True and False Repentance-Matthew 3

Wrong and Right Repentance (powerpoint). “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 3:2). In Matthew 2 we contrasted The Two Kingdoms of King Jesus with King Herod. In Matthew 3 we contrast true repentance with false repentance, which is very common. Some reflections after my sermon:

• Think things through thoroughly (TTTT) until the day of your death feels just like any other ordinary day to you.
• True repentance feels no sense of any personal righteousness after repentance.
• Christians get repentance wrong when they feel righteous and superior to those who do not repent.
• Repenting to get the benefits of the kingdom of God–rather than God Himself–is NOT the gospel and NOT true repentance.
• Repentance is often taught as giving up or stopping what you really like and want. This is wrong repentance–feeling a loss of the sin repented of rather than hating the sin.
• The church or a Christian’s sin against you is no excuse for you to justify your sin and not repent.
• “To truly become a Christian we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.” Tim Keller, Prodigal God.

Questions:

• Can you tell the difference between true and false repentance? Between the benefits of the kingdom of God and God Himself? Do you repent to get the benefits of the kingdom of God or to get God Himself?
• Do you repent to receive the kingdom of God? Or do you perceive the kingdom of God and repent?
• Is who you are and what you do and say in sync with each other?

“In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea” (Mt 3:1). A vague beginning. What days? How long since Joseph had moved the family to Nazareth? What has it been like for Jesus to grow up? What is his relationship with his mother and father? What kind of education has he received? What brings him into Judea? Why might he consider undergoing the baptism of John? These are all good questions, but not interesting to Matthew, which is a reminder that none of the gospels—including Luke’s, which tells us more about Jesus’s early life—pretend to be biographies. This is the story of God with us. The abrupt transition from learning that Jesus will be called a Nazarene to the sudden appearance of John reminds us that “in those days” is God’s time.

The reticence of the gospels frustrates us, but that frustration is necessary if we are to be trained to be good readers, disciples, of this man. In the gospel of John we are told that Jesus performed many signs that “are not written in this book,” but the ones we have are shared so that “you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:30–31). Matthew and John are not writing to provide information about which we can make up our mind, but rather they tell us what we need to know to be drawn into the kingdom of God. Yet our imaginations can go wild desiring to fill in what we can only regard as the gaps in the story. One of the forms that imagination takes in modernity is speculation about Jesus’s “messianic consciousness.” Did Jesus know he was the Messiah, and what kind of Messiah did he think he was? Attempts to answer these ill-formed questions often involve trying to show how Jesus reflected or was different from the developing Judaism that was beginning during his life. It is important to remember that what we now call Judaism became a reality only after the destruction of the temple. The investigation of the relation of Jesus to Judaism has taught us much about how “Jewish” Jesus was, and that is to the good, but attempts to “get behind the gospels” betray a prideful attempt to get a handle on Jesus. Matthew shows no interest in Jesus’ subjectivity, and neither should we.

Matthew provides no connecting story to prepare us for the appearance of John the Baptist. That Jesus comes from Nazareth (Mt 2:23), however, may help us understand John’s significance. Nazarenes were those in Israel whose life was dedicated completely to God. Thus, Samson describes himself as a Nazirite from his mother’s womb (Judg 16:17), indicated by the sign that “a razor has never come upon my head.” Nazarenes were called to live lives of holiness not unlike the role of monks in Christianity. John is not explicitly described as a Nazarene, but he seems to have shared much with those so designated in Israel’s past.

John was the one capable of first recognizing Jesus (Lk 1:5–25). Even while in Elizabeth’s womb John “leaped for joy” in the presence of Mary’s life-filled womb (Lk 1:44). At his circumcision, John’s father, Zechariah, is filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesies, proclaiming that God has raised up a mighty savior from the house of David (Lk 1:68–69). For a time, some may have thought that savior to be John, but God gifted John with the ability to recognize that the long-expected Messiah has come in Jesus.

What a strange figure John must have been. He appeared in the wilderness of Judea. He was dressed in camel hair with a leather belt around his waist. He lived on locusts and wild honey (Mt 3:4). His dress reminds us of Elijah, who is described as “a hairy man, with a leather belt around his waist” (2 Kgs 1:8). Elijah, the prophet who was taken to heaven in a chariot without dying, was long expected to be the one to return to pronounce judgment as well as to inaugurate the new age. The OT ends with this admonition:   “Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse” (Mal 4:4–6).

John the Baptist is this Elijah. Jesus explicitly identifies John with Elijah (Mt 11:14). Moreover, in response to John’s query if Jesus is the one to come, Jesus answers: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (Mt 11:4–6). The jubilee year, the restoration of land and people outlined in Lev. 25 and interpreted by Isa. 61, the long-expected overturning of injustice that John said was coming—all these Jesus claims are accomplished in his ministry.

