By The Rev. J.C. Austin
If there’s anyone you don’t want at your Christmas party, it’s probably John the Baptist.
Just picture it: the tree is shimmering with lights and ornaments, while festive decorations adorn the surroundings. People are clustered around the room in small groups, wearing bright clothes of red and green, chattering happily.
They are clinking glasses of wine or champagne, 
or trying to balance their drink with a small plate piled high with cheese and fruit and sweet and savory treats of all kinds. Christmas songs and carols are playing cheerfully in the background, creating a sense of bubbling festivity throughout the gathering.
And then the door bangs open and man with wild hair and an unkempt beard stalks in alone, glaring around the room. “Uh…hi, John,” you stammer out; “can I take your…well, I guess you don’t have a coat, now, do you?” you laugh nervously as he turns to stare at you with eyes like two blazing coals while you take in his rough-hewn cloak of camel’s hair cinched about him with a battered leather belt, as he is described elsewhere in Scripture.
You clear your throat. “Okay, John, well, make yourself at home. Over there’s the bar, and the food is all laid out on the table, so take whatever you want…” you say before trailing off as you remember that Scripture says he only eats locusts and wild honey, and while you might be able to scrounge up some honey, you definitely did not stock up on locusts before the party.
But John’s eyes don’t follow your direction to the refreshments. Instead, he scowls around the room, taking in all the holiday cheer and food and conversation with mounting anger until he finally explodes: “you brood of vipers!” he bellows at the holiday crowd.
Half the room seems to jump at the same time: every head snaps around towards this shocking development; a glass drops and shatters on the floor; and somehow, despite the fact that you’re streaming the music from your phone to a Bluetooth speaker, it still comes to an abrupt stop with the exaggerated screech of a record player’s needle across vinyl.
But John doubles down on the scene he’s making: “bear fruits worthy of repentance!” he commands; “…even now the ax is lying at the foot of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire!” And that’s when you know, without question, that the party is over.
That’s a little what it feels like to hear this story not only in Advent, when everything outside the church’s liturgical season is deeply in full-blown Christmas Spirit mode, but on the third Sunday of Advent, which as you heard at the beginning of the service is associated with the theme of joy.
There doesn’t seem to be anything about John the Baptist that is joyful: not his personal style, or grooming habits, or diet; not his preferred hangout in the desert; and not his words or his message, with their focus on judgment and repentance and One Who Is to Come that is far more powerful than John and who will gather the wheat and burn the chaff of those in this world.
And yet at the end of this passage, Luke declares: “so, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I feel like those other exhortations must have been pretty darn good to make John the Baptist’s words sounds like anything approximating good news.
The thing is, though, good news is often a pretty relative thing. My father is a huge sports aficionado, and particularly about college football and baseball. His college football team is the University of Alabama, where he went to college and had his first job hosting the weekly coach’s show with Alabama’s legendary coach, “Bear” Bryant.
But the University of Alabama is hated by many, many other college football fans because they are such a juggernaut of wealth and talent and success, particularly during the era of Coach Bryant and now under Coach Nick Saban, who has kept Alabama ranked #1 in the country for all or part of a season since 2008, and won six national championships in the process.
And his baseball team is the New York Yankees, who were the only team besides the St. Louis Cardinals to broadcast their games in the Deep South when he was growing up in the 1950s. But the Yankees have also won more titles than any other team in any other major professional sport in the United States and are one of the wealthiest teams in any of those sports, too, so they are widely hated by anyone who is not a committed fan, because of the dual perception that they “always win” and that they do so because they can go out and buy pretty much any player they want to help improve their chances.
So, when Alabama or the Yankees win, it is good news for my dad and for their respective dedicated fanbases. But when they lose, it may be bad news for my dad and the other fans, but it is good news for pretty much everyone else!
The truth is, if we’re struggling to find the good news in John’s message, it’s because we are focusing on what John says we will lose in this passage, rather than the victory that he is promising. It was true for the crowd that he was teaching, too. At the very beginning, John puts them on notice with the “brood of vipers” comment, which I have to admit doesn’t really have a good news side to it; that’s about as bulletproof an accusation and insult as one can imagine.
So the question is, why is he calling this crowd a brood of vipers when they have come all the way out into the wilderness just to hear him? Well, first of all, he tells them to bear fruits worthy of repentance, so they must have done some things that they shouldn’t have which now require repentance and tangible fruits of that repentance.
But second, a call to repentance itself is good news. We rarely hear it that way, because repentance requires us to acknowledge that we have done something wrong, that we wish we had not done so, and that will do our best to avoid doing it again in the future, and we hate (and I mean hate) doing all of that. It is so much easier to come up with reasons that justify or at least mitigate against what we did, or that someone else did something just as bad or worse.
