Participant #1:

Father Stephen De Young: Okay, when we get started in just a second, we’re going to start at the beginning of chapter three of the Gospel According to St. Luke, where we left off last time. And I’ll do my usual and say that you can go online to the website and listen to the first Bible study on Luke. You can hear my long, not overly quick, but long introduction to the Gospel of Luke.

For right now I’ll just kind of get us caught up here to where we were. It shouldn’t take too long because we’re only on chapter three. But a lot happened in Luke 1 and 2 actually. Basically, we’ve had sort of a whirlwind tour of the prediction of the birth of St. John the Baptist or St. John the Forerunner and then Elizabeth, his mother’s, pregnancy and then the annunciation to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel that she was going to give birth to his son and then John the Baptist’s birth, Jesus’s birth.

And one episode, the only episode in any of the Gospels from Jesus’s childhood, at the temple in Jerusalem. Just to comment before we start on that, you will sometimes occasionally see books or documentaries or this kind of thing talking about Jesus’s lost years. What went on during those years when Jesus wasÖ that aren’t recorded there between His birth and other than that one episode and when He reached the age of about 30, which is when all the Gospels sort of pick up the story of Jesus. There’s sort of a presupposition there, that there must be something exciting that went on there that somehow the Gospel writers either just missed all this really important stuff or better yet, are hiding something. We’re all deliberately not talking about it.

You will get everything from saying Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus’s uncle and took Him on a world tour selling things that went to Britain and all over the place, to Jesus went to India and studied with Brahma or something and any number of other things that people will try to superimpose in there.

But the problem with that is, again, there’s no historical or textual basis for that. And in fact, everything we’re told about His birth and a little bit about His childhood in the Gospels is all aimed at the fact that He was born in abject poverty. Abject poverty. He’s living in this little nothing village, of sort of wandering day laborers, the son of a day laborer in the middle of nowhere in Galilee on the east edge of the Roman Empire. This is not a person who’s going to go on exotic travels around the world, right? The fact that He actually went to Jerusalem as much as He did is kind of unique for a person at that time. I mean, that would be a big trip.

We’re a very mobile society today, and so we kind of take for granted the fact that we have all this mobility. We move around, we might live in several states over the course of our life; the United States is a fairly big land mass, and we might go on vacations, we might go on trips to other continents in the first century that didn’t happen, and that especially didn’t happen for peasants. And it wasn’t that long ago in this country that was true here too. I mean, you go to grandparents’, great-grandparents’ generations. A lot of people live most of their life in one town. And if there was a big city a few miles away, they’d go there once in a while. Yeah, maybe once a year, something. They’d go to “The City” to do some shopping or do something.

Interlocutor: They went to Egypt.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that was again in his infancy. They went to Egypt during the slaughter of the innocents and came back. But there was noÖ He wasn’t trained in any of the Egyptian temples or by Greek philosophers, because if He was an infant, that would make that kind of difficult. Being an infant. Quran aside, there is an episode of the Quran where Jesus as an infant starts talkingÖ Well, this will be very controversial if any Muslims hear it, but the author of the Quran seems to have used a certain Gnostic Gospel as source material and gotten that story from there. They don’t like people referring to the author of the Quran or that said author used source material. But it seems pretty clear because we have what’s called the Arabic Infancy Gospel of Jesus, and it’s in Arabic, which is kind of telling, from that area. And it’s a Gnostic Gospel. So it’s pretty clear they got that from there. But no, in the actual canonical Gospels, Jesus didn’t speak until a normal human age to begin speaking. But again, if the question is “What was Jesus doing, though, during those years?” It’s not actually missing; St. Luke tells us here. That’s why I bring it up here as opposed to the other Gospels.

Interlocutor: “Gnostic” means it’s not in the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, the Gnostics were, not just one group, there were a whole series of groups that were basically religious sects, mainly in the second and third centuries. And I say religious sects, they’re not even really Christian sects, all of them. There are sort of Christianized forms of Gnosticism. And basically what Gnostics believed is that the Earth was a place of sort of evil. Many of them believed it was created by some kind of evil god. But then there was also a good sort of higher god who human beings were connected to in some way. And the goal was for human beings to sort of shed their human existence and go become part of this high god. And so the ones that were sort of Christianized would say that Jesus was sort of a messenger for that high god who came to this earth to tell people how to escape. But it’s not always Jesus. Some of them worshiped Hercules. There were even some Jewish forms of Gnosticism where they said Moses was like an emissary from this high God that told people how to escape.

