| "Socrates was the very first person to be known as "God's gadfly." Indeed, Socrates bestowed that sobriquet on himself, as we can read in the Apology (30e-31c) by his disciple Plato. You will recall that Socrates was a 5th-century B.C. philosopher who understood his mission in life to be the stinging, goading, and stirring of the citizens of Athens into thought and virtue. But many were angered by this great horsefly of a man, and in 399 B.C. he was brought to trial on charges of teaching strange religion and corrupting young minds. The jury found him guilty, and thirty days later he was put to death through a draught of hemlock. Socrates "was a man of strong physique and great powers of endurance, and [he was] completely indifferent to comfort and luxury. He was remarkable for his unflinching courage, both moral and physical, and [for] his strong sense of duty." "He was [also] … a man of strong religious sense[,] … scrupulous in religious observances"[,] who experienced from time to time throughout his life divine signs or warnings that determined his course of action. [Guy Cromwell Field, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. M. Cary et al., 1949, p. 846] Socrates-a gadfly sent by God to the people of Athens! And then about 425 years later, and some 750 miles to the southeast, God sent another gadfly-this time to the Jews who were subject to Roman rule in the province of Judea and the tetrarchy of Galilee. The name of this gadfly sent by God was John the Baptist. And the lectionary of scripture passages that we follow sees to it that each and every year at this time, on the Second Sunday of Advent, we, too, are confronted by this bold, pesky horsefly of a man who was the voice of God crying out in the wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord! Repent, turn yourselves around, think new thoughts, and make room for God's entrance into the desert of your life!" A group of parishioners was once overheard saying that although they, as Christians, valued John the Baptist, they were certainly glad he wasn't their next-door neighbor! Well, it's true! We really don't feel comfortable around persons whose plain-spoken criticism of our life, of our lifestyle, is, to say the least, "annoying." And it's a datum of history that gadflies tend to get swatted. After all, both Socrates and John the Baptist were put to death. Yet, as David Bartlett of Yale Divinity School has observed about the Advent and Christmas seasons [New Proclamation: Year B, 1999-2000, pp. 12-13]: "…there is no way to approach [the birth of] Jesus except through John the Baptist. We may think that as Advent arrives we can turn [quickly] to gentle Jesus meek and mild …, but the fact that [it is] John the Baptist [who] points the way, and leads the way, makes it hard for us to ignore the harshness, the toughness of the [Advent] message[, the message to repent]." So just who was this John the Baptist anyway? Who was this biting, stinging Advent impediment, who each year stands there blocking our path just when we are trying to sprint ever so hastily toward Christmas joy? Well, in order to reconstruct John's life, we must refer to a variety of sources, including all four of the gospels and also the writings of the late first-century Jewish historian Josephus. [See, for example, Paul W. Hollenbach, "John the Baptist," in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, III:887-899.] John was apparently born into a devout priestly family, but not one that lived in Jerusalem-the seat of power, the domain of the aristocratic priestly group known as the Sadducees. No, John was born in a rural region, where priestly families shared the poverty of the other Jews living around them and where they had to eke out their living however best they could. There was a lot of tension between the poor priests in the countryside and the Sadducees in charge of the Jerusalem temple, for the countryside priests viewed the Sadducees as indulging in lifestyles of immoral excess and waste. The adult John who emerged from childhood and youth to become "John the Baptist" can be described in the same words previously used to portray Socrates. He was a man of strong physique and great powers of endurance, and he was completely indifferent to comfort and luxury. He was remarkable for his unflinching courage, both moral and physical, and for his strong sense of duty. He was also a man of strong religious sense, scrupulous in religious observances, who experienced from time to time throughout his life divine signs or warnings that determined his course of action. When John first burst upon the public scene and began his ministry in the tradition of the prophets, he appeared as a spokesperson both for God and for the common person. He appeared as one who himself practiced a lifestyle of radical asceticism-eating only the simplest foods, locusts and wild honey, and wearing only the roughest clothing. Now just as certainly as a thin bearded face wearing a stovepipe hat would conjure up in our minds images of that old-time president of ours, Abraham Lincoln, so, too, John's garment of camel's hair with a leather belt would conjure up in the minds of his people images of that old-time prophet of theirs, Elijah (cf. II Kings 1:8). And since Elijah had pronounced unsparing judgment on the king and court of his time, John's audience should not have been surprised to hear coming from his lips words of scathing attack upon Jerusalem's religious establishment, as he called upon them to repent and to redirect their lives to justice toward their neighbors and genuine piety toward God. And to all those who upon hearing John did repent, he issued this additional summons-to join him for a time in the wilderness, there to hear and heed more of his exhortations to justice and piety and there to receive as well the washing of his baptism, of his immersing of them in the river Jordan, both as an action symbolic of their turning from the ways of the world to God and also as an outward sign of the inward cleansing effected by their repentance. And when those baptized by John returned to their everyday world, John expected them to behave in more ethically responsible ways-for example, to share their clothing and food with the destitute, to stop extorting and oppressing the poor, and to start the work of transforming the institutions of structuralized injustice. You see, John the Baptist was a social revolutionary, a prophet who undertook to begin the restructuring of his society by changing the hearts and minds of the privileged groups whose deeds and lifestyles were perpetuating injustices, by changing the hearts and minds of the privileged groups who also had some power to change matters. Like an Old Testament prophet, John addressed his words to those who at one and the same time were both responsible for the sorry state of affairs in society and also, if moved to do so, able to effect changes and improvements. Now most of the powerful responded to this gadfly negatively, which led eventually to his execution at the hands of the tetrarch Herod Antipas. But some of the powerful responded positively, receiving John's baptism and then returning to their roles in life motivated to put John's vision of social justice into practice. Well, death could not silence the voice of gadfly Socrates. And neither could death silence the voice of gadfly John. Each and every Second Sunday of Advent John comes anew to the likes of us, to the likes of those who at one and the same time are both responsible for the sorry state of affairs in society and also able, if so moved, to effect, on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, numerous changes and improvements. Each and every Second Sunday of Advent John cries out anew in the wilderness. John calls on us afresh to prepare the way of the Lord by repenting and turning to God. John calls on us to pray for the will and moral resolve to fulfill our various roles in life in ways that transform the practices and structures of injustice, to fulfill our various roles in life in ways that can lead us, too, in our time and place to become, like Socrates and John the Baptist before us, gadflies-gadflies for God. Amen |
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