John is in the wilderness eating food that can only be gathered. John, as Elijah, recapitulates the wilderness wanderings that Israel experienced after its exodus from Egypt. Israel’s experience in the wilderness was at once a punishment for its apostasy as well as the place of its formation. As is so often the case, God’s punishment of Israel was also a gift through which it might learn how wonderful it is to be chosen by God. In the wilderness Israel learned to be dispossessed of possession so that it might learn to be led by God’s fiery cloud as well as to live on food that came only as gift. Thus in Amos 2:10–11 God reminds his people: Also I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite. And I raised up some of your children to be prophets and some to your youths to be nazirites. Is it not indeed so, O people of Israel?

John’s sermon: “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 3:2). John is the embodiment of what it means for Israel to repent. He is the fulfillment of Isa 40:3. Israel can expect the voice of one crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord (Mt 3:3). It is not surprising, therefore, that the people from Jerusalem and all Judea, as well as all the regions along the Jordan, went out to him (Mt 3:5). He was long expected. Moreover, they confessed their sins and were baptized in the river Jordan (Mt 3:6).

What does it mean for John to call for repentance? Our temptation is to think of repentance in individualistic terms, but John is a prophet of Israel. He represents God’s decisive action on behalf of Israel to save Israel from its failure to live as God’s people. That John baptizes in the Jordan is a reminder of Israel’s baptism in Exodus by Moses’s parting of the waters. Israel had to face death as it walked across the dry land between the walls of water. John’s baptism calls Israel again to face death that it might live. Repentance is about the life and death of the people of Israel.

Live as God’s holy people. The repentance John calls for is the same repentance that Jesus preaches (Mt 4:17). It is the call for Israel to again live as God’s holy people, a holiness embodied in the law, requiring Israel to live by gift, making possible justice restored. To be called to such repentance is always a challenge. John Howard Yoder says:

“The kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe the good news!” To repent is not to feel bad but to think differently. Protestantism, and perhaps especially evangelical Protestantism, in its concern for helping every individual to make his own authentic choice in full awareness and sincerity, is in constant danger of confusing the kingdom itself with the benefits of the kingdom. If anyone repents, if anyone turns around to follow Jesus in his new way of life, this will do something for the aimlessness of his life. It will do something for his loneliness by giving him fellowship. It will do something for his anxiety and guilt by giving him a good conscience. So the Bultmanns and the Grahams whose “evangelism” is to proclaim the offer of restored selfhood, liberation from anxiety and guilt, are not wrong. If anyone repents, it will do something for his intellectual confusion, by giving him doctrinal meat to digest, a heritage to appreciate, and a conscience about telling it all as it is: So “evangelicalism” with its concern for hallowed truth and reasoned communication is not wrong; it is right. If a man repents it will do something for his moral weakness by giving him the focus for wholesome self-discipline, it will keep him from immorality and get him to work on time. So the Peales and the Robertses who promise that God cares about helping me squeeze through the tight spots of life are not wrong; they have their place. BUT ALL THIS IS NOT THE GOSPEL. This is just the bonus, the wrapping paper thrown in when you buy the meat, the “everything” which will be added, without taking thought for it, if we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness!” (Yoder 1971, 31–32)

“But all this is not the gospel” jars us. We think we must know what repentance is. But Yoder reminds us, just as those who heard John the Baptist, that God gets to determine the character of repentance. John was not offering a better way to live, though a better way to live was entailed by the kingdom that he proclaimed was near. But it is the proclamation of the “the kingdom of heaven” that creates the urgency of John’s ministry. Such a kingdom does not come through our trying to be better people. Rather, the kingdom comes, making imperative our repentance. John’s call for Israel to repent is NOT a prophetic call for those who repent to change the world, but rather he calls for repentance because the world is being and will be changed by the one whom John knows is to come. To live differently, moreover, means that the status quo can be challenged because now a people are the difference.

Why he refuses to baptize the Pharisees and Sadducees (Mt 3:7). John’s condemnation of the Pharisees and Sadducees in some ways seems odd. The Pharisees and Sadducees represented alternative ways to negotiate the keeping of Israel’s law under Roman occupation. John’s refusal to baptize these leaders of the people anticipates Jesus’s biting critique of how these so-called authorities fail to lead lives congruent with their advocacy of God’s law. As we shall see, Jesus accuses them of attempting to make God’s gifts to Israel a possession rather than a task. John says that they assume that being progeny of Abraham is sufficient to insure their status (Mt 3:9a). As a result, they fail to bear fruit worthy of the repentance made possible by the coming kingdom (Mt 3:8). Jesus is the progeny of Abraham capable of raising children of promise from the stones themselves (Mt 3:9b).