So there’s all kinds of little nuances in every individual little group in terms of what they believe, but that’s sort of the overall structure. And they wrote during the second and third centuries volumes and volumes of books, most of which are literally bizarre, just riddles, things that had some role in their worship. And some of them are just taking sort of the canonical gospels and kind of twisting the stories a little bit. But there are a lot of these sort of invented odd stories like Jesus talking when He was a baby to try and say, because of course, since they believed that the material world was evil, most of them denied the Incarnation, even the ones who believed in Jesus, they say, “Well, Jesus couldn’t have actually become a human being because material is evil, so He couldn’t have had a body, really. So He just looked like a human being.” So for example, in that infancy gospel, they’re saying, “Well, He looked like a baby, right? But see, he was preaching and talking. See, He was really this sort of divine being. He wasn’t really human.” So, yeah, that’s what I mean when I say it’s a Gnostic gospel. It’s a book that comes from one of those sects and those circulated around in the second and third and even into the fourth centuries.

Interlocutor: The story of the presentation, that’s not from the Gnostic Gospels?

Fr. Stephen: No. There are actually several different sources on it from the early church. One of them is called the Protoevangelium of James.

Interlocutor: So that’s not a Gnostic Gospel?

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Christian church existed in the second, third and fourth centuries, too. And so there are people, there are Christians in the second, third and fourth centuries writing things too, and recording historical events that happened and doing theology just like today and commenting on the Scriptures and doing those things during those same centuries. So, we have Christian writings from those centuries. We also have writings from other groups, some of which were sort of quasi-Christian and some of which weren’t. The Gnostics were those quasi-Christian groups.

Interlocutor: OK just as a commentary, there must have been something tremendously active after the Resurrection, because you had people such as Marcion writing his own types of Gospels, for control over religion and the faith, so that would bear witness there was some truth that something dynamic happened that the rest of the world now wants to get involved in, they’ve either heard it, seen it or read about it but something in the first century was very dynamic.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to see that a little bit when we get to the Book of Acts, the second volume here of Luke when Simon Magus shows up. And traditionally, one of the Gnostic groups basically followed Simon Magus and thought that he was sort of the central figure. The way we see him presented in the Book of Acts is he shows up and sees the apostles working miracles. He sees people receiving the Holy Spirit. He sees what’s happening in the early Church and basically wants to get in on it and goes and offers the Apostles money to teach him how to give people the Holy Spirit. He figures it’s a racket, I guess, and so he says, “I want to have this power, too. How much you want to teach me how to do what you’re doing?”

So he traditionally then later ended up going to Rome and trying to get his own sort of quasi-Christian religion going and ended up in a lot of public debates with St. Peter, later on. Because St. Peter was trying to say, “No, that’s not correct teaching.”

Interlocutor: Another question, when you’re talking about Jesus and the “lost years” if you will, where he grew up there were no libraries, no formal schooling, very much in poverty what we’d call today, therefore the two natures of Jesus, how did they interact? Can you explain that to me?  Because how did He, this twelve-year-old, can you explain to me how did he get into the temple and talk to them?

Fr. Stephen: Not only can I not explain that, no one can explain to you how the two natures of Christ interact. [Laughter] You’ve got to remember, when you say “interact”, Jesus isn’t two people who interact with each other. He’s one person. Now, if what you’re asking is, can I get you into Jesus’s psychology, the answer is no, because God fundamentally doesn’t think the way we do, right?

And, that’s actually an important point, because whenever you’re reading something about the faith or listening to someone talk, if they start trying to talk about Jesus’s psychology right, “Well, what was Jesus thinking when theÖ?” Red flags should go up. We’re moving into an area of conjecture here, at best, because you’re talking about—I mean, Jesus is unique. There’s only one theanthropos. There’s only one God-man. So there’s nothing else we can compare Jesus to, or the Incarnation to, in order to understand it. So we have to sort of accept what we’re told.

