What should we do?

In today’s Gospel passage, crowds flock to John the Baptist who is preaching out in the dessert, urging people to change their ways and turn to God’s way.

You can tell from John’s response to the crowds that he hadn’t read the book ‘How to win friends and influence people’. The first thing he does is insult everyone!

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

He calls them poisonous snakes. He tells them they are not living as though they have changed their ways and turned to God’s way. They are not bearing fruits worthy of repentance.

John says that just because they are descendants of Abraham, God’s chosen people, doesn’t mean that they are immune from God’s judgement for their behaviour. In fact, their lack of changed lives had them skating on thin ice in God’s eyes. Their lack of fruit put them at risk of God’s wrath.

The crowd’s response is interesting. They repeatedly ask John the same question.

“What should we do?”

The crowd ask: “What then shall we do?”

John tells them to share what they have with those who don’t have.

Tax collectors in the crowd repeat the question: “Teacher, what should we do?”

They are told to stop their practice of taking more tax from people than they are supposed to.

Soldiers ask: “And we, what should we do?”

John tells them not to use their power to threaten people for money and to be satisfied with their wages.

I’m struck by how obvious John’s answers are. He does not tell them deep theological secrets, he doesn’t give them complicated spiritual disciplines to practice. What he tells them isn’t intellectually out of reach for anyone.

What should we do? Do the right thing!

The crowds, tax collectors and soldiers knew the answer to their questions. They knew what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

They had specifically gone to John the Baptist to be baptised. The cleansing with water would symbolise their repentance. John’s message told people to turn away from their rebellion against God and instead intentionally choose to obey Him. The crowds came because they accepted John’s message. They knew they needed to turn away from the bad things they were doing. They knew that God’s way was the right way.

They knew the answer to their questions.

Perhaps the question they should really have been asking is, why aren’t we able to do what we know we should do? Why can’t we do the right thing?

We know what God wants us to do and how he wants us to behave. We have the Ten Commandments and the Law. He has told us clearly how we should live.

We know that we live in rebellion to what He wants us to do and choose behaviours that displease Him.

We want to turn away from our rebellion. But why aren’t we producing the fruits of repentance – lives of obedience to God?

This is why John asks the people, “Who told you to flee the wrath to come?” when they arrive to see him in the dessert.

The people knew they were in danger of being judged and found wanting. They knew they had earned and rightly deserved God’s wrath for the way they had treated other people, for their greed and lies.

That was the reality for the people who came to John and that is the reality for us today. The reality for all of fallen humanity.

We know the answer to the question, “what should we do?” and yet we aren’t capable of consistently doing the right thing, of keeping the law perfectly in all its entirety.

This cycle of wrongdoing, repentance, wrong doing, repentance… could drive you to despair.

But in today’s Gospel, John the Baptist points the people to the solution, the answer to their deeper question: “Why can’t we do what we should do?”

John correctly diagnoses the people. When he calls them a brood of vipers, he isn’t just being insulting for the fun of it. He is speaking truthfully. The people were filled with venom, the poison of sin.

Venom is a poison produced inside some animals, such as snakes, spiders and scorpions, that is injected into a victim through a bite or sting.

The bible tells us that the venom of sin first got inside humans when Adam and Eve listened to the venomous Satan and decided to rebel against God, their creator, by eating something that He had forbidden. That venom of sin was passed down to their children.

As we read the Old Testament, we see the venom spread as the sin within each person bites others.

We see a jealous and rebellious Cain murder Abel, his brother, because God was pleased with Abel’s obedience and displeased with Cain’s disobedience.

We see the venom of sin corrupt the entire world, causing God to destroy everyone but Noah and his family in a flood.

We see the venom in Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery out of jealousy. The venom in the Egyptian rulers enslaving the Hebrew people and treating them badly, provoking God to send Moses to deliver them.

We see the venom in the Children of Israel repeatedly breaking the Law that God has handed down to Moses.

We see the venom in the Kings of Israel who repeatedly led God’s chosen astray to follow other gods of other nations out of political and economic motives.

We see the venom in the people who attacked, imprisoned and killed God’s prophets he sent to warn them of God’s wrath over their sinful actions.

It is the venom of sin that stops us from doing what we should do. It is our inability to overcome sin that makes us act in ways that are selfish, unloving, and unrighteous. It is sin that puts us in the firing line of God’s judgement and wrath.

But there is hope!

John points the people to Jesus. He points them to One who is more powerful than him, a mere human, no matter how prophetic and close to God John was.

He knows that no amount of washing with water could cleanse the sins of people. He knew that what the crowd, what he himself, needed was Jesus.

The people were anticipating the Messiah – the anointed one who would deliver the people from their bondage to sin.

They were anticipating the one God would send to take away the judgements against them.

Because they knew what they should do. They knew how they should live. They knew how they should treat other people. But they weren’t doing it. They couldn’t do it.

And the answer to how they could do the right thing, how they could live God’s way, how they could overcome the venom of sin, is God in their midst.

God the Son who was fully God, fully human. Jesus was the only one not infected with the venom of sin. The only one who could drink the full cup of God’s wrath, who could take the full judgement of God, the penalty of sin. Jesus is the only sinless sacrifice that could carry the sins of all humanity and take the judgement of death on a cross. Jesus is the only one worthy – the one who God showed was an acceptable sacrifice – by raising him from the dead and raising him to his right hand. The only great High Priest who could mediate for God’s people – all those who believe in Jesus and receive the salvation and victory over the venom of sin that he offers to all people, everywhere.

John tells the crowd that Jesus will baptise them with the Holy Spirit and fire. That Jesus’s winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary.

