3rd Advent: Lk 3:7-18
Note: This is the second of a series of commentaries on Lukan Gospel readings that lie at the intersection of the Year C Revised Common Lectionary and texts I’ve explored in Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics. These short reflections are also posted on our BCM blog. Please let your preacher, teacher and study group friends know about this resource.
3rd Advent: Lk 3:7-18. As noted last week, Luke gives historiographic prefaces to each of his first three chapters (1:5; 2:1–2; 3:1–2). He wants his readers to be clear that this story is not a fairy tale but a gritty tale unfolding in real political time and space. This is lost on modern North American readers who read the Gospel as a cosmic drama with no real terrestrial tether. Yet every time Luke names imperial officials who think they are in charge of history, he immediately refocuses the story back upon the poor people who will change it. As we saw in 3:1–3, Luke introduces Caesar, Procurator Pilate, the Herodian Tetrarchs of Palestine, and high priests—a genealogy of palatial power. But this list ends pointedly with John organizing at the margins of empire—and it is this obscure figure to whom divine revelation comes.
The fact that John patterns his work after the prophet Elijah explains the edge he exhibits in 3:7–14. He addresses the “crowd” (3:7, 10) coming for baptism harshly: “You offspring of vipers!” (3:7a). This “greeting” invokes a metaphor of snakes slithering away from fields set aflame after harvest. It is “as insulting a label as one could imagine in a society in which honor is fundamentally a function of birth” (Malina & Rohrbaugh). But John knows the nation is in crisis, and half-hearted or merely pietistic expressions of remorse will hardly do: repentance must be shown (3:8a).
The notion of trees being “judged for their fruits” (3:9b) arises from an agrarian cosmology, and will re-appear in Jesus’s teachings (6:43–49; 8:8; 12:17; and especially 13:6–9). For marginal farmers, fruit-bearing was the difference between life and death. This is radical analysis: the “axe” of divine judgment is “laid at the root” of the status quo (Lk 3:9), another agrarian metaphor. John further waves off reflexive appeals to patrimony: “Do not start telling yourselves ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’” (3:8a). Assertions of ethnic entitlement must have been the first objections John encountered, and he rebukes them sharply with one of the most evocative images in the Gospel: the Creator can “awaken children of Abraham from these stones” (3:8).
Connection to Abraham will be a central concern of Luke’s:
• The Abrahamic Covenant is invoked three times in his Gospel (1:55, 73, 13:28),
and in Acts speeches by Peter (Acts 3:13, 25), Stephen (7:2, 8, 16, 17, 32), and
Paul (13:27).
• Restoration to Abraham’s family is a key theme in two healings: LK 13:16
and 19:9.
• The Great Patriarch will have hard news for the presumptive rich in the
eschatological parable of Lazarus (16:23–30).
Exonerating oneself by heritage represents a denial of responsibility, a “move to innocence,” as we call it in Healing Haunted Histories. John challenges his people to awaken from their nationalist egoism (something all too characteristic of modern Americans) and to their prophetic heritage. Luke thereby also opens the door of discipleship to those outside of the history and traditions of Israel.
The next, uniquely Lukan, scene has the crowd inquiring as to the practical implications of this radical analysis (3:10–14). John’s instructions are uncomfortably specific and strategic—but by no means simple or cosmetic. Those who have the means of daily sustenance must share with those who don’t, not as a matter of charity, but of justice (3:11). “Clothing was a valuable possession that one either always wore (those who had two tunics wore one over the other) or even stored in a vault. It seems that the possession of two tunics distinguished the better situated of the little people from the poorer” (Stegemann and Stegemann). This ethos of mutual aid is grounded in older village ways. In Luke’s narrative, these will be fully restored through Spirit-empowered communities of goods, in which no one remains poor (Acts 4:34).
Turning to the extractive economy of the Roman occupation, John’s imperatives grow more subversive. Tax collectors are told to collect “no more than the amount prescribed for you” (Lk 3:13). Yet such a constraint would contradict the very architecture of tax farming in antiquity, since the middle-man collector only profited by charging people more than he had to turn over to Rome, resulting in widespread graft. Such a profession-undermining prohibition is then extended to soldiers (Lk 3:14), whom John boldly calls out for practices of oppressive policing that his hearers knew all too well. In order to supplement their meager wages, soldiers routinely used extortion and false accusation. John insists they must stop using armed authority to shake down vulnerable people—a request equally unlikely to be met. It is no wonder that his audience wondered whether John’s fiery critique signaled that he was a Messiah (Lk 3:15)!
To ward off such speculation, John suddenly changes his focus, if not his tone, and points toward a successor who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (3:16b, see 12:49). This, too, will be realized at Pentecost (Acts 2:3). Then comes another warning, an agrarian image from Q that echoes the apocalyptic tenor of 3:9: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (3:17). Again John draws on the prophetic imaginary of harvest as metaphor for judgment (see, e.g., Isa 18:5; Jer 12:13, 51:33; Joel 3:13; Hos 6:11).
John’s judgment oracle is characterized as “good news” (Lk 3:18)—and Jesus will shortly clarify: this is good news to the poor (4:18). For those continually dehumanized under the status quo, divine justice can only bring improvement. But it certainly was not so perceived by those in power; consequently, John would soon land in jail (3:19–20). The Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of Luke, corroborates the gospel witnesses about John’s fate, writing that Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea from 4 BCE–39 CE, executed him for plainly political reasons: the Baptist’s preaching was stirring up a popular insurrection.
Christian churches might well wonder: Of all the contemporaries Jesus might have chosen to initiate him, why does he make his way to this politically notorious prophet, whose days were numbered (3:21–22)? After all, such an association would implicate the Nazarene in John’s rebel movement. The answer, borne out by Luke’s subsequent narrative (7:25–26), is that John embodied the radical tradition of the wilderness prophets: animating public conscience, standing with the least, and speaking truth to power. There is an interesting dialectic in their relationship in Luke’s telling (following Mark). On one hand, John recognizes that he will soon pass on the mantle, shades of Elijah and Elisha; true mentoring in the prophetic tradition is about movement building. On the other, Jesus is consciously apprenticing to John by submitting to baptism in Jordan’s wilderness waters.
Unfortunately, later churchly Christology played down Jesus’s discipleship to John, to the point of disappearing it altogether, a theological suppression that continues to depoliticize the gospel narrative. Clearly, however, Luke’s Jesus shapes his ministry after his mentor:
• taking up the call to repentance after John is arrested (Lk 13:3,5);
• publicly patterning his ministry after Isaiah (4:18–19);
• talking of roots (8:13) and fire (12:49);
• bidding village folk to share clothing (6:29–30) and food (9:13);
• challenging tax collectors to abandon their ways (5:27–32; 19:1–10);
• defending John fiercely (7:24–27);
• and above all, sharing his fate at the hands of the authorities.
Mary taught Jesus the Song (the Magnificat is one of next week)’s readings. But John showed him the Way.
Image right: Tamas Galambos, John the Baptist, 1998 (source here). My next reflection, to be posted 12/18, will be 4th Advent’s focus on Mary. NB: You can now pre-order my book at Fortress Press; use the promo code “HARP24” at checkout for 30% off!