What we’ve seen already in Luke 1 and 2 is that you have a divine Person, the second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, who takes upon himself human nature, who is born of a woman and becomes versus a human infant, then a human child, and then a human man. If you try and get too deep into how that works, you’re going to get in trouble. Even the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which is the most the Church has ever said about the Incarnation, some people refer to as the definition of Chalcedon. I don’t think it qualifies as a definition, but some people will use that term. But if you notice, what the Council of Chalcedon said about the Incarnation, about Christ, were all negative statements. They were not positive statements. He’s God and man without mixture, without confusion, without separation, and without division. So His humanity and divinity aren’t mixed. They aren’t confused, but they also aren’t separated, and they aren’t divided. But those are all negative statements. That’s not telling us what it is. That’s telling us what it isn’t, right? This is an error. This is an error. This is an error. This is an error. So the truth is somewhereÖ in here.

We don’t try to, again, nail it down more finely than that. Because again, there’s nothing we could compare Him to. He’s unique, He’s a unique event. So we have to accept what we’re told, and we have to mind the fences. The word, dogma, that we get dogma from what’s issued by the councils, are dogmas. The word dogma in Greek, it was a stone marker that you’d put at the edge of your property. It marked off property lines, so it’s a boundary marker. So what the councils are doing is not giving us sort of these theological definitions and explanations. They’re giving us boundary markers. Here’s the boundaries of the faith. If you go too far this way, you’re outside the faith. You go too far that way and you’re outside the faith. On either side. So we stay withinÖ “here’s the fences”, because if you go outside the fences, you’re going to be believing something that jeopardizes salvation.

In terms of those quote-unquote, “lost years” or “hidden years”. Notice what Luke says here at the end of chapter two.

Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them. But His mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men.

He grew up in Nazareth. He was obedient to his parents. That’s what happened during those 18 years. They’re not missing. We’re just told what happened.

Interlocutor: He stayed and worked with His father.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, he obeyed His parents. He worked with His father, helped His father, helped His mother. That’s what we’re told. He had a normal human life. Once again, we’ve talked about this before. There’s this temptation to try and turn Jesus into Superboy. “The Adventures of Superman” when he was a boy, right? It’s like, oh, well, finding out he was from Krypton, like Jesus just one day figured out he was God or something, right? And it sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but there are some big budget movies made with basically that premise. That’s how it worked, like Jesus was sort of a normal kid and then one day he started having these visions or something, which is preposterous in terms of the way the Bible presents it.

But even more importantly, what is St. Luke’s teaching here? He’s teaching that in the incarnation, when God becomes a human being, He’s truly a human being and He lives a normal human life. He isn’t flying around saving cats out of trees. He lives a normal human life. And so when we start talking about living a life that’s Christlike and following Christ, we’re not talking about you having to suddenly learn how to work miracles, right? How to do this, that and the other. Jesus lived a human life and He lived it perfectly. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t ordinary a lot of the time. I mean, the gospels don’t make a point of it, but He ate pretty much every day. He ate. He talked with people, right? He wasn’t always giving a sermon. He spent time with His parents, spent time with His sort of adoptive brothers and sisters. He spent time with the people of the village.

All of that is important that we don’t lose sight of, because that’s what makes the Incarnation the Incarnation. It’s not just God walking around in a human body like a spacesuit. He really is a human person or human being.

Interlocutor: It’s affirmed later in the Gospels, because as an adult how many times did people say, “Isn’t this Jesus, whose father is Joseph, and mother is Mary?”. They’re basically saying “Who does this guy think He is?” they can’t believe that He was just apparently average human being living an average human being’s life.

Participant #1:

Fr. Stephen: Right. His ordinariness was a stumbling block to some people.

Interlocutor: It’s a stumbling block to a lot of people!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That he seemed just an ordinary person. That’s true to this day. I brought up Islam earlier, but if you talk to a Muslim, the arguments Muslims use, and I mean well-educated Muslims who go around debating Christians, the arguments they use, that Jesus wasn’t God, they will come to you and say, “Jesus ate food.” That one’s in the Quran. “Jesus can’t have been God because He ate food. He went to the bathroom. So He can’t be God. He was an infant, He was a little baby, so He can’t be God, right? He was weak. He can’t be God. He got sick; He can’t be God.” Those are the arguments they use. Those are really lousy arguments against Christianity, because of course, we believe in the Incarnation. Part of the central teaching of Christianity is that God, the person of Jesus Christ, ate, got sick, went to the bathroom, was a baby. Right? We teach that positively. That’s what we believe. And so there’s sort of a mismatch. But still, it was a stumbling block then, it’s still a stumbling block to people now. But that’s what the Incarnation, what St. Luke is teaching us here, these first couple of chapters is all about. That’s what it’s all about. So I just wanted to make that note about those lost years.

