was so focused on: repent!

I don’t know the answers to those questions – but I think I ought to be thinking about them.