Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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he would not be in other places too, but here there was a promise. If his people prayed there, if they even looked toward it, he would hear their prayer. If they sought forgiveness and were penitent, if they sought deliverance from their enemies, he would hear their prayer and act.
Why did John not use the Temple? He had access to it. His father, Zechariah, had been a priest, therefore he was a priest. Why tramp around in the muddy water of the Jordan, when the Temple was available? Or if the Temple would not serve, there was the relatively new-fangled invention of the synagogue, with its weekly service of Torah, haftorah, prayer and sermon. Why not preach in the synagogue. To flout established religious custom was shocking behavior.
Well perhaps John wanted a water supply. But then—here is a second shocking thing—he proceeds to baptize the wrong people. Judaism as a religion made a good deal out of water, but baptism like John’s suggests at once the admission of proselytes. A man who had come to believe in the God of Israel and the Jewish way of life had to do three things: 1) be circumcised; 2) be baptized; 3) offer sacrifice. A woman had to be baptized. Baptism was the mark of entering the people of God. But John was offering baptism not to proselytes but to born Jews. They needed no baptism. John baptized the wrong people.
That leads to a third thing: whatever else may be said about others, he baptized the supremely wrong person—Jesus. John’s was a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. So of all humankind, Jesus is the one person who should not have received it. John himself was aware of how wrong this was: “I need to be baptized by you and are you coming to me?” Only under pressure from Jesus himself did John agree to do what surely ought never to have been done.
Three shocking things, and we could find more if we had time to look for them. For (as you may have already guessed) I have not said all this simply to draw the conclusion: “Matthew’s is a shocking book, let’s go out and burn it.” Perhaps there is some value in these shocks, like the therapeutic use of electric shocks.
INSTITUTIONS
Religious institutions have their uses, and it’s not a good thing to get rid of them, but they are also very dangerous and you have to keep your eye on them. Temples, synagogues, college chapels, and the like. Already back in the old days of Solomon’s Temple, the Old Testament was aware of the danger. You remember Jeremiah’s bitter lament in the presence of his contemporaries: “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple. You have no notion of God’s commands. You steal, murder, fornicate and you come here to the Temple and say ‘We are all right; we are delivered from our enemies’, ‘the good God he will pardon me, it is his job’.” So, says God, you’ll love your Temple, your institutions. And they did. John is perhaps less radical than that. He does not say that the Temple will be destroyed (though it was). He simply says “stay out of it; we are going down to the river and you will learn to listen to God’s Word instead of gagging them with religion.” Out of the Temple, and down to the Jordan.
I could not but be reminded of one John Wesley, who for himself would have happily stayed in the parish church and college chapel, but knew that he could not that way get the Gospel into the ears of heathen England. So, “I consented to become more vile” and he preached in fields, and marketplaces, and city squares. Would the crowds have gathered as they did if John had gone on bringing incense into the Temple as his father had done? Would there have been a revival in eighteenth-century England if Wesley had continued to enjoy his college fellowship and the regular services at Lincoln College? I think not.
I am not saying there is only one way, and at that an eighteenth-century way, of commending the Gospel in 1996. But I do know that when Christians come out of their churches and into the open they may make themselves look fools, but they also make people say “these Christians have got hold of something that means a lot to them, and they do take it seriously. Maybe there is something in it.”
Over the last fifty years, I have seen open air preaching, open air services, die out (as far as I am aware) in Durham. If we have put anything in its place I don’t know what it is. For the most part we attend our religious institutions at 11 and 6 and that’s it. Who is going to give us the shock that John the Baptist caused? Trying to answer that question brings us to the second shock.
THE WRONG PEOPLE
The people who came out to the Jordan might well have said to the Baptist—“we’re alright John. We belong to the right people. We are respectable, even religious folk. We are the descendants of Abraham, and what more than that could we possibly need?” And John replies with a neat Semitic pun—“being children of Abraham is neither here nor there, if God wants children of Abraham he can produce them out of these stones. What matters is not your ancestry or your respectable religious background, what matters is a personal act of penitence and faith.”
It was a shocking thing to say; it still is. Most of us find it so. It is much easier if you can turn Christianity into the religion of all reasonable persons, better yet if it becomes the religion of all respectable persons. If it asks us for nothing more than a conventional standard of minimal ethical achievement, help out with occasional conformity to the religion that society is prepared to countenance—that we can tolerate. But John stands for something that goes beyond all that.
You look into your life and you measure it not by the standards that suffice for ordinary decency but by the requirement of your faith. And you realize you have to come to grips with him. And John will tell you—it is as far as he can go—that more is coming soon; that God has a gift for you that will turn you inside out, give life a new beginning, a new motive, a new direction, a new impetus. “He,” says John knowing only dimly who he is, “will baptize you with Spirit and with fire.”
This is the real shock. These are the right people after all! They are ourselves infected with the living God, faced by an offer of a new life, beginning from penitence and enacted by the Spirit of God, turning from the old, embracing the new. Hilaire Belloc was climbing once in the Pyrenees. They had started early, and the priest who did not know the Pyrenees was nearly blown from his hold by a torrential wind. “It feels,” he said, “like the end of the world.” “Yes,” said Belloc, “dawn always comes like that in the Pyrenees.” The dawn of a new life, the end of an old world. A very shocking experience— and how badly we need it! But how can this happen? Do you remember the third shock?
THE UTTERLY WRONG PERSON
What is Jesus doing at John’s baptism, baptism of repentance for the remission of sins? There is only one answer. They are my sins and yours he is bearing as he identifies himself with sinful humanity. He will bear them still, until he bears them finally, conclusively on the cross. This story is a picture of Paul’s most shocking epigram—“he who knew no sin, God made to be sin for us, so that we might become God’s righteousness in Him.”
There is the Son of Man, who is the man for all humankind, doing for me the things I cannot do for myself, until I have learned to do them in him—confessing my sin, receiving my pardon, making my own confession and my own pardon possible. Shocking that he should be baptized for me, even more shocking that he should die for me. How can I thank him for doing this for me? What a shocking chapter Matthew has written—and how badly we need it!
“BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN”—Matthew 5.4 (A Funeral Sermon)
[Preached at Langley Park 3/2/87]
Lloyd Johnson was a man of many parts and rich gifts. He lived a long and full life, and to tell the story of it, even if I were competent to do that, would take far more time than we have in this service. It would not only take up too much time, it would take us where we don’t want to go for the purpose of this service, and certainly for this address, the purpose is not to praise a man however deserving of our praise, but to give thanks for his life and to set forth in this special setting, the Gospel of Jesus Christ by which he lived, and which he would commend to us now in his death as he did in his life.
Others will have known him in other contexts, but when I think of Lloyd, I think pre-eminently of two themes, two characteristic occupations. One