Isaiah 11.1-10; Psalm 72.1-7, 18, 19; Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12

WHY is John the Baptist angry with the Pharisees and Sadducees for coming to him asking for baptism? And what is wrong with fleeing from wrath? Not all Christians are alike; so all Pharisees and Sadducees probably are not alike, either. We need to understand what entitles John to be angry with them and challenge their motivation. If I suddenly had a group of people coming to me for baptism, I would be encouraging them. John, though, must see something about them that is not clear to me.

This is one of those Gospel passages in which the text alone does not answer all our questions. We must imagine possibilities and test them for coherence and plausibility. I wonder whether John, teaching and baptising for quite a while, got to know the people who came to listen. He may have watched one particular group of listeners behaving in ways that marked their repentance as unsatisfactory: verse 9 certainly points that way.

They may have had other reasons that caused John concern. Someone I did not know once came to ask me — out of the blue, with great urgency — to baptise them immediately. I listened, then arranged a time to meet again before going ahead. That person never returned. I cannot know whether I did the right thing. But I hope that my instinct was the right one.

Even our best religious impulses are a mixture of the exalted and the earthly. Most of my motivation for becoming a Christian was being inspired by Jesus and feeling called by him. But some was a primitive sense of the need for protection from evil. Perhaps John’s “brood of vipers” had mixed motivations, too. It ill behoves us to criticise others for their motivations, as if we fully understood their sense of the meaning of a sacrament when we do not fully understand our own. And, here, we are talking “only” of John’s water baptism, not of Christian Spirit baptism.

John, being a prophet, is not giving a personal opinion, but speaking God’s words (Jesus endorses this specific judgement at 12.34). So, if he calls them vipers, vipers are what they must be. When we incorporate Luke’s version of the scene, in which the Baptist calls the whole crowd — not just the Pharisees and Sadducees — a “brood of vipers” (3.7), it strengthens the case for seeing that “them” is really “us”. We are the brood of vipers with our malicious intentions. We can be dangerous and aggressive like venomous snakes, just as we can also disguise our corruptions behind a pious façade, like whitewashed tombs (as Jesus says in Matthew 23.27). It is an unpleasant possibility. But it needs testing.

So, we return to John’s question, which is dripping with anger and contempt: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” The answer is right in front of us. John himself has warned them. John has told them to repent, and they have heard him and responded, and they have come for baptism. So, if he is still angry at them, in what ways are they still falling short?

The answer to this question is surprisingly straightforward. All we have to do is to consider John’s question in the light of the command that follows it. If someone has prompted them to repent and seek baptism, warning them to flee from the wrath to come, where are the fruits of their repentance?

Fruit is, in one important sense, like the sacrament of baptism itself. It does not happen overnight. A seed must be planted, roots must go down, and shoots must spring up. In agriculture, as in animal husbandry, fruitfulness (fertility) comes with maturity. Calling the product of repentance “fruit” certainly points this way, to a process with a set pattern. External factors (light, moisture, nutrition) may influence the speed at which it happens, but there is a sequence of stages that almost every complex living thing must move through to mature enough to bear fruit.

Asking for baptism before being mature enough to yield fruits of repentance is like someone who has sinned, or committed a crime, and who admits to having done wrong, and yet wants to move immediately to the stage where life after that wrongdoing begins. The fruit of repentance, in other words, comes to maturity only in hearts that have weighed themselves in the balance, and confessed to finding themselves wanting (Daniel 5.27).

Buried Treasure: The collected Church Times Sunday readings by Cally Hammond is available now (Canterbury Press, £24.99 (£19.99); 978-1-78622-567-2).