Here is John. He’s in the wilderness, baptizing a multitude of people. He’s preaching to them of repentance, the reorienting of one’s life, priorities, values, routines, thoughts, relationships, and finances around Jesus completely. And these people are confessing their sins in conjunction with being baptized.
Hence, when Pharisees and Sadducees are showing up to be baptized along with the crowds, John has nothing nice to say to them. “You brood of vipers,” he greets them (Matthew 3:7). “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” and “Do not say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’” he tells them. He has little to no faith in them that baptism will produce the fruit of a Jesus-oriented life. These religious leaders catch a lot of heat in the Gospels, and especially in Matthew, for finding too much meaning in their public image and in their Jewish heritage. In Jesus’ own teaching throughout Matthew’s Gospel, his word to describe religious leaders is “hypocrites,” that is, actors and pretenders.
So John meets them, not in the waters of baptism, but with a little sermon full of rich, and even frightening, images. Stones, trees, fruit, fields of wheat, a winnowing fork, an axe, a river, and a blazing hot fire.
I love the dramatic story these pictures are telling. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. John certainly seems to agree. Trees that grow and produce year after year. Trees that grace the landscape with a splash of color. Trees that wither and struggle. Trees that are no longer healthy enough for anything but to receive the axe and a new function as firewood. Then there’s the wheat fields. The fields are harvested and the wheat kernels are threshed and rattled loose from the wheat chaff. There’s a flowing river that washes and cleanses and renews. And there’s an unquenchable fire that consumes it all (3:9-12).
This word, unquenchable, might seem scary at first. The image of Jesus presiding over a fire that’s so hot it disintegrates everything it touches and no one knows how to put it out might unsettle us some. But that’s good. Jesus, and John with him, don’t need us to feel comfortable and at ease all the time. And trust me, we want the fire to be uncomfortably hot. A nice, mild, inoffensive birthday candle of a fire is probably not going to purify much. And the stuff Jesus wants to burn away is the same stuff we want burned away from our hearts. The stuff we’re embarrassed about. The impulses that control our words and actions and temperaments that we feel ashamed of a few minutes later. The broken feelings and decisions that lead to broken relationships. That stuff. That’s what Jesus wants to, and intends to, and is actively burning up in his unquenchable fire. Let a flutter of joy rise up in your heart at the good news that once Jesus gets ahold of that stuff and throws in his fire, it’s done for.
All this is from Jesus. He nurtures the tree and he chops the tree down. He sows the wheat and harvests the wheat and threshes the wheat. He washes and cleanses and renews. He sets it all on fire. He is hard at work in the gardens and wheat fields of our hearts and relationships and lives to nurture what belongs and to thresh away, or chop down or burn up, what doesn’t belong.
John the Baptist has a word for all this: baptism. This is what we were baptized into, the nurturing of what Christ plants within us. And the chopping down of everything that doesn’t.