Third Sunday of Advent 2024

 

Third Sunday of Advent: Philippians 4.4-7 and Luke 3.7-18

I wonder if there is a smell that evokes this time of year for you? Perhaps it is a bowl of clementine oranges. Or the smell of wet wool, transporting you back to childhood mittens and rolling snowballs in your hands. Perhaps it is the clinical smell of the room in which a loved one died, at this time of year. More than any of our other senses, smell takes hold of memory and can transport us through time to some distant moment.

One of the big themes in our Gospel passage today is wrath. Wrath is the settled and ultimately victorious opposition to rebellion. And the root of the idea is connected to smell, to the drawing-in of air through the nostrils, before acting decisively.

As John calls the people to repent and return to God, he is amazed at who responds. Many in the crowd have sided with Rome against their own people, grasping opportunity as tax farmers or soldiers serving a local client king backed by Rome. John calls them vipers, a reference to the Garden of Eden, where the serpent deceived our first parents. God had created the human in God's own likeness, and declared us to be, like God, very good. Yet now sin had come to afflict us.

This did not, and does not, change our nature. Sin afflicts us, as does cancer. If you had tests and went to the doctor for the results, they might say, “The bad news is that you have cancer. The good news is, we have caught it in time and are confident in our therapy.” A doctor would not say, “You are a cancerous person!” Likewise, God comes in compassion to deal with sin. God promises Eve that her seed will crush the serpent’s head, even as its seed bites her seed’s heel.

John observes that God has taught even the vipers, those who sided with Rome, to flee to God from the coming wrath. That wrath is the wrath of Rome, and it is a bitter smell in the nostrils, evoking other bitter memories of national disaster. For wrath is always historical, not abstract.

Jesus also calls certain groups vipers, and asks how they will escape hell? The hell he refers to is the coming wrath of Rome, whose legions will burn Jerusalem to the ground.

There is a tradition in scripture of seeing something of the wrath of God being exercised through the wrath of empires. And Jesus asks the Father, if there is anything of your judgement falling on your rebellious people in the coming wrath of Rome, let that wrath fall on me instead, and let that be enough. In this Jesus is standing in the tradition of the martyrs of the time of Greek invasion and occupation of the Temple.

The Father accepts Jesus’ prayer. And so, when the Jewish people rebel against Rome in 66 CE, and, midway through an eight-year war, the Romans burn Jerusalem, this is not the wrath of God falling on a nation that rejected his Son. It is solely the overreaching wrath of Rome. And for this, Rome will experience the wrath of God.

But the wrath of God is quite unlike the wrath of Rome. It is not military. It is not violent. Instead, it looks, and smells, like this:

gentiles are embraced within the people of the God previously of the Jews;

women, slaves, and children are given equal status to free men;

Christians serve their neighbours in times of plague and disaster;

Christians refuse to recant their declaration that Jesus is Lord, even in the face of the lions.

What kind of lives are these? It takes a couple of hundred years, but Christ will topple Caesar, not by might but by the aroma of joy, of peace, of non-anxious people in the midst of an anxious world.

This is what the wrath of God looks like. And with Rome judged, in love, the age of wrath with which the New Testament is concerned comes to an end.

John takes up a different image for Jesus, that of removing the protective outer husks from the kernel of wheat. Jesus comes, not to transform some unacceptable husk into acceptable grain, nor to separate out inedible husks from edible wheat, but to remove the husk from every grain. He comes to remove that which keeps us from our neighbour, the hard shell. He comes to deal with our sin, and we are still called to repent and believe the good news.

Of course, we still live in a world where we see the bitter wrath of nation states and would-be emperors falling on men, women and children. In such a world, we are not to be vipers, siding with power, but instead, like the early church, might also be joyful, gentle, non-anxious, prayerful, thankful, peaceful.

May that be, increasingly, your experience. And if it is not your experience today, may you be transported to a time when it was. May this Season evoke the memory of the One who came to us, who comes to us still, and who will come to us again. Amen.