Text: John 1:6-8, 19-28                                                                                            3 Advent

The “Good” Die Hard

            In the name of him who is the Light of the world, dear friends in Christ:  A lot of Christians think of the Bible’s Old Testament as the darker side of God’s revelation.  It’s the part all about law.  There they see a God full of wrath and anger who is always telling people what to do and punishing them when they disobey.  There’s where they find all kinds of terrible plagues, wars, and bloodshed. Seems like it’s all bad news.  The New Testament, on the other hand, is seen as the brighter of the Bible; it’s all about God’s grace and love.  That’s where they find forgiveness and blessings in the Lord Jesus.  That’s where there is Gospel—Good News.  And so, it’s only natural that Christians who think this way tend to gravitate toward New Testament passages.  They’re a lot easier to take.

            But it sure wasn’t that way in last Sunday’s appointed readings.  Then we heard the good news from the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament.  “Comfort, comfort for God’s exiled and downtrodden people.  The Lord himself is coming to rescue you.  His herald’s voice is calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord’ – hang in there, help is on the way!”  That was pretty encouraging:  glad tidings of comfort and joy.  But then in the New Testament, where we normally expect to hear the good news, we had John the Baptist, who is a living portrait of anything but comfort and joy. For a pulpit he chose the sun-scorched, desert:  dry, intolerably hot, and blasted by the searing east wind.  For clothing he wore a heavy coat of scratchy camel hair – which would be about as comfortable as wearing steel wool; and he wore that over a rough leather loincloth—I’m not even going to try to image what that felt like. And if fashion were not his thing, his culinary habits were even less refined.  For food, when he wasn’t fasting as he did quite often, the man ate grasshoppers.  My guess is that very few people accepted invitations to dinner at his place.  I’m sure I would have turned him down.

But if John seemed determined to make himself feel miserable, at least he had a heart for sharing.  Through his blistering verbal attacks and denunciations he tried to make everyone else feel miserable too.  And it’s kind of ironic:  his name, which was given to him by God, means, “The Lord is gracious”.  You’d never know it by listening to him preach. From John we get mostly the terrifying “turn or burn” message of God’s unrelenting wrath against sin.  Through his preaching, John tried to make people feel on the inside the way he looked on the outside.  He wanted their consciences to burn with guilt.  He wanted to shake them up and make them to feel uncomfortable, desolate, trapped, hungry, and dissatisfied; he wanted to frighten them with the fires of hell; he wanted them to see their danger, so that they would eagerly reach out for someone to rescue them.

Which is exactly what he needed to do to prepare the way for the coming Savior: he had to show people their desperate need to be saved.  That’s what true repentance is all about.  You have to be brought low, before you are raised up; you have to be humbled before you are exalted; your sinful self must die and be buried before you can be raised to new and holy life in Christ.  So John preached a message of scathing law to show his listeners just how far short they fell from the perfection God demands.  You might say that he preached them to death.

And a lot of his hearers got the message. They came flocking to John from all over Judea, and when they heard what he had to say they were convicted in their hearts.  They felt the shame of their sin.  They recognized how hopeless was their condition, and confessing their many faults and failures, with tears of contrition, they went down into the water to be baptized by John.  These were the ones who were ready when later John had the privilege of pointing out “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

But not everyone who heard John was so affected by his message.  In today’s Gospel reading we hear of a delegation of people representing the priests, Levites, and Pharisees from Jerusalem who have come down to hear what John has to say.  They have been sent on a fact-finding mission by the religious authorities headquartered in the holy city.  Understand that this was a time of great messianic expectation.  Rumors had been circulating for years of shepherds who saw angels, and wise men who had followed a star.  The time was ripe and people knew it.  And now the whole city was abuzz with news of John’s powerful ministry.  Some were openly wondering if this eccentric fellow just might be the long promised Christ. It had to be checked out.  So the delegation left Jerusalem, comfortably situated in the heights of the comparatively cool and breezy Judean mountains, and they’ve come down the treacherous and rocky four thousand foot eastern escarpment, to be out here in the blazing hot, God-forsaken wilderness of the Jordan River valley.  They are to listen to John, find out what the spiritual fervor he’s been stirring up is all about, and then make the two day trip back up the mountain to report to their higher-ups whose sacred duties were so pressing and important that they couldn’t be bothered to make the journey themselves.