There’s almost as much of that as there is about the lost tribes of Israel. That’s the other one you get all the time. And I talked about that a little before. But needless to say, there are no lost tribes of Israel. We have really good Assyrian and Babylonian records. We know where they all ended up, the names of the villages. We could show you their names and record keeping. They’re not lost. They weren’t in Israel anymore, but they didn’t vanish. They didn’t go anywhere.

Okay, so now we do leap ahead a little bit here in time at the beginning of chapter three. Chapter three, verse one:

In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituria in the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene,

(That’s not the one in Texas.)

While Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

So notice once again, as we’ve seen before, Luke goes to great pains to tell us exactly when this happened. He doesn’t just tell us it happened. He wants us to know, okay, we’ve jumped forward in time here’s exactly… They didn’t have our years. He couldn’t tell us. This is 28 B.C., or A.D., right? He didn’t have that dating system yet. But he’s giving us an exact time because again, for St. Luke, he’s telling us history here. He’s telling us what actually happened in the real world. This isn’t a myth or parable or a story. And so he runs through, “We’re in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.” That tells you who’s the emperor. Tiberius was the emperor after Augustus, who was emperor when Jesus was born. Pontius Pilate is the governor.

And then he lists three of the tetrarchs. They’re actually four, hence tetrarch. Tetra being four. Remember after Herod the Great died, the Romans were a little leery of how much power he had gained, and his sons were not the men their father was, shall we say. What they did was rather than letting the sons fight it out and decide who was going to inherit, Herod the Great’s throne as ethnarch, they chopped his territory into four pieces and put four of his sons over the four pieces, hence tetrarch. So just by the fact that he’s naming tetrarchs not only tells us it was during the reign of those particular tetrarchs, but that this is after the death of Herod the Great when his holdings have been split up.

And then he even tells us when Annas and Caiaphas were high priests. Remember I mentioned at the end of the Gospel of Mark when Caiaphas appeared earlier, this tells us a very particular time because there were several years where Caiaphas himself was high priest and then his son Annas, he was sort of grooming to take over for him. So there was an overlapping period where they were both functioning as high priests, where he was sort of training Annas and then, of course, Caiaphas died and Annas took over. So, St. Luke is going so far as to tell us it’s during that overlap period. So, this was for people who were familiar with the history of Judea, he’s giving you a very precise point in time.

And so, as we saw when we last left him. Zacharias’s son, St. John the Forerunner, is out in the wilderness. He’s been out in the wilderness since he was a child. And we talked about that that was because of Herod going to kill all of the newborn infants. But now, the word of God comes to him. This is a familiarÖ we saw this, remember, in the prophets in the Old Testament. This is usually how it started. The word of the Lord would come to one of the prophets and that would be the beginning of their ministry. So John is there in the wilderness. The word of God comes to him, that means he’s now designated as a prophet and he’s going to begin his prophetic ministry.

And he went into all the region around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, saying, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; Make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill brought low; The crooked places shall be made straight and the rough ways smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

So, a couple of pieces here. First, remember, as we already saw prophesied by his father at his birth, St. John is now bringing this baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Remember, we talked about at that point, St. Luke is pretty clearly indicating to us and we’ll see he follows up on this in the Book of Acts that people were having their sins forgiven through being baptized by St. John, right? We talked about it that time, God has the power to forgive sins, He can do it however He designates, right? So when He designated sin offerings in the Old Testament, that was the way people receive forgiveness of sins. Now that He designates St. John, His baptism is how people are receiving the forgiveness of sins. And as we saw at the end of Matthew, and we’ll see again at the end of Luke, Jesus is going to designate his disciples and the church that they’re going to bring into being, He’s going to tell them, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,” to all of His disciples, not just one of them. And so He’s saying that now it’s through the Church that he’s going to give the forgiveness of sins.

