Commentary on Matthew 3:1-12

These December days are a time of pretty lights and pine trees, Christmas cookies and carols.

So the gospel comes as a shock: “You brood of vipers!” John the Baptist says (Matthew 3:7). Harsh words.

There is nothing pretty about John himself. He wears animal skins—“hair of camels,” the Greek says vividly—held together with a strip of leather for a belt. He eats locusts and wild honey (3:4). He looks like the prophet Elijah.

This description of John the Baptist calls up 2 Kings 1:7–8. When Ahaziah the king is lying injured, he sends messengers to the pagan god Baal-zebub to ask whether he will live or die. A man confronts them on the way. “Is there no God in Israel?” the man says. Why are you turning to Baal-zebub? This is the message you shall take to the king: “Therefore you shall surely die.” The king asks them what sort of man he was. “A hairy man,” they say, “with a leather belt around his waist.” “It is Elijah the Tishbite,” the king says.

“His clothing was camel’s hair,” Matthew says, “with a leather belt around his waist.”

The point is clear: John is like Elijah. John is like Elijah, who rebukes the king for forgetting God. John is like Elijah, who, in Jewish expectation at the time of Jesus, would come again when the reign of God was at hand.

When Matthew describes John the Baptist as Elijah, he is saying two things:

1. 1. 1. This is a time like that time: People are forgetting God. There is need for repentance. 
      2. This is the time Israel has been waiting for: The reign of God is at hand.

And this is exactly what John says, when he first comes on the scene: “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2).

When the people saw John in his hairy skin with a leather belt around his waist, eating locusts like a man of the desert, they would have known exactly what this meant: This is that day. This is the day of Elijah, the day when God’s reign is coming. And they would have heard the question John was asking: Are you ready? Can you stand before the face of the living God?

No wonder they flock to John to confess their sins, to be washed in the Jordan River—that river through which God, by the hand of Joshua, first brought Israel into the promised land. Another promised land is at hand!

As we read through their eyes, John the Baptist stands here in our lives on this second Sunday of Advent to remind us what we await this Christmas: It is God who is coming among us. It is his reign that is at hand. And if this is cause for joy—and it is, as all the lights and carols tell us—it is cause for repentance also.

We give lots of attention to the joy. But we need to hear the message of repentance also, because only then are we really hearing John’s message; only then are we really hearing what time this is.

Even before John appears in his hairy skins and leather belt, Matthew has told the reader what time this is.

“In those days,” Matthew says (3:1). These are the first words of today’s gospel. At first glance, this means just what it says: In the days when Jesus was in Galilee, John the Baptist came proclaiming repentance in the desert of Judea. 

But these are also the words with which the prophets, Jeremiah and Joel, announce “the day of the Lord,” the day of reckoning and of restoration.

Jeremiah says, “In those days and at that time [kairos] they will call Jerusalem the throne of God” (Jeremiah 3:17–18 Septuagint). 

In Jeremiah 5:18, “in those days” describes the time of God’s judgment upon Israel and also his promise that Israel will not be utterly destroyed. And in Jeremiah 33:15–16, “in those days and at that time,” God will cause a righteous Branch to spring up and bring justice to the land; Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.

In Joel, in the midst of portents in the heavens and on earth, “in those days,” God restores the fortunes of his people and pours out his spirit upon all flesh (3:1; 2:28–32).

“In those days”—the words in Jeremiah and Joel and Matthew are exactly the same. This is the time the prophets spoke of, Matthew is saying. This is the day of the Lord.

John the Baptist is the one Isaiah spoke of: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord!” (Matthew 3:3; Isaiah 40:3).

The people recognize who John is, what time this is. That is why they all go out to be baptized by him (Matthew 3:5). Even the leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, come out to be baptized.

And John berates them: “You brood of vipers!”

If Isaiah’s words promise forgiveness and restoration for God’s people “in those days,” John’s salvo against the leaders reminds us that the day of the Lord is also the time of judgment.

Wrath is coming “against all ungodliness and injustice,” as Paul says in Romans 1:18, and it is not enough to say that you repent and to be baptized. You must live it, too.

It is the hypocrisy of the leaders—the Pharisees and scribes and Sadducees—that Jesus objects to in Matthew’s gospel, that those who wear the mantle of priest or teacher or leader of the people should use their authority to sow lies and put burdens on people’s backs and care mostly for their own glory (see also Matthew 23:1–4).

Do not think, John the Baptist says, that because you call yourself a son of Abraham, because you call yourself a Christian, you are in the camp of the good (Matthew 3:9).

You must show the fruit (3:10). You have to act like a Christian, too. You have to seek to speak what is true. You have to listen to God and his word and his Christ, and not to your own whims, whatever they might be that day. You must bend the knee and let God be king.

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees” (3:10): It is an action shot, the woodcutter measuring his blow. Is the fruit good?

In these days, as we prepare in Advent to greet the newborn Christ, God sends John the Baptist to ask us to consider our fruit.