Photograph by Jametlene Reskp via Unsplash

In Luke’s nativity stories, we find in the first two chapters of Luke a great drama with a bigger cast than we usually depict in our Christmas programs with shepherds in bathrobes. Luke tells an expanded story, centered first on Elizabeth, the older cousin of Mary. Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah are of advanced years, and just like Sarah and Abraham, they are gifted with a child. Zechariah struggles mightily with this promise, an irony for a longtime priest of God. Elizabeth embraces the news faithfully.

The two stories of John the Baptist and Jesus in Luke’s gospel intersect through the ties of family as well as mutual belief. The second cousin to Jesus, John the Baptist preaches a call to repentance and offers baptism. Jesus will build upon John’s teachings, bringing forth a vision of salvation and the wonderfully contrary world of the Kingdom/Reign of God.

Though, if you asked John the Baptist what his motivation was, he’d look at you and roar, “Repent!”

Repentance is not necessarily a word we go looking for this time of year. With Christmas now days away, we are focused on the holidays and many of us are looking for signs of merriment during difficult times. Can we just wait to be called to repent? Congregants will look at you in John the Baptist mode and think, “Sheesh! Lent will be here soon enough. Leave the hard edge, preacher. It’s nearly Christmas!”

I admit I have wondered how John the Baptist pushed past the shepherds and wise men to get into the Advent readings. He is an inappropriate figure speaking an inopportune word, clearly against the grain of the wider cultural admonishment “Be merry!”, replete with “Advent calendars” that promise anything from daily chocolates to Star Wars LEGO projects to help you prepare for even more merriment.

Meanwhile in the back pews, the congregant thinks of the merry and quietly reflects: Should we just quietly ignore what he’s saying and hope he’ll move on? “Repent!” is not a word for right now.

Then I got thinking about John the Baptist’s role in the gospels. He sets the stage for Jesus’ ministry and message, surely something John has in common with the season of Advent. We light the four candles slowly (waiting a whole week before proceeding around the wreath). We tell our friends this is how we wait for Christmas, watching and praying faithfully. Part of being faithful to God is clearing up the distance we often place between ourselves and God by our sins and our shortcomings.

One more thing: Most of us hear “Repent” and squirm. Why is a word so overused by the fundamentalist types on TV showing up at our worship services, where we try our best to be graceful and open? Nonetheless, just like John the Baptist appearing inconveniently in the gospel readings during Advent, so is his word about repentance just as needed nearing Christmas.

Indeed, many of us are more like John the Baptist’s daddy, the man who seeks the sacred path and serves even as a priest in the Temple, yet for all his faith, old Zechariah reserves his belief in what God can do. It’s a form of sin, if you go back to the New Testament, where the Greek word hamartia speaks of sin more as “missing the mark.”

John’s message of “repent” is a good word to hear at this time of year, for we live in a world that is in sore need of it, and if we are honest, we need it as well. In the New Testament Greek, the word “repentance” is metanoia, which has to do with transformation or turning away from one way and turning toward another and better way. Paul’s writings to the church at Rome have the best-known use of that Greek term when he proclaims: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). Such a change is about your transformation, where repentance leads to a new way, a new life-giving way, or indeed a new life.

What greater gift could one find in this life? To repent is not to be browbeaten by the heavy hand of God or at least by those who claim to speak for God. To repent is to understand your life is with its omissions and limits, willful choices that are not in line with living responsibly or in community with others.

By avoiding or denying our need to repent, we continue ways leading to sadness and despair, no matter how we might tell ourselves otherwise. To repent is to turn things around, to let your life find balance, to welcome grace into your life. You realize there is a wonderful fullness to life that is not like the illusions we chase after. As the late Baptist ethicist Glen Stassen sagely observed, “The Christian life is continuously repenting, continuously learning.”[i]

Such calls to repent, though, often take the prophetic edge to get past our dulled response. John the Baptist has an unsettling edge to him, as he bellows on the street corner a message that some avoid, content to pass by and tune him out.

John the Baptist is sometimes hard to handle. After all, he smells of locusts and defies anybody’s offer of a makeover. In Luke’s gospel, he is a cousin of Jesus, and therefore kin in relationship as well as belief.

Remember that these cousins John and Jesus are not popular, and they also find that the authorities, religious and secular alike, do not take well to their call to repent or the teachings of another Kingdom far above any empire. To follow this message of transformation and working for the Reign of God is not for those who wish to keep on walking by the faithful yet edgy preaching of the gospel.

I wonder if we might consider adding some extra figures to the manger scene on the front lawn or mantle. I would love to add the family of John the Baptist, for surely they fit into the story. Let’s imagine adding a beautiful elder woman, a hand gently on the swell of her stomach and a pleased smile upon her face. Then add the old priest Zechariah, standing in his Temple robes yet sort of shocked and puzzled, literally speechless at the thought of Elizabeth’s advanced years yet bearing new life.

And then I imagine John the Baptist, not content to be “tamed” by being depicted as a young child just a few months older than Jesus. Instead, he insists that his figurine be that of his adult years, wearing old and rugged clothing, brush-defying hair, a small dish of mashed locusts and honey close at hand. John is not content to be kneeling near the crèche. Instead, he is peeking around the corner of the stable, not wanting to distract from the true focal point of this scene: the baby Jesus at the center of this great reverence.

John the Baptist looks back at us. “Have you repented?” he says with that glint in his eye. Then he extends one long, bony finger toward the manger where the Christ child awaits those who would transform themselves for Christ’s sake.