Advent 2: The Preaching of John the Baptist

Jeff Garrison
Mayberry & Bluemont Churches
Matthew 3:1-12
December 7, 2025

At the beginning of worship:

Two preachers on their day off, fished at a river by a road. Before sitting on the bank, where they watched their corks with hope a fish would be soon tugging, they posted a sign by the road. It read, “The end is near! Turn yourself around before it’s too late.” 

A few minutes later a car flew by. Seeing the sign and the preachers, the driver yelled out, “Keep your religion to yourselves, you fanatics.” He hit the gas, sending rocks flying and dust swirling as he rounded the curve. 

A moment later, braking tires crunched over the gravel. Then came a big splash. 

One of the preachers looked at the other and said, “Maybe we should have just written, ‘Bridge Out’?”

The lectionary, on the second and third Sundays of Advent, focus on John the Baptist. At a time, we’re getting excited about Christmas joy, we hear the rantings of a crazy prophet calling us to repentance. 

Before reading the scripture:

Why do we only find the story of Jesus’ birth in two of the gospels, while the story of John the Baptist preparing the way for the Messiah shows up in all four of the gospels? And all four gospels link back to Isaiah, that voice howling out in the wilderness.^[1]Scripture demands we contend with the story of John the Baptist, even more so than the birth stories of our Savior. What are we being told here? How does the fire and brimstone preaching of John the Baptist prepare us for the loving message of Jesus? 

If we want to get to the good news, we must face the bad. Before we can accept a Savior, we must comprehend our own issues. We’re sinners. So, let’s listen to what John has to say to us. 

Read Matthew 3:1-12

I wonder about John’s message. It’s so harsh, maybe he should have toned down his words, like the two fishing pastors I told you about at the beginning of worship. Repeatedly, John talks of fire, and not the warming flames of a campfire, but the ominous fire like those recently experienced in Hong Kong where numerous high rises burned.^[2] John’s dangerous fire consumes and purifies. 

“You brood of vipers,” John calls the religious leaders of the day. That doesn’t sound very loving, does it? Jesus would never say that, would he? Actually, Jesus’ does. Twice in Matthew’s gospel.^[3] What does this phrase, which Matthew liked so much that he recalled it three times, mean? And how does this relate to a loving God? 

Law and gospel must go together. In scripture, law came at Sinai during the Exodus and the gospel came roughly1400 years later with the exemplary life, atoning death and glorious resurrection of Jesus. John is the last in a series of prophets who show our failure of abiding by the law as he calls us to clean up our acts. God is doing something new and marvelous. We need to be ready! All this talk about fire and calling people snakes catches their attention. It also catches our attention. We’re forced to examine our own failings so that we might repent and follow Jesus. 

Law and gospel, go together. To understand the story of scripture, we can’t just push off the “law” parts of the Bible and only focus on the gospel. The gospel makes no sense without the law. The gospel is about how God saves us from our failures, our sin. John provides those listening to his preaching with a choice. They can confess their sins and begin the process of repentance. Repentance means to turn around or to start in a new direction. They had to leave sin behind as they joyfully accept what new God activity within their midst. 

So, why does John call the religious teachers and leaders of the day a brood of vipers? That’s a harsh term. It conjures up nightmares, a den full of snakes, a place for Indiana Jones but not the rest of us. In the desert, you must be careful trying to find shade under a rock overhang or in a grotto or cave. Snakes tend to gather in such places to avoid the heat of the day. You might not want to mess with them. By using snakes as an illustration, John implies their words are poisonous. 

Consider this: both the leaders of the day and John took seriously the sins of the people. But the difference is that the leaders of the day taught that people must justify themselves before God through an elaborate system of sacrifices, whereas John twists the concern of sin around to where people confess their sins, so that they might be washed of them as symbolized in baptism.^[4]

All this comes back to God doing something new. With John the Baptist, God paves the way for his Son to come on the scene and to teach people a new way to live and to be human. To prepare for something new, people must admit their own sinfulness and to realize they long for something better. Of course, if we don’t think we need to be better, there’s a warning here. Judgment for transgressing the law hangs over our heads. If we ignore our sinfulness, we die to the law? Or, we accept and confess our sinfulness and embrace the grace that Jesus’ offers? Those are our choices.

Advent is the time for us to prepare for the loving tenderness shown by Jesus. If God redeems this world, if God promises a new heaven and a new earth, we should want to be ready. But to receive God’s gift, we must leave the past behind. We must be willing to examine deep within our souls and to offer up all that’s not godly so that we might be both cleansed of our sin and have the room to accept Christ into our hearts. We must be willing to allow ourselves to be transformed into something new and better. For Advent is a time not only to remember that Christ came, but that he will come again. We must be ready.

Your assignment for this week (and every week) is to examine yourself, your words, your thoughts, your actions. What have you done that’s not been Christ-like? Have you harbored bitterness or showed unkindness or said things which twisted the truth or belittled another? We all do such things. But we need to bring our guilt to God. That’s what John encourages. Get rid of the darkness by bringing it to the light. 

We must not just prepare ourselves; we should prepare the church, which, in the final event of history, becomes the bride of Christ.^[5]That means the church must confront all we’ve done that’s not holy, and there’s been a lot. From the crusades to the inquisition and witch-hunts, from the support of slavery and conquest to our tendency to huddle into crowds of similar people and turn our backs on the world for which Christ came and gave his life. The earthly church has not always been holy. 

We need to confess this! John’s call to the religious establishment of the day still holds. Are we willing to confess our shortcomings and to be open to what God is doing in the world? That means we must give up control, for this enterprise known as the church isn’t about us. It’s about God. It’s about us bringing glory to God as we serve as the hands and the feet of our Lord in the world. 

Is there joy in this passage? Yes, but we must get beyond the call to prepare, which John focuses on, and realize God’s activities which occur in the background. We trust in a God of resurrection. Even if the world destroys itself, God won’t let that be the final word. God wants to remake us. John’s role is to prepare us. Our role is to respond to John’s call to repentance so we might be open to what God is doing in our lives and in our fellowship. Confession and repentance may not be in favor in today’s secular world, but in the church, it’s where we begin. All of us need to take a deep look at ourselves and then turn to God and fall on our knees… Amen. 

---

^[1] Isaiah 40:3-5. Frederick Dale Bruner, The Christbook, Matthew 1-12 (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 2004), 88. 

^[2] ttps://abcnews.go.com/International/death-toll-climbs-146-hong-kong-high-rise/story?id=127977217

^[3] Matthew 12:34 and 23:33.

^[4] Bruner, 89.  Bruner attributes this idea of a shift from justifying to accusing to Matthew Henry’s Commentary (1721).

^[5] Revelation 21:2.