Mark 1:1-8

A different interpretation of the ministry of John the Baptist

My first point today considers the implications of Richard Rohr's Advent thoughts. Rohr is an internationally known, contemporary American Christian speaker and writer. As a Franciscan friar he was ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1970. The following year he established Cincinnati's 'New Jerusalem Community' and in 1986 he founded the 'Center for Action and Contemplation' in Albuquerque where he continues to serve as its Founding Director. He is both controversial and inspirational and this year's Advent comment is no exception.

 Richard Rohr's statement is both simple yet profound: "The Word of God confronts, converts, and consoles us - in that order. The suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great now to settle for any infantile gospel or any infantile Jesus."

 In the face of free falling membership across all the traditional and institutional churches in Britain, it is imperative that we rethink our Christian theology. We need to look critically at what the Gentiles of late 1st century Christianity did to the traditions, teachings and experiences of the original Jewish Christian sect that followed the teaching and life style of Jesus of Nazareth. And we need to do this to try to rediscover the authentic Jesus who is always relevant to the world in every generation.

 I suggest that we need to think afresh about our inherited theology concerning the Christmas story. For the sake of the future of the Christian Church, we need to give up simplistic ways of approaching and interpreting the story of the babe in the manger.

 We urgently need to get back to the uncomfortable and challenging Jesus of history - to the man of Nazareth who confronts, converts, and consoles us in that order.

 We need to rediscover the Jesus who lived on the edge and who walked the dirty smelly streets and alleyways of towns and villages such as Bethany, Bethsaida, Capernaum, Gennesaret, Nazareth and Jerusalem.

 My second point is that it is significant that Mark's Gospel begins, not with Jesus of Nazareth but with John the Baptist. One of the leading contemporary scholars specialising in the history of the Roman Empire in the century before the birth of Jesus and the century after the execution of Jesus is John Dominic Crossan.

 Crossan suggests that the real concern of John the Baptist was not that of an overtly 'pious' campaign to bring Jews to repentance to release them from the impact of original sin as many latter day Gentile Christians seem to think. For a start, Judaism did not and still does not acknowledge any sense of original sin, only that all are born free and responsible for the choices that we make in life.

 Crossan's research leads him to conclude that the driving issue for John the Baptist was Herod Antipas' privatisation of the fishing on the Lake of Galilee. Jews believed that their God had given the land, including the lakes, to them as their birthright and the actions of Herod Antipas were profoundly disturbing acts of personal and religious disinheritance.

 Antipas was a collaborator with the Roman occupation military and economic forces, ruling Galilee from 4 BCE to 39 CE as a client state of the Roman Imperial Empire. In 18 CE Antipas built a new capital city for Galilee, the city of Tiberias, on the shores of Lake Galilee.

 But to pay for its construction, he privatised the Lake of Galilee and levied a tax upon all the fish caught. This took away the god-given birthright of Jewish fishermen to the Lake and to its fish.

 In the book called "Antiquities", written by Josephus in the latter part of the first century CE, Antipas is said to have further angered faithful Jews by knowingly building Tiberias over Jewish tombs. This was against both the written Torah and the oral traditions of the Jews.

 The thinking of 1st Century Judaism, as it had been for centuries before, was fashioned within political and religious nationalism and self-interest. We misunderstand all that John the Baptist stood for if we ignore his political and religious context. Instead, we often over spiritualise his ministry and put it into a Christian rather than a Jewish context. His message and ministry were directly related to the abuse of privilege and power that resulted in the privatisation of the Lake of Galilee.

 John the Baptist was a religious leader, possibly a member of the Essene Jewish sect, calling for spiritual repentance that was symbolised in water baptism. But it was not the kind of baptism and repentance proclaimed by the later gentile Christian communities as a washing away of 'original sin'. The repentance that John the Baptist called for was concerned with the Jewish Pharisaic understanding of holiness by separation.

 Throughout much of the history of Judaism, the belief was that God punished the nation with defeat in war and often followed by exile when the people ignored the Torah - the Law of their God. The other side of that coin was that God rewarded the Jewish nation with political, religious and economic success and self-determination for once again keeping all the laws of Moses.  Theirs was a carrot and stick - a rewarder and punisher type of God.

 John the Baptist was calling ordinary Jews to repent for letting go of the Torah that had resulted in the calamity of Roman occupation. In all probability, he believed that when sufficient people had returned to keeping the Torah, God would reward them with freedom from both Herod Antipas and the Roman Empire.