And then secondly, we have this quotation from Isaiah. Now, as I mentioned, when the same passage was quoted in Matthew, I actually disagree with the way they’ve punctuated it in the English translation. Remember in the Greek and in the original Hebrew of Isaiah, there’s no punctuation, there’s no spaces. And in the original it was in all capital letters, even in the Greek. So, when they put in even question marks and that kind of thing in a translation, that’s an interpretation. They say, “This seems like a question, so I’m going to put a question mark.” And when they break sentences off and put periods, that’s an interpretation. When they put commas or parentheses, all those things are interpretations. They’re not there in the original. And so even though this is typically, and they took this over from the New King James Version, in the first verse, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’”. So this interpretation has the voice, the person who’s speaking crying out in the wilderness. That’s certainly true, St. John was out in the wilderness. But if you look it up in Isaiah, I think a better punctuation of it is “A voice of one crying, (comma quotation marks), ‘In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’”

And the reason I argue for that is that in the context, when you look it up in Isaiah, you’ll see this is a prophecy about Israel returning from exile. Returning from exile. Which means if they’re going from Babylon back to Palestine, where are they going to have to go? Where’s the road going to have to go through?  The wilderness. The desert. And even looking at just the rest of the quote, “Every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill brought low”, the idea is this road, this way, it’s being made through the wilderness. All the valleys are being brought up, all the mountains are being brought down, so there’ll be this path through the wilderness for Israel to return.

So, what St. Luke is saying here, by having St. John say this, is that remember, we’ve talked about before how in the minds of the faithful Jews of the first century, they didn’t consider the exile to be over. Yes, they were technically in the land, but they still had the Romans ruling over them and oppressing them. They didn’t have their own nations; they certainly didn’t have a king descended from David ruling over them. And remember, God’s presence hadn’t returned to the temple when they rededicated it. So, they’re still waiting for this exile to end. And remember we’ve talked before about how the different sects of Judaism sort of had different ideas of how that was going to happen, right?

The Pharisees believed, “Well, we got thrown into exile because we were sinful, so if we want the exile to end, we need to all become righteous. And they said, we broke the law and went into exile, so now we have to keep the law and the exile will end.” So they went and taught a very strict interpretation of all these laws and said, “If we could get everyone in Judea to just follow all these laws, then God will return, the exile will end, the Romans will get overthrown, the Messiah will come, then everything will happen.” And remember, for them, that made anyone who wasn’t keeping the law, anyone who was a sinner, anyone who wasn’t living the way they believed the law should be followed, that made them the enemy. “They’re the ones who are keeping the exile from ending. We need to get rid of them.”

So, what’s happening here, what St. Luke is saying, and what St. John is proclaiming, is that the exile is coming to an end. That’s happening through the ministry that’s beginning here with St. John the Forerunner, and that is then going to be picked up, we’re going to see, of course, spoilers, by Jesus. But that it’s beginning here. He’s what? He’s preparing the way for what? We say that all the time, preparing the way. He’s not like a doorman, right? He’s preparing the way, as in the exile is going to end. But you have to have a way for the people to travel, right? So he’s sort of laying out, he’s setting up the game board, right? He’s laying everything out, everything in place so that now Jesus can come and end the exile once and for all.

Then he said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him,”

And this is an interesting approach, when we evangelize, we usually don’t take this approach, right? We go out and try and find people. We try and be nice to them, try to tell them nice things, try to soft pedal things. “Come on, you want to come in?”, right?

St. John takes a little different approach. So, all these people come out to be baptized by him. They want to be part of his movement, want to get on board, he’s got numbers, and he says,

“Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

It’s not winsome. You’re not going to see that on Joel Osteen anytime soon, I don’t think, when people show up for church in the morning.

But let’s take apart what he says. The core of St. John’s message here, this is now the flip side of what we’re just told, we were just told the positive side, right? The exile is about to come to an end. Exile is about to come to an end. That should be a good thing, right? But now St. John is saying, God’s wrath is coming. God’s wrath is coming. Because if you remember when we went through the prophets, what happens after the exile ends? Judgment. God visits His people. God returns, like they want, to the temple. But as we said before, when God visits His people, it’s not like Grandpa coming over to visit, bringing toys for the kids and having tea. This is, when God comes to visit, some things are going to get sorted out, right? It’s more like, “Wait till your father gets home.” Because when he does, things are going to be put in order, right?

So there’s two sides to this. We’ve talked about this before, and this is another theme that happens throughout St. Luke’s Gospel, is that the gospel is good news for some people and not so good news for some other people, right? People who have been living high and living wickedly, it’s not good news for them. It’s not good news for them. The people who have been oppressed, the people who’ve been living in the hope that God would come to them and establish justice for them, it’s good news. And this is important that we always remember both sides of the gospel. The gospel isn’t just “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” It’s “God loves you, and there’s a way now. There’s a way now to be cleansed from your sins and to be reconciled to God.”

