TODAY’s Gospel is the full-fat version of John the Baptist, not Baptist-lite. In common with Luke, Matthew uses a source that is not recorded in Mark or John, and it preserves for us an ominous conclusion (v.12) to the story of the Baptist’s emergence from the desert, and his part in proclaiming what Matthew calls “the kingdom of the heavens”.
We do not usually learn about the Good News in such a way. That warning about the cleaning out of the threshing-floor does not even sound like good news. Matthew uses a distinctive word found nowhere else (a hapax) for this image of judgment: diakathariei. The kath bit means cleaning; the dia bit tells us that the cleaning will be emphatic and thorough. Anyone who has ever done a clean-up job — on a mess, a wound, a muddy dog — which is subject to scrutiny and evaluation by someone else will know the anxiety that disrupts our equilibrium: “Did I do a good enough job, or am I in trouble here?”
The imagery is not difficult to decode. This is the last act of a farmer whose working year is over. After this, there will be no more grain to winnow. The kernels of wheat contain the nutrition and the promise of life. Chaff, on the other hand, is empty. It keeps the shape of the whole grain of wheat, and superficially resembles it. But it is hollow, and worthless for anything except burning.
No one wants to be a speck of chaff at the last judgement. So why does the Gospel need this ominous tone to reinforce the warning? One simple answer is the gloomy, predestinarian one: that we cannot help sinning, and doing the evil that we do not want to do (Romans 7.19). Beyond that message, there are other explanations — equally challenging, but less likely to freeze us in hopeless inactivity that arises out of fear.
One explanation that jumps out from this Gospel is more than just a warning about judgement for Advent. On the contrary, it gives us a tool to apply to other texts as well, as we search the scriptures, because we believe that in them we have eternal life (John 5.39). When the Pharisees and Sadducees came to be baptised by John, he completely failed on four out of the five marks of mission (tell, teach, tend, transform, treasure) — and even his way of “telling” was not easily recognisable as good news.
It takes a particular kind of vocation to dare to speak so brutally. John was either mad, bad, or a prophet. To be uncompromising is characteristic of the prophetic calling, which is no doubt why prophets are so unpopular most of the time. I wonder whether that uncompromising message was part of what drew the Pharisees in the first place; for they were prone to setting extreme standards of religious observance (Luke 11.42). That kind of holiness is something that God can probably do without. If John and Jesus are right, it is mere gilding applied to the base metal of human arrogance.
The desire to be special is not wrong in itself, despite our misgivings about modern society’s cult of celebrity. But the Baptist rips into these self-righteous people with a challenge that, for me, has become a yardstick, a standard that I can apply in complicated questions of church practice and Christian theology: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matthew 3.9).
Whenever custom, legislation, or ignorance mean that I find a Christian matter awkward, this is a test for me to apply. Does one Church doubt that another Church’s communion is valid? God can raise up the body and blood of Christ from stones. Does one Christian believe that another’s baptism is invalid? God can raise up a Christian baptised in the waters of their own true faith (just as martyrs are recognised as having been baptised in blood). This criterion works just as well on interpretations of the Trinity as it does on same-sex Christian marriage.
This does not mean that matters of order, faith, and ethics are unimportant. But we need to be reminded (repeatedly, down the Christian centuries, it seems) that “his extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4.7).