John’s condemnation of the Pharisees and Sadducees will be extended by Jesus throughout his teaching and healing ministry. Matthew’s gospel reports a string of controversies occasioned by Jesus’s ministry that eventually results in the conspiracy to put him to death. Accordingly the leaders of Israel seldom appear in a favorable light in Matthew’s gospel, inviting us to assume that the Jews rejected Jesus. Yet Jesus and his followers are Jews. Indeed Jesus’s understanding of the righteousness required by the law may well have been quite similar to that of the Pharisees, who attempted to maintain the observance of the law in a very hostile context. It is not what the Pharisees and Sadducees say that John and Jesus condemn; but rather it is the inconsistency between their lives and what they commend. Every tree must bear good fruit, according to John, or it will be thrown into the fire. Drawing on prophetic condemnation of Israel’s refusal to trust in God, John says the ax now threatens the very root of the tree. Israel has often been pruned by God, and the pruning has even meant exile. Yet God had never abandoned his love for Israel, creating it anew through suffering. John’s prophetic condemnation of Israel is but the form that God’s care of Israel takes—from stones, indeed from hearts of stone (Ezek. 11:19), God will raise up his people again. Some of those stones, we will discover, are Gentiles who are grafted, according to Paul in Rom. 9–11, into the life of Israel.

Since the Protestant Reformation it has often been alleged that Paul’s account of the relation of law and gospel, as well as his understanding of the continuing status of the people of Israel, is at odds with Matthew’s gospel. Yet Paul maintains, as does Matthew, that Jesus is about Israel’s redemption. Thus Paul in Rom. 9:30–33 elaborates John’s appeal that God is able to raise up a people from the stones (Mt 3:9), because the stone turns out to be Jesus:

What then are we to say? Gentiles, who did not strive for righteousness, have attained it, that is, righteousness through faith; but Israel, who did strive for the righteousness that is based on the law, did not succeed in fulfilling the law. Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, “See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

For Matthew and Paul it is not a question of law or gospel, but rather it is a question of Jesus; Jesus has come to draft us into the promise, into the story of Israel. When Christians presume that we are superior to the people of Israel, we ironically, like the Pharisees and Sadducees, claim a status rather than a calling. John refuses to baptize the Pharisees and Sadducees because they have not borne “fruit worthy of repentance.” Surely it is the same presumption of status that led to the Christian persecution of Jews. No doubt, on this side of the Shoah, Christians rightly read and hear texts about “the ax . . . lying at the root of the trees” with apprehension and guilt. But guilt is seldom a useful position to assume for a faithful response to God’s word. Far more important is that we respond, as John demands, to the one who has come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.

John is the end of the prophets. He has come to prepare the way for the one who is God’s refining fire. John’s baptism is not the baptism that Jesus will charge his disciples to take to the nations. That baptism, the baptism into the life and death of Jesus, awaits Jesus’s destiny, which is death by crucifixion. John knows that the one to come is “more powerful” because he will have, as we will learn, the authority to forgive sins. Only the Son of God can have that authority. John’s humility is not feigned. He is the forerunner calling Israel to a repentance made possible and necessary by Jesus.

John’s description of Jesus’s task challenges all attempts to characterize his ministry in a manner that leaves the world as it is. John’s sermon is the apocalyptic announcement anticipating Jesus’s account of the destruction that accompanies God’s judgment in Matt. 24. The new age begun in this man requires that the chaff of our lives be burned away. That fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit, is the fire of a love so intense that we fear its grasp. Yet it is the love unleashed in Jesus’s life—the life into which we are baptized—that, as Paul tells us in Rom. 6, frees us from the sin revealed through the law but from which the law cannot in itself deliver us. A people freed by love, which is Jesus himself, can live with the joy that comes from no longer being subject to the fear of death.

Jesus comes from Galilee, from relative safety, to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. The one who is free of sin, the one for whom it is John’s whole mission to announce, comes to be baptized by John. We should not be surprised then that John recognizes it is he who should be baptized by Jesus. Yet Jesus, speaking for the first time in Matthew’s gospel, tells John that he must undergo his baptism in order “to fulfill all righteousness.” Jesus, who is the very embodiment of justice, of the law, submits to the law so that we might see justice done. This gives us a foretaste of Jesus, who is life itself, submitting to death so that death may be conquered once and for all.

John consents and baptizes Jesus. The heavens open, and Jesus, like Israel coming through the sea, sees the Spirit descending like a dove and hears a voice declaring: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This is Jesus’s coronation. The Father anoints the Son to rule over the nations. Jesus is the son decreed in Ps. 2:7–9: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”   Jesus is unleashed into the world. His mission will not be easy, for the kingdom inaugurated by his life and death is not one that can be recognized on the world’s terms. He is the beloved Son who must undergo the terror produced by our presumption that we are our own creators. He submits to John’s baptism just as he will submit to the crucifixion so that we might know how God would rule the world. His journey begins. Matthew would have us follow.

Reference: Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.