There’s an Advent Hippie on the Christmas Highway

Christmas is just around the corner. I’m thinking of stuffed turkey, cranberry sauce, roast potatoes and Christmas pudding. Suddenly, without warning, I have a plateful of locusts and wild honey shoved under my nose.

Christmas is just around the corner.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

In the lane snow is glistening

A beautiful sight, I’m happy tonight,

I’m walking in a winter wonderland …

… skating on an ice rink and taking my kids to see Santa with his bagful of goodies and a hearty “Ho, ho, ho.”

Suddenly, without warning, the winter wonderland disappears and I hear a voice in a desert wasteland. It’s not Santa hollering, “Ho, ho, ho,” but John the Baptist shouting, “Woe, woe, woe!”

Christmas is party time, but John the Baptist is the ultimate Advent party-pooper. Before he is through, our heads are pounding with images of vipers, wrath, axes, and unquenchable fire, when all we really wanted was a chance to get to the church carol service to sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

There is a screech of brakes driving down the highway to Christmas. I see a hippie on the highway, yelling and waving and pointing wildly in the opposite direction. “Turn around. Not this way. That way!”

So why do many churches, both Roman Catholic and the majority of Protestant churches who use the Revised Common Lectionary (a three-year cycle of biblical readings for Sunday services), have two Sundays of Advent dealing with John the Baptist?

The Party-Pooper Who Comes Before the Party

Advent was wisely devised as a subversive interruption to the days before Christmas so that while celebrating Jesus’s first coming, we would not lose sight of His Second Coming. And there’s no better way to highlight Advent than to bring in the oxymoronic persona of John the Baptist.

John the Baptist brings to a grinding halt the secular countdown to Christmas. Notice how the market in the post-Christian Western world has almost entirely blanked out the season of Advent and put in its place a consumerist offering of soppy pseudo-Christmas so we can binge-shop our brains out, forgetting the terrifying reality of Jesus’s return.

John the Baptist is the archetypal hippie. He is a Nazarite, like Samson (Delilah’s boyfriend), so he has never had a haircut (Luke 1:15) to prove his total dedication to God. He has never touched booze from birth. He wears a designer shirt made of camel’s hair. He eats locusts and wild honey — Palestinian sushi! He lives in the desert.

His fire and brimstone preaching is as severe as his lifestyle and as prickly as his hair shirt. He preaches justice for the oppressed. He leads a protest movement. You can almost hear him sing Bob Dylan’s anthem, “Everybody Must Get Stoned.” And he sure doesn’t mean getting stoned on dope.

So why does every gospel writer introduce Jesus by talking about John? Why is it that in Luke’s gospel, he is twinned with Jesus even before birth, when in his mother’s womb, he “leaps with joy” when Jesus’s expectant mother walks into the room? Why John before Jesus? Why the party pooper before the party?

What’s the Point?

The party pooper is trying to make a point—like the hippie movement of the 1960s, which was horribly misguided but, in its own wild way, tried to bring reform. Protesting against the Vietnam War, the pretensions of elite society, and crass capitalism, the hippies, high on cannabis and LSD, were pointing to an alternative way of living. “Make love, not war” was their slogan, and “All You Need Is Love” was their song.

The hippie on the highway is pointing. (Pointing is bad manners, but nobody told John!) He is pointing in three directions.

First, he is pointing to the past. Anyone in Jesus’s day looking at John would have no doubt where he belonged: to the world of the Old Testament prophets. He dressed like Elijah, who wore “a garment of haircloth, with a leather girdle about his waist” (2 Kings 1:8). This was the “designer clothing” such prophets wore (Zechariah 13:4).

Just as the prophet Jeremiah was called by God while still in his mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5), John was filled with the Holy Spirit while still in utero (Luke 1:15). 

Just as the prophets began their careers when the “word of the Lord” came to them, Luke introduces John’s ministry with the catchphrase “the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness” (Luke 3:2). 

In Zechariah’s song, The Benedictus, John is called “the prophet of the Most High” (Luke 1:76). On one occasion, Jesus tells the crowds that John is ‘more than a prophet’ (Luke 7:26). But why did Jesus need a prophet to introduce Him? And why did John need to point to his prophetic predecessors from Israel’s past?

The Messiah

Several self-proclaimed messiahs were mucking around in Jesus’s day. All of them claimed to be sent by God. There was one sure way of checking the Messiah’s DNA: If he was the fulfilment of prophecies made hundreds of years ago, you could be sure he was no Johnny-come-lately but indeed the long-awaited Messiah of whom the prophets had spoken. The gospel writers understood Jesus’s entire life — His birth, ministry, death, and resurrection — to be the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.