We’ve got to keep both pieces. It’s interesting to me, one of our resurrection troparia and father may remember which tone it is, because I don’t off the top of my head right now, but it says that “the women at the tomb who discovered Christ’s resurrection were bid to declare a warning that thou hast risen. O Christ”. Why is the fact that Christ has risen a warning? That’s not usually how we say, “Oh, it’s good news!”

Well, it’s good news for some people, or it could be very bad news. It wasn’t good news for the chief priests who murdered him. It wasn’t good news for Pontius Pilate. It wasn’t good news for the Roman Emperor at the time, unless they repented. And so that brings us to the second piece. What is it that St. John says they need to do in light of the fact that God’s wrath is coming also? They need to repent. And he clarifies. Repentance is not just, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Or, “Oops!”, right? That’s not repentance. It talks about bearing fruit of repentance. Bearing fruit of repentance. What does that mean? Repentance means actual change, actual transformation. Not guilt, not feeling bad, not disliking the consequences of something we did, but actual change.

For a good example that we’re going to see later in the Gospel of Luke. You look at Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus is a tax collector. Christ comes to his house. We tend to focus again on the first part of that. “Oh see, Jesus even loves tax collectors and sinners. Isn’t that wonderful?” But why does Jesus rejoice at the end? Jesus rejoices at the end because Zacchaeus says to Him, not just, “Welcome to my house and thank you for loving me”, but “because of the love you’ve shown me, everyone who I’ve stolen from, I’m going to go pay them back five times what I took.” Jesus’s love of Zacchaeus transforms Zacchaeus, and that’s why Jesus rejoices and says salvation has come to his house because of the transformation that happens in Zacchaeus’s life.

So, St. John is saying to these people, baptism isn’t sort of your e-ticket, right? Like, “Oh, man, I’ve done a lot of bad stuff. Well, I know. I’ll go get baptized, my sins will be forgiven, and then I’ll be all clear. Fire insurance, right? I’ll go to heaven instead of going to hell, right?” They didn’t even have that concept. But he’s saying, “That’s not it. If you’re really here because you’re fleeing the wrath, the cup, because you’re worried, because you’ve realized you’re sinners, then you need to not only be baptized to receive forgiveness of sins, but you need to repent. And that needs to change you and transform your life.”

And then what’s the second thing he counsels them about? “Number one, don’t think that just because I’m going to baptize you now you’re free and clear, you don’t need to change how you’re living. But number two, don’t say we have Abraham as our father.” Because again, God is returning. God is going to issue judgment, and we’re going to see this again and again in St. Paul’s epistles, for a lot of the people living in Judea at this time, “We’re descended from Abraham. We’re God’s chosen people. We’re the good guys.” Just automatically, just automatically, “Those Romans who are the bad guys, right? We’re God’s chosen people.”

And so, St. John says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you may be descended from Abraham, but if God wanted to give Abraham children, God could give him children from the rocks. God could just make children for Abraham. He doesn’t need you to have a people. So don’t put your faith in that.” Paul, of course, is going to go much more in depth with that. He’s going to point out, “Where in the Torah does it say that the people who receive the Torah are blessed? It’s not the people who hear the law or receive the laws, it’s the people who do the law who are blessed.” Doesn’t matter who your father or your grandfather was, that’s not going to get you in by itself.

And then he tells them, “This is your moment of decision right here. The ax is already at the root of the trees. I’m not here to tell you that very soon judgment is going to come. It’s coming now. You need to repent today. You need to repent now, not put this off, not plan for tomorrow. This is something that needs to happen now. Today is the day of repentance.” And then ultimately, again, judgment. “Therefore, every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

So the people asked him, saying, “What shall we do then?”

So, he’s at least successful in getting them scared, in unsettling them, which is sometimes what we have to do. There’s an old saw about preaching, at least in the Protestant world, that part of the job of a preacher is to comfort those who are troubled and to trouble those who are comfortable. That’s what St. John is doing here. He’s got a lot of people who are comfortable. Comfortable because they’re descended from Abraham, comfortable because they think, “Oh, well, if I come and be baptized, then I’m okay.” And he’s saying, “Oh, no, no no!” He’s troubling them some. They’re troubled, “What shall we do?”

He answered and said to them, “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.”

