“Sowing, and reaping”
Meditation – Bulletin, Sunday, December 5, 2010
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
“Sowing, and reaping”
In today’s gospel reading (Matthew 3: 1-12), John the Baptist makes a rather unnerving demand: he expects results! Not content to see time merely put in or words glibly given, he expects those who have made a profession of faith to actually follow it up with action! Verbal confession of sins and verbal protestations of repentance were not enough: he wanted to see some evidence that the words really meant something. Or, to put it in other, agricultural terms, what good was sowing if there was never any crop?
He addresses two groups in particular, two groups that might very well have seen themselves as ‘doing very well, thank you very much.’ They were the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious and political leaders of that time and place. Outwardly, and far as anyone else was concerned, they were respectable and above reproach. Yet John chooses to call them “a brood of vipers.” Poisonous, deadly, venomous, snakes: that is hardly a term of praise or endearment!
There are two possible things that John is alluding to. Firstly, he may be trying to say something about the real state of their spiritual lives, that is, their inner beings. Two other times in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 12:34 & 23:33), Jesus applies this same term to these people, and in both cases He is saying that their inner and outer lives do not match. Outwardly, they “appeared” to be righteous and faithful to God’s but actually were doing nothing of the sort. They were not living out in their lives what they professed with their words.
The other thing that John might be saying is that these folks were scared and were taking what they thought was the easy and convenient way out. In the very short grass of that arid region there lived many kinds of animals and reptiles and what little stunted and sparse vegetation it afforded was their home and their sanctuary. But when the prairie fires broke out (as was the pattern of the area), these creatures scurried for their lives, frantic for some sort of safety.
So perhaps John was seeing these folk in that light: eager for safety, but not for any life-impacting change in how they behaved.
Both of these conjectures are supported by what John says next. He warns them not to presume upon the faith of their forefather Abraham and figure that it would somehow ‘do the trick’ for them. That, in fact, was a widespread belief at the time, namely that the faith of Abraham was sufficient for all succeeding generations. That merely being a Jew, a descendant of Abraham, was enough to guarantee one’s salvation for all time and eternity. And how widespread that assumption is even now, even it does happen to be expressed in slightly different terms. How many children or grandchildren naively assume that the faith of their parents or grandparents, or the faith of a believing wife or husband, will somehow ‘cover’ for them. It may even go the other way: I even had a grandmother who told her priest that her believing grandsons’ faith was enough to take care of her.
In this little ‘dialogue’ between John the Baptist and the group of Sadducees and Pharisees (though in this account, it comes out as pretty one-sided), there appear two fatal flaws in the thinking of the latter group. Firstly, they were of the impression that they were ‘good enough’, either in their already existing behaviour, or in their own natural ability to make the necessary changes to their behaviour. And, secondly, they figured that they were already covered. That merely being a Jew was enough and nothing more was needed on their parts. In both cases then, there is only a superficial repentance. While they may indeed represent a turning from an old way of life, neither is really a turning to God or to Christ in humble faith and dependence.
What John is taking great pains to say is that everyone has fallen far short of God’s righteous demands and desperately needs God’s grace and help in their lives. We simply cannot do it in and of ourselves, and so must turn to Christ in humble faith and dependence and allow Him to do it in our stead. Only in that way will our sowing produce anything worthwhile.
