In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." 

(Matthew 3:1)

There’s a thing that cropped up quite often when I was teaching. I’d see someone doing something wrong and call them out for it. Then they’d start to argue about it so I’d take them outside the room and they’d deny it. I was standing right there! I literally watched you do it. Then the tack would change. Usually to ‘I wasn’t the only one doing it’. That would necessitate a few more minutes - sometimes more patiently than others - that if what they were doing was wrong it didn’t matter how many other people were doing it: it was still wrong. There are whole hours I’m never going to get back. What did they think I was going to do if they simply confessed? Whip out a disintegrator gun and blast them to atoms? All I really wanted was for them to accept that they’d been behaving badly so we could move on. Trouble is that it’s so often hard to admit to being in the wrong. Even to ourselves

That’s what John the Baptist is doing in our text this morning. He’s calling on the people of Jerusalem and Judea to reflect on the things that are wrong in their lives, come down to the river and be cleansed before God. For some of what John says in this passage we have to bear in mind that he was an apocalyptic preacher. He believed that the world was ending, that God would be ushering in the end of the world and the beginning of a new one any moment now with all the destruction that would entail. Maybe that’s what he means when he says that the kingdom of Heaven has come near. The world didn’t end though and we’re two thousand years on so what does this passage mean to us?

“Repent! That’s John’s cry. The Church has managed to invest that word with a lot of negative baggage, often associated with fire and brimstone and great wailing and gnashing of teeth. “Repent! Repent ye sinners or ye are doomed! Doomed I tell ye!” In the Middle Ages it sometimes meant mortifying the flesh - literally whipping yourself: “I’m such a miserable sinner”. But what does repentance actually mean? It means ‘thinking again’. It means thinking again about the stuff in our lives that gets in the way of walking in the way of Christ; thinking again about the way we think about our lives and the lives of others; thinking again about our attitudes and what influences them.

That can be hard. None of likes to think we are wrong. Maybe that’s why John singles out the Pharisees and the Sadducees and is surprised they’ve turned up. These are the guys who take great pride in fulfilling the Law of Moses and in interpreting that Law. Surely these are the folk who must think they’re pretty well-in with God. They’ve carried out the commandments and studied them in depths. Yet here they are thinking again like all the others.

It does us no harm to now and then rethink what it means to be a Christian. To question how far we think it’s just rocking up to church on a Sunday morning rather than something that’s supposed to inform how we behave every day. To question how far we deep down want the Church to condemn sinners - not us of course - rather than welcome them. To question whether we really do love our neighbour if that neighbour is a man beaten by robbers on the road to Jericho. Or a homeless beggar on the streets. Or an asylum seeker making landfall in a rubber boat. Or slump-shouldered people shuffling forward in the queue for a foodbank. 

Repent. Think again. Think again how far we are beguiled by newspapers and the media to vaunt the rich and deem the poor to be failures; to condemn those on benefits as ‘scroungers’; to talk of how much people ‘are worth’ in terms of the size of their bank accounts rather than as precious and beloved children of God as I am. As you are.

Repent. Think again. It can be life-changing. One evening forty years ago - my last evening as an atheist - I had an experience that made me think again about where my life was going and why it mattered how I lived and how I treated people. I went for a walk and on that walk I realised that there IS a God. That it matters to God how I live and treat people because I matter to God. In that moment I felt an overwhelming sense of coming home. So here I am.

Repent. Think again. What is there to be afraid of? That God’s going to whip out a disintegrator beam and blast us to atoms? No. The message of the Cross of Jesus Christ is that we have nothing to fear if we come to God repenting our failings. That we are forgiven them. Why? What if it’s as simple as this? God is our father and he wants us to be the best people we can be? I’m a Dad. Some of the most wonderful moments of my life have been when people have said, “Oh. You’re Chris’s dad. He’s so polite and kind” Maybe God’s not so different.

But of course he is different. He knows what we’re going to rethink before we rethink it. He’s known it since forever. We can’t hide from him. So in these days of Advent let’s throw off all the burdens of guilt and self-doubt we have by facing them head on and handing them to God to deal with. Let us tread boldly the road to Bethlehem to meet the newborn Christ: the child in whom you are reborn, I am reborn and in whom the whole world knows rebirth.

Lord give us confidence to think again about what we value in life and to come to you with our failures knowing that through the Cross of your Son those failures are washed away and we can grow as your children

Preached at Baxter Hall Eastriggs and Annan Old Parish Church

Complete Service