 Suffice it to say that the members of this delegation don’t really want to be here either. And they are very skeptical.  They sincerely believe that anything truly worthwhile that could possibly happen in a spiritual sense could only happen in Jerusalem.  So they are expecting to find fault with what they hear from John.

They are surprised to hear him preaching a powerful message that is completely consistent with the Word of God that they have studied so diligently and practically know by heart.  At some level, they recognize in what John says the same Spirit who had spoken through the ancient prophets; and they can see all around them sinners who are moved by his words to turn from their sin and repent.  But they do find fault with John.  He is a bit too free in his application of hellfire and brimstone. He fires out God’s threats and judgments like a machinegun into the crowd, with seemingly no regard for who it is he’s shooting at.  “Why, the man treats everyone the same.  He doesn’t distinguish between these common sinners standing all around and people like us:  good, godly, decent people, who know God’s Word and try to live holy lives according to it.  It’s right to call these sinners to repentance; but to hear him talk, you’d think he expects us to repent too.”  They heard John’s message, but instead of making them uncomfortable with themselves, they got very defensive.  They recognized the voice of the prophets, but they didn’t let the message penetrate their hearts.

They are the spiritual die hards.  Maybe you’ve seen one or two of those Die Hard movies starring actor Bruce Willis in which he plays a very street smart and resourceful cop who always seems to find himself confronted by a whole team of highly trained terrorists led by an evil genius.  The bad guys have the perfect plan, and they are carrying it out with merciless precision.  Meanwhile, the good guys are paralyzed; they are completely taken off guard at each turn – and no one among them can begin to imagine just how sinister and far reaching is the goal of their adversaries.  Only the character played by Bruce Willis has an inkling of what they’re up to; and so it falls on him – and him alone – to defeat them.  It usually happens that his beloved wife is among the potential victims, which is the twist in the plot that gives him the special incentive to continue to operate even though he has no jurisdiction.  And so, with no help from the bumbling good guys (who have told him repeatedly to stay out of it and mind his own business), he takes on the forces of evil single handedly – usually getting shot up and taking a terrible beating in the process.  But each time the bad guys think that they’ve gotten rid of him once and for all, he manages to come back again.  This is the theme that gives the title Die Hard it’s meaning: though they come close many times, the bad guys just can’t kill him.  In the end, of course, though he has taken enough punishment to kill ten normal men, he wins and justice prevails.

What’s my point?  These Die Hard films, despite their preposterous plots, were and remain quite popular.  And I think that’s because audiences can easily identify with the “one man against the forces of evil” theme.  It appeals to people.  And that’s because there is a bit of the Die Hard character in each of us:  good, clever, resourceful, fiercely independent, and able to beat anything the evil one can throw at us – and “I don’t need any help from the good guys, thanks very much.  I can handle this all by myself.”

That is what John faced in this delegation from Jerusalem:  good, godly, church-going people who knew God’s Word … folks who were walking the straight and narrow way and saw no need to repent. They had licked the outward sin in their lives all on their own, and were getting alone just fine.  They were quite satisfied with their performance – and to be fair, they really weren’t engaged in any gross public sins like so many of these others who were being baptized by John.  You could easily see the sin in their lives.  No, no, these were “good” people – and unfortunately for all of us, the “good” die hard.