This illustration would have been easily recognisable and made a lot of sense to the agricultural community that John was speaking to. For me, a city girl, I needed to do some googling to visualise what John describes here.

A threshing floor is a flat, hard surface where grain is separated from chaff – the inedible and unusable parts of the wheat. The sheaves of wheat are spread out on the floor, beaten and trodden on and then the mixture is winnowed. To winnow is to blow wind or air through the wheat in order to remove the chaff. A winnowing fork is a tool used to toss the grain into the air so that the wind can blow away the lighter chaff while the heavier grain falls back to the threshing floor to be gathered and stored.

In the Bible, the threshing floor is used as a symbol of judgment and a place of separation and revelation. The threshing floor is also a metaphor for sanctification and worship. It represents the process of uncovering God's provision for us, and our responsibility to honour Him with the fruit that is revealed.

When we understand this agricultural process, we can more deeply understand what John is saying to the people.

John the Baptist’s message was to call people to the water of repentance, a rejection of the venom of sin that constantly led them astray and a desire to turn back to God and His ways.

But John’s mission was to ‘prepare the way for the Lord

His baptism and message pointed people to the Saviour, to God in Man. He points us to Jesus Christ, who offers a baptism of salvation, a cosmic washing clean that wipes clean our sentence of death that is produced by the venom of sin that infects the whole of humanity.

Jesus Christ is the only one who could hold back God’s axe of judgement, standing in the way of it and protecting us from the coming wrath.

And – to all who will accept his protection, his salvation – he baptises with the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit comes to live inside all those who believe.

Because the answer to the question of “How do we do what we know we should do?” is God in our midst. God the Holy Spirit living inside our bodies. The winnowing wind of the Holy Spirit blows through us, guiding us, convicting us of the chaff and sinful behaviours that need to be blown away; the Holy Spirit leads us to the truth and empowers us to tell it and do it. The Holy Spirit teaches us how to obey God. He speaks to us from the inside.

As we live in this earth – as we live on God’s threshing floor – it is often quite a hard place to be. We can be trodden on by people in our lives – a bullying boss, a challenging relationship. We can be beaten down by our circumstances – the hard work of endurance for those with caring responsibilities for children, a sick spouse, or elderly parents; the financial struggle we face with the rising cost of living; mental health difficulties, trauma and illness in our lives.

But in all this, we have hope because God offers to live IN us. His Holy Spirit will blow through us, in our times of brokenness, in our times of hardship. He can breathe new life into us, transforming us from the inside out. Removing the unusable parts of us and our behaviour that hinder our role in His kingdom and producing fruit that benefit God’s kingdom.

Fruit that is worthy our repentance. Lives that refresh others. People who will make time for others, who will comfort people in their distress, who will show love to the outcasts of society, people who will loosen those who are bound, open the eyes of the blind, lift up those who are bowed down by the pressures and injustices of life. Bearing fruit worthy of repentance might mean having a different approach to the asylum seeker and immigrant than the prevailing animosity. It might mean having a different attitude towards those society deems as not economically productive – the disabled, children, the unemployed and unemployable, the homeless and drug addicted. Our Psalm tells us that God watches over the stranger in the land, he gives justice to those that suffer wrong and bread to those who hunger, he upholds the orphan and widow.

God wants us to be His children – not just people who rely on their nation’s historical connection to the faith – like the people in John’s time relied on their connection to Abraham the Father of their faith.

We are to be children of God, who resemble our Father in how we live: Following the footsteps of Immanuel – God with Us – by following the teachings and actions of Jesus and how he lived when he walked the earth; and being filled by God the Holy Spirit so that we can be God’s hands and feet and bodies as we walk the earth today.

We are called to proclaim the good news to the world around us – not just through our words but through our actions, through how we live our lives, through how we treat others and how we spend our resources and time.

Because, like the crowd who came to John the Baptist, we know what we should do. We know how we should live. We know how we should treat other people.

So, this morning, let’s consider John’s answer to the question of the crowd: “What should we do?”

Let’s bear fruit worthy of repentance. Today we can turn away from any areas of rebellion in our lives and follow God’s way in doing the right thing in that situation – maybe that could mean an apology we owe someone, or swallowing our pride in order to make peace – even when we know deep down that we were not in the wrong. Maybe it is being kind to someone who we don’t think deserves it, listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit as He blows and brings to light things we need to repent of.

We can allow God’s winnowing fork to work in our lives. Transforming us from the inside out and separating us from the sins that can entangle us at times.

And we can take the advice of Paul in his letter to the Philippian church:

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” – we can rejoice in the hope of our salvation. In the knowledge that God has given us His Son, Jesus Christ, the Way to escape the wrath of judgement, a way to be cleansed from the poisonous venom of sin.

Let our gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near – God the Holy Spirit lives in us and is our help – to make us gentle in how we treat others, especially in a world that grows increasingly hard and focused on self-preservation.

Do not worry about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God – In a world where there is much to worry about every day – as we see the rising global tensions, the wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Africa; threats of new pandemics, the crime and poverty on the rise…. But we have hope, so let’s live like people who have hope. Investing more of our energy in praying about these issues and problems than we do worrying or complaining about them – I am preaching to myself here!

And as we do these things, Paul promises that the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

In a world that is on the threshing floor, in a world where there is plenty to bring us feelings of despair, we can be joyful children of God. Because “Happy are those who have the God of Jacob for their help, whose hope is in the Lord their God; Who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps his promise for ever…[who promises to turn] the way of the wicked upside down at the last judgement…”

What shall we do? We shall have hope in the Lord who shall reign for ever.