But when we do that, we widen the rupture that we have already created in our relationship with the other by refusing to acknowledge we’ve done anything wrong in the first place. If we have the honesty and courage and humility to repent, though, the good news is that is the first step in healing the wound we have inflicted, in filling the breach that we have created.
Miles Davis, the jazz trumpeter and one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century and more, once said, “it’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note. It’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” What he meant is that a wrong note can be…well, saved: turned into a transition to something new and beautiful if you play the notes after it that lead it to that conclusion rather than just leaving the wrong note hanging there to disrupt the performance.
In musical terms, you can modulate the key, using the wrong note as a sort of sonic stepladder up or down into a different key in which you can find consonance and harmony once more. Or you can resolve the wrong note, moving from the dissonance it creates in the music by adding more notes that lead you through chord progressions in that same key that finally resolve into a stable final chord that keeps the music from spiraling out of tonality.
That is what repentance and its fruits are: the notes we play after striking a wrong note that help restore our relationships with God or others which have been disrupted by the error we have made. And that is why a call to repentance is good news: it is a promise that our mistakes and shortcomings do not get the last word in our lives and our faith; that if we acknowledge what we have done and act differently in response to it going forward, we can modulate or resolve things so that the dissonance of our mistake is incorporated into the larger harmony of our relationships rather than breaking them apart.
But what if we don’t know what fruits we can bear that will make a difference? What if we can’t find or even imagine the notes that will lead us forward into a restored relationship with God? Herbie Hancock, the great jazz pianist who got his real break playing with Miles Davis, has a wonderful story about exactly that.
One night he was playing one of Miles’ signature songs with the rest of the band and Miles was burning up one of his trademark improvisational solos against the background of the band, which was particularly tight that night. And then, right in the midst of that amazing grove they were all in, Herbie played a wrong chord. And not just a wrong chord: “I played this chord that was so wrong I thought I had destroyed everything, and reduced that great night to rubble.”
In fact, he was so convinced of it that he violated one of the cardinal rules of show business: he stopped playing and put his head in his hands in despair and horror at the mistake he had made, the only act of repentance he could think to make at that point. But Miles didn’t respond in kind.
Instead, he paused, took a breath, and then began to play some new notes. “And I don’t know how he did it,” Herbie says, which is saying something in itself, given that he’s a musical master himself, “but Miles made my wrong chord right,” adding in the notes that Herbie couldn’t find in order to redeem the performance by resolving their music back into harmony after Herbie had ruptured it, however inadvertently.
What John the Baptist is doing here with the crowd is telling them the notes they need to play in order to resolve the dissonance they have brought into their lives and their relationship with God and one another. First he tells them that they can’t count on their status as descendants of Abraham to do that for them; those who are part of God’s covenant with the Jewish people are not exempted from the need to repent.
That shouldn’t be news to them; after all, the highest of the holy days in Judaism, Yom Kippur, is about repenting from and atoning for wrongdoing. But, for human beings of any faith or tradition, it is all too easy to confuse a special duty with a special status, and assume one has unique privileges instead of a unique calling. (Christians throughout our history have often struggled with the exact same problem, right up to the present day.)
But the flip side of that is that anyone can bear fruits of repentance. It doesn’t require special status or identities or beliefs or abilities, simply a willingness to turn away from actions and behaviors that promote injustice and oppression, that run contrary to God’s will for human life and society. And what’s really interesting is how ordinary the examples are that John offers.
“Share what you have” and “don’t cheat or extort people” are not exactly exotic fruits of repentance; they’re actually a pretty low bar when it comes to showing the sincerity of your repentance. And they are simple things that people can do right where they are, in the very ordinariness of their lives; he doesn’t tell them to give up everything they have and everyone they know and come out to the wilderness for a heaping helping of locusts and honey along with him.
The truly good news of this passage is precisely the message of repentance to all: that all of us, wherever we are, can take tangible steps to make right what is wrong in our lives or in the world, and that God will meet us there when we do so, even providing the notes to play when we’re not sure what to do.
And that is not simply cause for joy, but one of the deepest sources of it: that God love each of us and this entire beautiful and broken world; that there is a place for all of us in God’s house, regardless of who we are, where we’ve come from, or how lost we’ve become; and that if we just listen, we can hear God at work turning right what is wrong, modulating our mistakes into a new key of harmony, and connecting with every dissonant step and half-step until it becomes part of the larger music of our life and this world that concludes with rest and resolution, and everything at last made right.