I baptize with water. Okaaaaaaaaaay, that’s not a why. We don’t get the He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit until 7 verses later. And the eventual why we get is on the next day. John the Baptist baptizes so HE might be made known to Israel. In John’s Gospel the Baptist doesn’t have anything to do with repentance or forgiveness.
This is quite a contrast from Marks version which was read last week. In Mark, John the Baptist himself is forgiving sins. And he does so in Luke as well. Matthew equivocates that John’s baptism is for repentance, forgiveness he leaves for Jesus. By John’s Gospel however, none of that remains.
It would seem that the higher your Christology, the harder it is for mere humans to forgive sins. John’s Gospel doesn’t even have the Lord’s prayer in it. Not our job to even forgive sins against us. The disciples are able to, but only after they receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – so it’s not ever really them that do it.
We can’t have people forgive sins if our theology is that Jesus came into the world to save sinners – period, no other reason. To be fair John doesn’t even go that far. There are many different reasons why Jesus came in John’s Gospel. To do the will of the Father, to bring light to the world, to testify to the truth, to give eternal life, etc. Even when John does say that Jesus came to save, he’s speaking of the whole world, not individuals.
This led me to wonder what the other Gospels said about why Jesus came. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus came to preach the good news of the kingdom of God. Jesus also says he came to seek and save the lost. Jesus says this when people grumble about Jesus eating with sinners. This is a variation of Mark’s story when Jesus is critisied for eating with sinners. In Mark’s book, Jesus says that he came to call sinners, not the righteous.
I think the use of the word call here, rather than save, is Jesus summoning, or inviting, sinners to the banquet of the kingdom of God. I’ll remind you that the kingdom of God is NOT heaven. The kingdom of God that is to come is a new Jerusalem on earth. The kingdom of God among us is doing God’s will. Forgiving the sins done against us is doing God’s will as Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer.
For you see, God has already forgiven us. That is the good news. If only we could forgive others, if only we could forgive ourselves, then the kingdom would be here among us.
There is an amazing speech that Doctor Who gives to someone who is waging a war. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk!
The person he’s talking to does not believe the other side would stand down if she did, “not after all I’ve done.”
The Doctor responds, “You're all the same, you screaming kids, you know that? "Look at me, I'm unforgivable." Well here's the unforeseeable, I forgive you. After all you've done. I forgive you. I did worse things than you could ever imagine, and when I close my eyes... I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count! And do you know what you do with all that pain? You say this -- no one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain. Not on my watch.
This for me is a key point. ALL HAVE SINNED. We all hold somewhere, some version of that pain. No one is pure. Yet God has forgiven us. Humanity is in big trouble right now because far too many people turn that pain on others – or what may be worse, delude themselves into thinking they are pure and have no need of forgiveness and so have no need to forgive. It’s those OTHER people who have sinned.
That, my dear friends, has a lot to do with why the kingdom of God is still very far off in the future. So we wait. Advent is all about waiting. Waiting to celebrate the incarnation as well as waiting for the kingdom to arrive. In the meantime, do what you can to relieve the suffering of others. For we don’t even know what damage our pain can do.
