2nd Advent: Lk 3:1-6

Friends: Today in this space I’m beginning a year-long series of comments on Lukan gospel Year C lections.

  Context: Advent marks the beginning of the Year C Revised Common Lectionary’s journey through Luke for the Sunday Gospel reading. Tomorrow’s 2^nd Sunday of Advent brings the first of the readings that lie at the intersection of the RCL and texts I’ve explored in Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (roughly 2/3 of Year C gospel readings).  After today, I’ll aim to post these notes (which are abbreviated from the book) on the Wednesday before the Sunday on which the text is read in church. These short reflections will also be posted on our BCM blog. Please let your preacher and teacher friends know about this resource.

  2^nd Advent: Lk 3:1-6.  Upon the completion of his extended account of Jesus’s birth and youth (Lk 1-2), Luke turns abruptly to Jesus’s “relative” John. As in the Nativity story, John’s introduction is grounded in its historico-political era, citing named and notorious personalities imperial (Tiberius and Pilate), local (Herod Antipas, Philip, and Lysanias), and religious (Annas and Caiaphas; 3:1–2). But “greater than” them all is the obscure wilderness prophet John.

Through the first seven decades of that century, tensions in occupied Palestine over Roman political domination and economic “globalization” gave rise to multiple Jewish prophets calling for radical change. This included armed insurrectionist streams, which converged into the Judean revolt and Roman counterinsurgency of 66–70 CE. Luke’s recitation of the political geography of this fraught historical moment, however, also alludes to the prologue to the book of Jeremiah (Jer 1:1–3). This implies that John took his cue more from the prophetic legacy of nonviolent resistance than from the Maccabean tradition of revolt. Jesus will also walk this road less traveled.

Luke 3:3 draws on Mark’s narrative for the first time, portraying John in the wilderness at the Jordan River, and calling for a baptism of repentance (Lk 3:2b–4 = Mk 1:2–5). John invites his people into sacred waters of renewal far from the domesticated ritual baths of city and village—and from the dangerous attention of urban-based elites.

The Jordan was, and remains, the spine of the land of Palestine, its only truly perennial stream. It runs north to south some 156 miles, from Mount Hermon in southern Lebanon into the Sea of Galilee, then on down the rift valley, eventually emptying into the Dead Sea. Its name (Hebrew nehar hayarden) means “descender,” as it plummets from mountainous heights to four hundred meters below sea level. The river features both dramatic gorges and rapids as well as meandering bends and quiet pools, ranging from trickles in the dry season to floods in wet. It only averages ninety feet in width and three to ten feet in depth, and certainly wasn’t navigable, though it was often uncrossable during the rainy season (there were some sixty fords along its length in antiquity). Yet archaeological evidence suggests human habitation along the Jordan for more than a hundred thousand years! It was and is a deep ancestral place.

While the Jordan may not have been so “deep and wide,” as the old spiritual imagined, for John it represented the watery soul of that arid land. It offered immersion into the origin stories of his people. Mentioned 180 times in the Hebrew Bible, the Jordan coursed through the heart of Israel’s narrative: from Jacob’s wrestling match with an angel (Gen 32:22–32; Hos 12:3–5) to Joshua’s ceremonial crossing into the Promised Land (replete with the symbolism of twelve sacred stones, Josh 3–4), and from Elijah’s fiery departure (2 Kg 2:1–15) to Elisha’s healing bath for an enemy general (2 Kg 5, to which Jesus will allude in Lk 4:27).

John’s prophetic renewal movement thus commences in this primal space, proclaiming Isaiah’s “way in the wilderness” (3:4). This trope refers back to the Exodus journey of liberation (Ex 13:17–18), reiterates Zechariah’s dream of the path of peace in the Nativity story (Lk 1:79), and anticipates Jesus’s way of discipleship (Lk 9:3). Luke lengthens Mark’s allusion to Isaiah 40 (Lk 3:4–6), underlining a prophetic genealogy. Jesus will reiterate this in his invocation of Isaiah 61 at his “coming out sermon” (Lk 4:17–19). Similarly, Luke earlier established that John will operate “in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Lk 1:17), as did Mark 1:6.

John’s notion of “repentance for the release from sin” (Lk 3:3) has long been domesticated by the modern Western church’s preoccupation with private spirituality. To repent means to change direction, personally and politically; we might well render it the work of “turning history around.” And as we shall see time and again in Luke, the verb “release” (Gk aphiemi) anticipates the Jubilee semantics of Jesus—a major theme of my study of Luke.

Image below: Kehinde Wiley, “Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” 2013. My next reflection, to be posted 12/11, will continue Third Advent’s focus on John the Baptist. NB: You can now pre-order my book at Fortress Press; use the promo code “HARP24” at checkout for 30% off!