Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel from Luke this morning, we get a small glimpse of the sort of fiery preacher that John the Baptizer really was: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

Now many of us, if we heard someone preaching these words, would probably not think too too much of the preacher: just another fire and brimstone sort of zealot, we may mutter dismissively under our breath, and walk on. Leaving aside that preaching fire and brimstone is an important mode of preaching—which is to say: preaching God’s fierce unwillingness to abide human wickedness and sin; preaching God’s judgment on the systems of oppression and injustice in which we are too often complicit and from which we profit; preaching the healing, purgative fire of God’s love which will not only burn away the darkness of sin and death in us, but cauterize our wounds and restore us to health…a fire most clearly revealed alive in Jesus Christ and gifted to the church in the Pentecostal flame of the Holy Ghost—we need to listen to John. And not just because John proves himself to be a very practical pastoral theologian later in our reading (the sort of pastor who’s able to mix stern reproof with meaningful and empowering counsel) but because John’s asking us a question as much as he’s asking it of his original first-century audience.

First, that “you brood of vipers” image is an evocative one and isn’t principally meant as a “you horrible people” sort of insult. In the ancient world, folks didn’t understand that vipers gave live birth—rather gruesomely, they believed that baby vipers ate their way out of their mother, devouring her as she had devoured. What John is diagnosing here in using this image is a world in which people devour each other and are devoured in turn in endless cycles of self-perpetuating violence. It’s no wonder that the advice John eventually gives to the crowds has so much to do with ending the devouring by restoring some measure of right-relationship through sharing and mutuality.

Second, John’s real question here isn’t “who warned you to flee,” as if he’s disappointed that some folks might be saved from what’s to come. The real question arises from the pairing of “who warned you to flee” with “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” The real question is, “Now that you’ve fled, what’re you gonna do? Who told you that righteousness was a matter of running away? Because let me be clear with you: it’s not. It’s not enough to run away and think you’re okay—repentance isn’t a matter of running away. Repentance is a matter of transformation. So if you’ve really repented, how will you reveal it? How will you make it known? How will your life make it known? How will you bear the fire of God back to the world from which you’ve fled?”

Beloved, in celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, we celebrate the victory of love over sin, of life over death, of light over darkness. We celebrate a love, a life, a light, that doesn’t flee from the pain, the suffering, the sin, the death, the terrors of the world, but faces them head-on in order to meet them and undo them from the inside. But how will the world know that the love and life and light of God are victorious if we don’t allow them to transform us, through repentance, into images of the deathless love, life and light of God? If we don’t receive the grace of God to effect in us a total change of life, how will running away from the world through distraction or aversion root out the pattern of the world’s darkness still at work in us?

How, Beloved, will we allow grace to transform us and empower us to bear the fruits of repentance in lives shot through with the fire of God’s love?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+