Last Saturday, once again, I was over at the Sheppard Centre meeting a friend for coffee. We know one another through time spent hiking and trail running together. As we were crossing at Yonge and Sheppard, we heard street preachers yelling with a megaphone: Jesus - the King of all the world - is coming. Repent or when this life is over, you will go to hell. I had a sudden hot surge of anger well up inside. I corrected myself immediately though. Wait. This is precisely what John the Baptist shouts at people: Repent, for the king is here, the kingdom of God is here in Jesus Christ.” So why the anger. Are they not simply following John’s model?
And then it struck me as I considered John’s own words. When people thought that maybe John himself was the Messiah, he told them: “one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will come with judgment, baptizing you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” While those street preachers certainly get John’s message right in a very literal sense, they miss the point God is driving at in giving us that passage of scripture. And in missing the point, their monologue-based tactics actually become about their own success in winning a convert. The pride of success.
When God works through John to call people to repentance, what God is saying is, I already know you’re struggling, folks. I see everything you do and know everything about who you are. You cannot save yourselves. You cannot heal yourselves. So this isn’t about you. I need you to point beyond yourself to me so that I can help you. So John’s words are not about winning converts; they’re about getting people to recognize God the king.
God whose kingship is one of ruling by giving himself up for us, which Jesus does on the cross. With God whose kingship is won in and by his death, which restores the very kingdom or world that he created. A kingdom, or world, or mansion with many rooms for all the particular people and things he has made. This is what John recognizes when he says, “one more powerful than I is coming after me. I don’t even have the capacity to tie his sandals. In other words, I can’t even cause you to turn from your own ways. I can only tell you to look for his coming. Only he can change or transform you.
And this of course is precisely what the King of kings, Lord of lords, does. He doesn’t do this with power or force or capitalist business strategy. He does it by joining us to himself through being born one of us and dying as one of us and, as one of us, being raised from the dead. That is the kingdom come. That is the kingship we celebrate.
To be a subject of this king is not to enter into a kingdom or life of fear of hell. God’s perfect love comes in Christ who rules over all the powers that currently take all our attention and sometimes our lives, casts out our fear that the powers of this world have ultimate control over us. And so John’s words joined to Christ’s coming are these: repent, let go, turn to God so you can see and hear where he’s leading and how he’s calling you. Stop allowing the people and things of this world to be the priority determining how you think, act and respond.
Come and follow me instead. Repent. Seek my way first so that when you are making decisions about how to live here and now, you will do so through the lens of being a subject of and a follower of Jesus. To follow me, Jesus says, to become a subject of God’s kingdom, you’re going to have to let my life become your life so that I can take you where I made you to go; you walk by faith in the grace of God that will fundamentally reorder this world. So take courage in the fact that Christ has already made the path for you to follow as he remakes the world.
Gird yourself up in the armour of Christ - as would a knight of old - in the armour of Christ’s own faith. Put on Christ’s faith; this one who has opened the door to God’s kingdom for us so that we might forge through this world in relationships where we are called to love neighbour and enemy, to develop relationships filled with compassion, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and self control. AMEN
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