It’s interesting, again, we’ve talked before about, for example, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, the parable of the sheep and the goats. And I’ll say, it again, because it bears repeating. When each of us stands in front of the judgment seat of Christ, one day, there’s not going to be a theological exam. It’s not going to be, do you believe XYZ? Right? Because once we’re sitting in front of Christ, even people who weren’t Christians are going to suddenly believe XYZ right? I mean, “We’re told every knee is going to bow, every tongue is going to confess that Jesus is the Lord.”

So it’s not going to be “Do you believe Jesus is the Lord?” “Oh, true. Yeah, I did.” The standard we’re given by which will be judged is by what we’ve done. And not some lofty like, “Well, I built 20 monasteries,” some great heroic thing. This is very simple. This is very simple. This is something anyone could do. You have food, someone else doesn’t, give them some of your food. You have extra clothing, someone else doesn’t have any, you give them what extra you have. It’s very simple. A lot of people he’s talking to are peasants. They’re not going to go out and endow the temple. They don’t have anything to do any of this. But this is very simple. This is what God is looking for.

And notice again, this is the fruit that he’s talking about. Why is it called fruit? Well, fruit grows off of a tree. And you look at the fruit and that tells you what kind of tree it is. It’s produced. And so when you produce this kind of fruit, that shows who you are. It shows what’s going on inside your heart, what’s going on inside your soul, that shows who you are. So this is what they need to do. This is the fruit of repentance they need to produce.

Then tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?”

Remember, tax collectors, they’re about as bad as you get. It’s not just that they hated the IRS like we do, right? Nobody is a big fan of the IRS, but these tax collectors, remember, we’ve talked about this before, but the way the Roman government did taxation was they would say to or a governor, either on his own or from word passed down from above him, would say, “Okay, I need to raise X amount of funds.” So he would go to his tax collectors and say, “Okay, in your district here you have X number of people, I want you to get me this much money.” The tax collector’s job was to get that much money. Didn’t matter how he did it, didn’t matter who he got it from, he didn’t have to be fair, right? And it was his neck if he didn’t get the amount of money he was required to get. So if he had to turn someone over to be executed by the Romans in order to make an example out of them, to get the money out of everybody else, he’d do it.

And the way this was incentivized, right? You’d say, “Well, who would want to do that?” Especially if you’re Jewish. Why would you want to work for the Romans? Why would you want to do that? Well, if you collected more than you were required to collect, you got to keep it. You got to keep it. So this was a way for someone who’s a peasant, not a Roman citizen, if you’re willing to sell out your people and work for the Romans, it’s a way to get rich. You’re told to collect 20 talents, you collect 40, you’re 20 talents richer. So this is why not only are they traitors to their people, not only are they collaborators with the Romans, but they’re basically thieves and extortionists. They’re threatening these people with punishment by the Roman authorities in order to take their money and keep it for themselves.

So these tax collectors come to be baptized, right? They got a lot of sins that need forgiving so they’re there to be baptized. They say to St. John, “What should we do?”

And he said to them, “Collect no more than what is appointed for you.”

Now, that seems obvious. Just collect what they tell you. But notice, how are they supposed to make a living?

If they only collect exactly what the Roman governor tells them to collect, that means they’re going to give everything they collect to him. So this isn’t quite the easy command it looks like. You’d think he’s saying, “Just be honest.” He’s not really saying, “Just be honest.” He’s basically telling them, you need to stop billing your people entirely. You need to find another way of making a living besides being a tax collector.

Likewise, the soldiers asked him, saying, “And what shall we do?” So he said to them, “Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages.”

Notice, what’s the temptation here again? Extortion. Right? These aren’t Roman soldiers. He’s not preaching to Gentiles at this point. Yet these are like the temple guard. The Romans allowed the Jewish authorities to have a certain number of temple guard, because they couldn’t guard the temple, because they’re Gentiles, they can’t go into the temple complex. So the accommodation was they were to have a certain small unit made up of Jewish people who could then go in and guard the temple to make sure nobody tried to barge into the Holy of Holies or anything similar, or go where they weren’t supposed to go. So these are those soldiers. But because these are one of the few groups of people among the Judeans who are allowed to carry weapons, allowed to carry armor, they’ve got a military unit. What’s the temptation? They’re not getting paid a lot. So the temptation is to take bribes, to extort money. So this is what St. John is telling them. This is what you need to be content with what you get paid. Serve your function. Don’t intimidate people, don’t extort money. Don’t take bribes.