Isaiah 11.1-10; Matthew 3. 1-12
‘He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.’
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Divine judgement: this is the traditional focus of the Church’s liturgy on the Second Sunday of Advent. Today, we are presented with the theme of judgement, and especially as it is articulated by the Hebrew prophets.
In the first reading, we hear the prophet Isaiah prophesy about God’s anointed, one who will delight in the fear of the Lord, who will strike the earth with judgement, and bring an end to the wicked. And in the Gospel, John the Baptist, the last in the line of the Hebrew prophets, proclaims his message of repentance, as he warns the Pharisees, whom he calls a brood of vipers, about the wrath to come. His message of a coming judgement is peppered with quite threatening language: unfruitful trees being chopped down by axes, and then thrown into fire; and the promise of one who will come with fire to clear out all the chaff.
To what is all of this language about judgement pointing? Who is the one that will be encountered in all of this? A great destroyer? Someone to be feared? Is all of this language about judgement ultimately pointing to something that we really ought to try and avoid?
We certainly get that kind of impression from some presentations of the Christian Gospel, which say that God is really quite angry with us all, but the good news is that Jesus, our saviour, is a kind of divine fire blanket, who protects us from God’s fiery judgement, so that it doesn’t touch us?
But the question that really matters is, what is the purpose of God’s judgement? Is it a blaze of punitive retribution? Or is it rather the furnace of purifying and forgiving love?
This fire certainly does not seem to be something that John the Baptist would encourage us to avoid in today’s Gospel. He proclaims that the baptism we receive from Christ is a baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire.
There is an oblique reference to what is received in this baptism in the first reading this morning. The prophet Isaiah speaks of one who will be anointed with the sevenfold gift of the spirit. One upon whom the Spirit of the Lord shall rest, a spirit that has six further aspects which are listed in three pairs: wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, and knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
These are the seven spirits which are mentioned in the Book of Revelation as seven burning lamps before the throne of God. And there is a rather beautiful tradition of interpretation which connects these burning lamps of the sevenfold spirit of God with the Menorah. The Menorah consisted of one central lampstand, which had three lamps to the left, each of which was connected by a curved branch, which intersected the central lampstand, with three corresponding lamps on the right. The central lampstand, so the tradition goes, represents the Spirit of the Lord, and the six other lamps, in three pairs, represent wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, and knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
In other words, the fire of which John the Baptist speaks in this morning’s gospel simply is the Holy Spirit. It is the fire of divine love. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, this fire of divine love is not safe, but it is good.
Think, for example, of Moses’s encounter with God in the fire of the burning bush. He is commanded to not approach too closely, but to take off his sandals, for the ground upon which he is standing is holy, and so he is afraid to look upon this marvellous sight. But, the fire does not consume the bush, and the voice which speaks from within the fire is one of compassion. It is the voice of the God who has beheld the affliction of his people, and has appeared so that he might redeem them.
The fire of God’s presence is not destructive, rather, it is liberative. But it is also holy.
Indeed, during this season of Advent, as we prepare for our celebrations of the birth of Christ, it is appropriate to consider St Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. Gregory was a late fourth-century bishop and theologian in what is now Turkey. He wrote that what Moses saw prefigured the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘Just as on the mountain,’ he says, ‘the bush burned but was not consumed, so also the Virgin gave birth to the light and was not corrupted.’
The fire of God’s awesome presence is not something to be feared. It is a gift that we ought to welcome, because it is not something that destroys, but something which brings to birth the light of God’s word within each of us.
But where does this leave us in terms of today’s theme of divine judgement?
The Prophet Isaiah foretells of a time when the one anointed with the fire of God’s spirit will judge the poor with righteousness, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He will put an end to wicked ways, so that there will be peace and harmony in the world, and the wolf will lie down with the lamb. This is a judgement that is restorative, not punitive. It is a justice that is not retributive, but distributive. In other words, it is a judgement whose purpose is to bring life in all of its fullness.
Which means that the fire of God is encountered by us as judgement insofar as it is the purifying flame of forgiving love. Our God is a consuming fire, says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, because his love is a transformative one. We ought to welcome the fire of God’s judgement, not avoid it, because it is the effect of his love burning up all that is unloving and unlovely in us. Its effect is like that of a gardener tending to a vine, cutting away all that is unfruitful, and burning it up, so that what is left can truly live and be fruitful.
This season of Advent is a time for us to be open to God’s judgement. It is a time to be vigilant and alert, to see our present lives within the horizon of Christ’s return in glory, when he will judge the quick and the dead. We must welcome the fire of his loving and forgiving judgement now, because if we don’t it will arrive as quite a shock in the age to come. As St Paul explained it to the Church in Corinth, the day of Christ will reveal the work of our lives, as by fire, and, if our work is burned, we will suffer loss, we ourselves will be saved, ‘but only as through fire.’