You see, there are two kinds of hardened sinners.  There are those who reject God’s Word outright and altogether.  They live in their sin without shame.  They don’t care.  They openly scoff at issues of right and wrong; all that matters to them is their personal pleasure.  These are easy to identify – and chances are, we will never see one of them in church here on a Sunday morning, unless by God’s grace they are brought to repentance – in which case, they wouldn’t be hardened sinners anymore.  But there is another kind of hardened sinner.  These are all too common in the church – in fact, that’s exactly where you can expect to find them:  they live in each and every one of us.  These admire and respect the Word of God.  They agree completely with the righteous demands of God’s holy law.  They just don’t see how it applies to them.

Do you have such a Die Hard lurking within you?  Perhaps the best way to smoke them out is to identify their tactics, because the evasive maneuvers of hardened sinners is always the same. When they hear the Law of God, they get defensive.  Instead of letting it penetrate, they fire back.  So we hear the offended delegation ask John, “Who are you, anyway?”  They recognize the message of the prophets – they agree with it; they just don’t like it being applied to them – so they attack the messenger. It happens the same today.  When God’s law is preached and it hits a little too close to home, the Die Hard in you is that little voice that asks, “Yeah, and who do you think you are?” Did you ever hear that inside you?

If so, John’s answer is just as valid today.  “I’m nobody: no Elijah, no prophet.  I’m just a voice calling in the desert, ‘prepare the way for the Lord’.”  The messenger of God’s law is always nobody – just a voice through which the Lord speaks. The important thing is the message from the Lord.  It’s easy to discredit the speaker – but that doesn’t change the truth or power of the message.

Then comes the second evasive tactic of the delegation, and that is to question the credentials of the messenger:  “If you are nobody:  not Elijah or a prophet, like you say, then what gives you the authority to say the things you do?”   These days the question is usually framed this way:  “What gives you the right to talk to me like that?”  Ever hear something like that in the back of your head?

Again, John’s answer is telling:  “I just speak the words.  I just baptize with water, but among you stands One you do not know.”  There’s John’s authority:  the One whom “good” Die Hards do not know.  They will never know him.  The reason they do not and cannot know him is because he can only be known as a Savior from sin – and “good” Die Hards don’t think they have a problem with sin.  So they don’t need a Savior.

Let me shed a little more light on it:  you know that portion of the service earlier when you were allowed a few moments of silence for reflection and self-examination during the confession? What were you thinking about then? Maybe you took that time to mentally run through the last week and you came up with a few sins that were troubling your conscience.  That’s good. It’s right to bring those sins out where they can be washed away.  But maybe you had trouble coming up with much of anything.  Or maybe after thinking of a few dark spots, you thought you could get along all right with the rest of them – they weren’t that serious.  “Okay, that’s enough.  Let’s get on with it.”  Or maybe you found yourself thinking, “Well I sure hope so and so is repenting of what they did.”  Ah, there’s that good Die Hard who’s lurking within. 

You see, very often it isn’t the obvious sinner in us that has such a hard time repenting – it’s the part that thinks of itself as good.  And to the extent that we think of ourselves as good … to the extent that we don’t see our need to repent … to the extent that we smugly judge the sins of others, to that same extent we cannot know Jesus Christ as our own Lord and Savior.

The “good” in us is the part that’s full of independence and pride. It’s the part that wants to take credit for saving itself.  And that part dies hard.  Every time we try to kill it, it comes bounding back; but die it must if we are going to be prepared and ready to receive the Lord when he comes.  That’s what true repentance is all about.  It’s knowing that we bring nothing that’s to our credit before the Lord.  All we have and are is sin and uncleanness.

Today the Baptist calls us to be prepared.  And the way to do that is to let God’s law reveal the whole truth. Every shred of the good, self-righteous covering we wear must be stripped away so that we stand naked and ashamed before the Lord.  Then and only then can reenter the waters of repentance and die and be buried with Christ. And rising with him from the water, we will be clothed gloriously in the righteous garments of salvation Jesus earned for us by his perfect life.  This is something you can do to be prepared every day.  Then your whole spirit, soul and body, will be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The One who calls you is faithful, and he will do it – because you can’t.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!