A Warning from Outside Civilization (Luke 3: 1-18)
“Every valley shall be filled,and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth.”
Some times I think when I wander through the NZ bush… what would that be like if all the crooked ways were made straight and the rough ways smooth? And when I stand at the Hermitage and see Mt Cook emerge from the clouds, or at Homer Huts and look up almost vertical to Mt Christina … what would it be like if every mountain were made low? It’s an image of devastation… the beauty and glory of nature is its jagged edges.
And yet I guess it’s not long since people who were struggling to survive in the wildness of nature, were quite glad to build roads through wilderness and burn it down.
But of course none of this is the point of this image. It is not really about the NZ mountains and bush or about creation at all. John the Baptist is ranting about the wilderness of the human soul and of society… and of course the soul is a social thing…– the wilderness of soul and society together. John the Baptist is joining his voice with the prophet Isaiah to protest the crooked distorted wildness, the brokenness, the broken order of the soul, the demonic… all that fights against what it is to be a creature of God within our human life… it’s into that reality that he wants to bring in the spiritual bulldozers and the wreckers ball. The mountains and the valleys are symbols of the barriers we but up to the reign of God in our world. So John yells out to the gathered crowd, “The axe is at the root of the tree! Repent!”
John goes outside the city, across the Jordan.
But Luke wants us to know what time it is in the city. Luke wants all this located and documented in terms of the history of what we call civilization.
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…”
He is really labouring the point, we are talking about real historical time and location… It may not be exactly modern historiography, but it is historiography and Luke wants to document and give a reliable witness to the entry of God’s Word into the course of history in a particular place and time… the Word of God, we are told, came to John, son of Zechariah – not just any old John.
But alongside this concern to take history seriously… this sense that what Luke is bearing witness to is not some timeless myth about origins or about another world… alongside this concern with history, is a critique of history.
This history of Tiberius and Pilate and Herod is about to be interrupted. This is the civilization that John walks out on… and in the wilderness he reminds us that the city itself has become a spiritual wilderness. John walks out and threatens the city with a divine wrecking ball which will knock down all the barriers to God’s reign. History has become a disaster, in need of a shake-down and a clear out.
One of our contemporary John the Baptists is the singer Leonard Cohen and he has recently written a dark and powerful song called ‘The Future’ in which he sings:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wondered what they meant
I’ve seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
It seems like Leonard Cohen has decided, like John the Baptist, to stop being a politician, to stop saying what people like to hear. To the crowd who gather John bluntly says ‘You brood of vipers! Can you imagine that? You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance!
I suspects the crowds were partially offended and partly just loved the drama of it all. Some of them knew that it was easy to be a critic and much harder to offer an alternative, so they tested John out. OK mr poet critic, what should we then do?
Like fish in water, they can’t really see what the problem is. Something is wrong… they are beginning to suspect John is right, there is a problem… but they can’t see what it is.
Slavoj Zizek tells a nice story: about a factory worker suspected of stealing from the factory. Every evening the guard carefully inspects the wheelbarrow that he pushes ahead of him. But every evening the wheelbarrow is empty. They are about to give up their surveillance when they realize that he is stealing wheelbarrows.
It’s a story that makes us chuckle, but also underneath it’s disturbing … There’s something about the hiddenness of its deception…
What’s wrong? Everything looks perfectly normal to us. What should we do? John’s answer, from outside of civilization, is simple, disarmingly simple… It’s economic reform…
“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food should do likewise”… and to the tax collectors he says “collect no more than the amount prescribed for you”… to the soldiers ‘be satisfied with you wages’
If you have more than necessary to survive, share… be satisfied … How easy is that? And yet it cuts to the core of the human city … it address the very heart of civilization as we know it. It’s about the wheelbarrow, not just the contents. The invisible ways in which normal people like you and me, insulate ourselves from the coming of God… the mountains and valleys we create to protect ourselves from God’s world.
The simple solution is the radical solution. Share! Be satisfied!
And yet John knows that his ability to change the world with threats of danger is limited… ‘One who is coming after me will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.’
To baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire is not merely to educate, nor merely to command. Not merely to inspect the contents of the wheelbarrow. It is to change the world from inside out with the fire of purification. It’s like those science experiments you do at High School where the chemical structures are changed so that elements can be taken away.
Share! … Be satisfied!
So easy to say. So easy to gloss over… like an invisible man pushing a wheelbarrow. But actually getting our head around it is like a chemical change that changes the very make up of life. The slow process of becoming a Christian, baptized with the Holy Spirit, burning through the garbage that litters our habits and our psyche, but also the garbage that organizes our cities in certain ways. John the Baptist feels that a spiritual wrecking ball is required. But he also knows that he doesn’t have the resources himself. And so, like us at Advent, he waits for the coming of the Messiah, who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and Fire.
Bruce Hamill 6.12.09 Green Island