Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

There’s a wonderful synergy in all three of our readings today. Isaiah decries systemic institutional injustice that leads to a complete breakdown in relationships: to people devouring each other’s lives and livelihoods, treating each other like mere instruments to satisfy their own insatiable appetites for gain, legalizing oppression. Peter takes folks to task for backbiting, slander, gossip, rumor-mongering…which are just a few ways that people tend to like to devour each other and burn each other up as fuel for one passion or another, eviscerating whole communities in the process.

And then we come to John the Baptizer. We heard Luke’s version of John’s preaching last Sunday, and Matthew’s version here is not much different, including as it does those two powerful images of the axe lying at the root of the trees and the winnowing-fork-wielding Messiah separating wheat from chaff.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve often experienced these images as describing an angry God who apparently has it in for less-than-perfect people…which is to say, the images describe a God who’s angry at imperfect people...people like me! Aack! But there’s something missing in that understanding of things. Sure: I think John means to personally challenge us with some blunt and powerful imagery (he’s aiming at our conversion after all)…but in the end, John’s not exclusively concerned here for us as individuals and for our individual feelings of imperfection. Like Isaiah and Peter, he’s concerned with the health of a community.

Look at the movement from one image to the other. In the first image, there’s an orchard at stake: trees that don’t produce fruit will be pruned by the orchard keeper to make room for healthier trees, healthier growth, to increase access to light, and to eventually ensure a more plentiful harvest. In the second image, the chaff needs to be separated from the wheat because you can’t make good bread with chaff, with the husks of the wheat—so the grain is all tossed into the air with a winnowing fork, allowing the right sort of breeze (an image of the Spirit) to separate the wheat from the husk. In this latter image, it’s important for us to remember that the wheat and the chaff aren’t different sorts of people, good and bad. The chaff is dead matter that surrounds the wheat until it’s loosened from the wheat, separated from it, and discarded.

So what we have here isn’t a metaphorical description of an angry God cutting people down or burning them up for not being good enough. We’ll never be good enough. Good enough isn’t even on the table. Us being good enough on our own steam doesn’t form any part of the divinely inscrutable calculus of God’s infinite love for us which can neither be increased nor diminished by either our feats or our foibles. And Isaiah’s pretty clear in today’s reading that if there’s any burning happening, it’s usually we who wind up burning each other.

No…What we have here is imagery concerned with the health of two interrelated and interpenetrating systems: the community and the individual. We have a pair of integrated images describing conversion of life by becoming more and more susceptible to the Spirit’s movement of grace separating from us all that is dead and death-dealing within us—our unruly passions, our sins and our attractions to our sins—leading us to bear fruit within the context of a community’s transformed and transforming life, leading us to participate in that transformation as a people undergoing sanctification and as agents of that sanctifying Power.

The beginning of a new year is a great time for reflection. So what might be dead in us that needs removing? What in our hearts is preventing us from bearing spiritual fruit and is in need of pruning? How might we contribute to the health and fruitfulness of the community by allowing ourselves to be opened out to the rush of the Spirit’s Living and Life-Giving Breath? How might we, enlivened by the Spirit and inflamed by and with Love, become together living bread broken for the world, following the example of Jesus Christ?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+