Let’s just examine His birth.

• Isaiah of Jerusalem prophesied that the Messiah would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23).
• Micah prophesied that he would be born in Bethlehem one of the most insignificant towns in Judah (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6).
• Isaiah prophesied that he would be given gifts of gold and incense (Isaiah 60:6; Matthew 2:11).
• Hosea prophesied that the Messiah would have to flee into Egypt (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15).
• Jeremiah prophesied that innocent babies would be slaughtered (Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:18).
• Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet, prophesied the coming of John the Baptist (Malachi 3:11; Luke 7:27-8). In pointing to the past, the Advent hippie on the Christmas highway is clearly part of the good news of salvation, fulfilling the word of the prophets.

While one hand points to the past, the other points to the present. While one hand points to the Old Testament with its prophecies and promises, the other points to Jesus as fulfilling those prophecies and promises. 

Luke’s gospel develops an impressive parallelism between John and Jesus. He brings both mothers, Elizabeth and Mary, together. Both John and Jesus are conceived in “barren” wombs. Both have their birth announced by an angel. Both are in the desert. Both preach the good news.

As the bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as the midpoint of history, John the Baptist points to Jesus, the high point of history.

Warnings to the Religious People

But, more importantly, John is also preparing people for the Messiah’s coming. All four gospel writers apply Isaiah’s great prophecy to the ministry of John the Baptist. 

His is “the voice crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” John is preparing people for the Messiah by calling them to repentance. He points his finger at the crowds who have come for baptism. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee God’s coming wrath? Prove by how you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God” (Luke 3:7-8 NLT). 

In other words, “Don’t think your religion will save you!”

John points his finger at Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, for committing adultery with Herodias, his brother’s wife, and for many other wrongs he had committed (Luke 3:19). But pointing can get you into big trouble. John the Baptist goes to the guillotine for this and is beheaded. John’s actions were similar to those of the Old Testament prophets who repeatedly confronted kings and commoners with the “word of the Lord,” calling them to repentance.

Suddenly, the hippie on the highway turns his finger around and points it at you and me, saying “Shuv!” in Hebrew. In other words, turn around 180 degrees! This is what the Hebrew word “repent” literally means. “Turn!”

This is where the party pooper spoils our Christmas party. This is when Advent begins to sound like Lent with its sackcloth and ashes. “Repent!” The Greek word for “repentance” (metanoia) is best understood as a “change of mind leading to a change of behaviour.” The English word “repent” skews the meaning slightly because it conveys a sense of remorse. (The Latin Vulgate got it wrong, translating metanoeite as “Do penance” [paenitentiam agite)].)

But the biblical sense is clear. Think differently! Live differently! Yes, almost like the hippie movement — living an alternative lifestyle, pointing to a different reality, marching to the beat of a distant drummer.

Finding the Joy

Perhaps John has pooped on your Christmas party. It need not be so. You can still have the best Christmas celebration with the best Advent preparation. 

Mary’s response was a “leap of faith.” John’s response was a “leap of joy.” John is not such a killjoy after all. By pointing to Jesus, John is proclaiming good news. This is “good news of great joy,” the angel said to the shepherds.

This sense of supreme joy would compel Sir Alec Guinness, this most reserved and private of superstars, to run through a street in London and fall on his knees. In his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, the actor described one such scene:

I was walking up Kingsway in the middle of an afternoon when an impulse compelled me to start running. With joy in my heart, and in a state of almost sexual excitement, I ran until I reached the little Catholic church there … which I had never entered before; I knelt; caught my breath, and for 10 minutes was lost to the world.

Guinness was unable to explain his actions. He finally decided it was a “rather nonsensical gesture of love,” an outburst of great joy for his faith in Jesus Christ. The actor dashed into that church not long after March 24, 1956, when he converted from atheism to Christianity.

It was this sense of supreme joy that gripped C. S. Lewis while he was still an atheist. His autobiography Surprised by Joy is the story of his conversion to Christ. It is this supreme joy that gripped Johann Sebastian Bach as he wrote Jesu Meine Freude (“Jesus My Joy”) one of his greatest motets and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” one of his best chorales. Guinness, Lewis, and Bach had one thing in common: They had all discovered that life does not have a point unless it points to something, and the point of everything is God.

My prayer this Advent is that we will be surprised by joy unspeakable as we discover the direction the hippie on the highway is pointing us in.

 

Dr Jules Gomes,