Advent 2024 : 11

 

It isn’t part of the infancy narratives, but there’s this moment in Advent when we read of John, the one who prepared the way for Jesus, now an adult:

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptised by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance ... Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3.7-9)

The imagery is rooted in the Garden of Eden, in the serpent who tricks the first humans to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil before they are ready for such food; and in the resulting promise God makes to Eve that her seed will crush the seed of the serpent’s head, even as that seed bites at the heel of her own seed. (God will teach Eve’s seed how to fight the serpent.)

Many of those who came to John were vipers, those who had sided with Rome and whose actions wounded their own people: tax farmers, soldiers of the client king.

Jesus himself will take up the image, applying it not to collaborators with Rome but to those scribes and Pharisees whose demands placed an injurious burden on the people, and asking how they will avoid the fire of hell?

The wrath John speaks of is not the wrath of an angry God, but the wrath of Rome. The irony is that those who have gambled on Rome have realised, almost too late, that Rome will destroy them. Likewise, the hell Jesus speaks of is not the action of a righteous and redemptive God, but the imminent action of Rome, whose legions will burn Jerusalem to the ground. Who has taught the crowd to flee the coming wrath? Who might yet teach the scribes and Pharisees? John is amazed to realise that it is none other than God who has taught them.

God has taught crowds who had responded to fear of Rome by fawning to Rome, the better – in this context, the godly – action of flight. To flee to the shelter of a loving God.

John sees through the outward appearance of vipers to their deepest desire, to be trees, that bear good fruit.

You are not a viper; you are a tree.

You are made in the likeness of God. That means that your nature, like God’s, is good. At the most fundamental level, you are good, not evil – any more than God is evil. But you are afflicted by sin – by opposition to God and those who bear God’s resemblance – in much the same way as human bodies are afflicted by cancer: it is not inherent to who we are and can be overcome. When God looks at you, God does not see an offence that must somehow be mitigated against, God sees God’s own likeness afflicted by sin and responds with compassion. Compassion is not wishing you could do something about someone else’s situation, it is acting for their deliverance from that situation.

John is amazed that even the most unlikely candidates get in on that deliverance. Jesus, likewise, holds out this amazing hope. In him, all that was lost is restored, all that was disfigured is transformed. As Moses lifted up the statue of a serpent on a pole and all who looked upon it were healed of deadly poison, so will Jesus be lifted up: the condemned man on a cross, the viper on a tree who turns out to be a tree – the tree of life, no less – in a garden of trees.

But it starts with being taught – apprenticed; being apprentices, or disciples – in fleeing wrath, in taking flight to refuge in the arms of Love.

Happy Advent, you brood of vipers!