 John the Baptist also saw the national religious leadership of the Temple Sadducees as hypocrites, depending upon their descent from Abraham rather than by living by the Torah.

 In this process, John the Baptist condemned the tyrant Herod Antipas explicitly, and by implication, the oppression by the military might of Rome. Far from the great non-political 'spiritual' leader and forerunner of Christian tradition, John the Baptist was, in fact, leading a highly politicised religious movement against the Roman appointed tetrarch Herod Antipas.

 Unlike those of us brought up in traditional and institutional Christianity, such an understanding of all that John the Baptist worked for would not have been lost upon the early Jewish listeners and readers of the Mark narrative.

 And so, what has all this about John the Baptist got to do with the Christmas story? The radical political and religious agenda of John the Baptist was taken up and developed by his former disciple, Jesus of Nazareth.

 My third point is that this Christmas we again need to tell the wonderful warm and cuddly story of a babe born in a manger, sung to by angels and visited by shepherds and wise men from afar.

 It is a magnificent incarnational story packed with sacred truth but we need to tell it, not as historically accurate fact but as sacred mythos: something that never happened as it is told but something that happens every day in our experiences.

 Its truth is not in the story but in the actuality of God incarnate in a babe born into the dirt and grime of poverty, oppression and exploitation. Like it or not, its truth is our contemporary story that is lived out by millions of people each and every day.

 The real meaning and challenge of the Christmas story is not something that happens only once a year. Its truth is that the one God of all people and of all religions comes to us daily. It is the challenge of God incarnate in all whom we meet either personally or on the television news and in our newspapers.

 God incarnate is in the asylum seeker and refugee; in the hungry and the sick; in the so called 'fat cat' bankers and in our often derided politicians.

 God incarnate is in those public sector strikers this past week and even in Jeremy Clarkson who foolishly and very publicly suggested that they should be shot!

 God incarnate is in the homeless and in all who are prisoners of conscience and who will be recipients of our Amnesty letters again this Christmas.

 But to speak the truth of such a dirt and grime God incarnate at Christmas time appears to be offensive to so many people. What does seem to be acceptable is to rejoice in the story of long ago - as long as 'we' are not confronted with it as a dirt and grime reality of today that calls us to action on behalf of the poor, the marginalised, the outcast; the Palestinians whose homes are being bulldozed to make way for new Zionist settlements; the rejected and those falsely imprisoned by dictatorships and oppressive political regimes.

 In all sincerity I say to you, if you want to see God, do not look for God 'out there' or simply in the big events of life - just look at the person sitting next to you now and in that person you will see the same Spirit of God incarnate that indwelt Jesus of Nazareth.

 You will see the same Namaste Spirit of God indwelling those whom you like and in those whom you find very difficult to like!

 Look in a mirror and you will see the shekinah presence, the glory of the light and life of the indwelling Spirit of God looking back at you! I am not saying that you and I are God. We are not God, but God is incarnated within us. We remain responsible for and have to live with the errors that we make in  life. And those who commit criminal acts and attrocities against others remain especially accountable to society's justice and social punishment for their actions.

 However, the truth of the Christmas story is that the Spirit of God is incarnate within all people.This is the truth that is always relevant and it is to be lived day by day. The Christmas Season goes on 24/7 and for 365 days a year during which we can rejoice in the God that comes to us in those whom we will meet.

 In conclusion, today you have heard my Christmas sermon because this year I have chosen not to preach or to lead services over the Christmas weekend. This year I will not have to struggle with preaching Christmas Eve or Christmas Day sermons that will not offend too many people too much.

 Nor will I have to sing words of carols that are not only a misreading of the truth of the birth of Jesus but do much to undermine the Church and the transformational Christian message in our contemporary age.

 The 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' kind of carol puts the whole transformational political religious movement of Jesus of Nazareth and the daily incarnational truth of God visiting each one of us into the same category as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

 Is it any wonder that our contemporary world finds the church and its Jesus story irrelevant?

 Richard Rohr said, "The Word of God confronts, converts, and consoles us -in that order. The suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great now to settle for any infantile gospel or any infantile Jesus."

 For the future of the Christian church we need to face the issues: Jesus has left the manger; Jesus has grown up; and so must we.

 Copyright ©: 2011, Rev John Churcher. All rights reserved.