The Hope in Repentance
Sermon on Luke 3:1-6
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Ron Smith on Unsplash.]
One of the commentaries I read this week asks, in reference to the first verse and a half of our reading, “What has Rome to do with Jerusalem?”[1]
While that might not be how anyone in this room would have phrased the question, I imagine that most of us had a reaction of at least some perplexity about the point of all those historical names at the beginning of our gospel reading.
Why include them? What are they supposed to communicate to us?
On the surface, at least, they seem to offer a reference point for timeline purposes.
There has been a time jump in the narrative after the accounts of Jesus’ birth and childhood, so Luke relocates us with reference to the “15th year” of the ruling Caesar.
But if he’s just identifying the moment in history, wouldn’t that one reference point be enough? Why also list out the various ruling governors over the different regions inhabited by the Jewish people.
And why also draw in the reference to the chief priests? “What has Rome to do with Jerusalem?” Why mix references to political power structures with religious ones?
Clearly, this isn’t just about locating the narrative in the timeline.
Rather, I think it’s about locating us in the political and religious reality of the story: a reality that is fraught.
A fellow pastor this week referred to the list of leaders as describing an Israel that was “conquered and divided.”
Politically conquered by Rome, whose Emperor heads the list of dignitaries and whose (only non-Jewish) Governor, Pilate, held power in the pivotal region of Judea, but not in all of the former land of Israel...
because the region was also politically divided into regions after the death of Herod the Great, split between Herod’s ambitious but ineffective sons, who did not play nicely with each other.
Which was all for the best from the perspective of the Empire that could pit the petty leaders against each other and use it as justification for enforcing the Pax Romana.
And, by the way, the land was also religiously both conquered and divided, due to the interference of Rome in the Temple power structure.
Scholars believe that is why two chief priests are named: Annas and Caiaphas.
Annas had previously been high priest, but even after he was deposed by the Roman Pontiff some years before, he still wielded significant authority over the people although Caiaphas officially held the high priestly role.[2]
A schism of loyalties and authority that compromised the Temple’s integrity and exposed the corrupting power of Rome’s interference.
So, yes. Conquered and divided is a fair description.
Israel is a nation and a people subjected to a foreign power that split its territory and interfered with its religious leaders.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I try to put myself into that social and emotional headspace, it makes me feel pretty helpless.
The litany of names of men in power… none of whom I would have any reason to believe know or care about me…
The ability with a few words to evoke exactly how unreliable, petty, and broken the institutions that govern my society are…
It makes me feel like there is nowhere to reach out for stability or meaning-making.
Until… I notice something important about the first two verses of this reading:
All of the references to political and religious leaders, numerous as they are, are all part of a DEPENDENT clause.
They aren’t the point. These arbiters of power are not the ones doing the essential action.
As translator and commentator D. Mark Davis notes, “The dependent clause names all of the people in power with the regions over which they are empowered. The main verb, however, is that a word of God came into being, not to any of the political or religious luminaries of the day, but to a desert-dwelling John.”[3] (emphasis added).
It's the person in the wilderness, the man on the margins with no place or claim to institutional power structures, whom God chooses to fulfill the long-awaited prophecy and to proclaim the coming of God’s saving work.
It’s a re-orienting challenge to the opening assumption that it’s the power-players (whose dates of rule are chronicled in world histories) whose actions actually matter.
It’s a reminder that God’s pattern has often been to choose the unexpected prophet… the unimportant youngest son… the foreigner… the virgin peasant girl… to carry God’s vision of hope for the people.
But that’s not the biggest surprise that this passage has to offer.
No, that surprise comes in the particular way that hope is introduced into the fraught and corrupted scene established by the litany of leaders.
Given the conquered and divided reality of God’s people we might expect God’s message of hope in response to be a promise of coming freedom and restoration in the political and religious realms.
But instead, the promise of release comes via an unexpected road: REPENTENCE for the FORGIVENESS of SINS.
It sounds like another sudden shift in the narrative:
First, we get solidly placed into the world of empire and intrigue…
Then, we get the news that all of the power-players are just a side-show and the real event is happening with an rogue prophet in the wilderness proclaiming God’s word…
And now the focus is shifting again to issues of morality?… for the people on the margins??… who are already suffering subjugation and division???... they are to repent????
Because we hear a rebuking word when we hear “repentance” right?
Mental clips of a TV preacher banging on about a catalogue of sins that we have to regret and reject in order to be made right with God.
But that’s not what Luke’s original readers would have heard
They didn’t have the cultural baggage that we have in 21st Century America.
They had what the text actually says: the call to μετάνοια (metánoia), which literally means a change of mind.[4]
And had the explanation that this change was for the ἄφεσις (áphesis) of ἁμαρτία hamartía, which means freedom, or deliverance, or even divorce from mistakes that wander from the law of God.[5]
Which… feels a lot more continuous with what has come before:
Luke’s readers had been baited with the names of political and religious leaders because the elevation of those powers, the assumption that they are the central reality, represent, in fact, mistakes of mind that would cause the people to wander from the law of God…
And God’s proclamation of repentance through John is a call to the people to change their minds.
In Davis’s language to, “change the way you think about everything and keep going,” to “adopt a new way of thinking … akin to divorcing”[6] the old.
When we add the observation that the prophesy from Isaiah places the voice calling for preparation of God’s way in the wilderness – as in: as far as you can get from the worldly institutions of power – we get a sense of the contrast that Luke has presented.
Repentance for the forgiveness of sins looks like:
turning away from the patterns of thought that tell us structures of power define our world, and instead looking for hope in God’s action far away from those structures.
It looks like freedom from the belief that the hills and valleys we are confronted with are unchangeable, so that we can respond to the call to prepare a straight path for God’s work out in the wilderness.
It looks like divorcing our lives from the crooked ways of the world, with the assurance that, however powerless we might feel, we have God’s promise that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Luke locates the story in the framework of everything we are taught to find awe-inspiring and intimidating, and then he tells us we need to change the way we think about power because it gets in the way of us seeing what God is doing.
The God who shows up on the margins, to offer freedom.
The God who makes promises and fulfils them.
The God who calls us into hope.
Davis offers a final reflection about the different timeframes represented in today’s reading:
The initial prophecy of Isaiah,
And its fulfillment in John,
And the proclamation of this fulfilment by Luke to the early church,
And our own hearing of that proclamation in our time.
Each context is different, and it makes it hard to know how to interpret the apparently universal claim that “all flesh shall see God’s salvation.” But Davis offers this possibility:
“Perhaps it is not a claim in the literal or plain meaning of the term, but a word of hope that is rightly echoed in new voice in each situation of despair. It’s meaning may lie not so much in how it is fulfilled at any given moment in time, but in how true it is in every moment in time.”[7]
For what it’s worth, I think trusting in just such a word of hope is exactly the repentance that we need in our time and place. The new way of thinking that, whatever might be happening in the places of power in our time, we can trust that God working on the margins, for the salvation of all people, and calling us to prepare the way.
Thanks be to God.
[5] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g859/rsv/mgnt/0-1/, https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g266/rsv/mgnt/0-1/ and https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/12/all-flesh-shall-see-salvation-of-god.html
[7] Ibid.
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