ADVENT TO REPENT
LUKE 3: 7 John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Therefore, bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor,' for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
JOHN CAME TO PREPARE THE WAY and proclaimed the Gospel of repentance for the remission of sins. The forgiveness of sins was not always in the center of religious beliefs.
When Abraham came from Babylonia, or in a wider sense, from Northern Mesopotamia, from the city of UR-Khasdim, the focus was rather on the punishment of the bad and the wicked and on the reward of the good, though mostly on the punishment of the bad.
The ancient criminal codes were comparably quite harsh, more often than not, the ordered punishment was simply death or to be solved as slaves, often the innocent family members were also sold together with the sentenced person.
This has some mirroring in the ten Commandments where the second commandment says I am the Lord your God is a jealous Lord who punishes even the children for the sins of the parents and grandparents and the great-grandparents through three or four generations.
The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi from the 18th century BCE says that:
1. If a man bring an accusation against a man, and charge him with a (capital) crime, but cannot prove it, he, the accuser, shall be put to death.
2. If a man charges a man with sorcery, and cannot prove it, he who is charged with sorcery shall go to the river, into the river he shall throw himself and if the river overcomes him, his accuser shall take to himself his house (estate).
If the river shows that man to be innocent and he comes forth unharmed, he who charged him with sorcery shall be put to death. He who threw himself into the river shall take to himself the house of his accuser.
3. If a man, in a case (pending judgment), bears false (threatening) witness, or does not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case is a case involving life, that man shall be put to death.
We have ancient criminal codes recorded from the ancient Indian civilizations, one of them is called the Code of Manu. It sounds quite modern, for example their rules for wartime. It states that first and foremost, war should be avoided by negotiations and reconciliations.If war becomes necessary, a soldier must never harm civilians, non-combatants or someone who has surrendered. The use of force should be proportionate. The Egyptians had many legal codes, one of the most interesting ones is the so called 42 confessions, which is somewhat the extended version of the Ten Commandments.
From Abraham's Mesopotamia we have the famous code of Hammurabi, the sixth king from the first Babylonian Amorite dynasty, around 1750 BCE. The code was carved into a basalt statue, which is currently standing in the Louvre Museum of Paris.
One of its cornerstone is the well-known ‘an eye for an eye’ principle, which is echoed in the Old Testament, but other than that, the Babylonian laws and the Law of Moses were antigonistically opposing each other.
Whereas Babylonia allowed often 200 percent interest rate on a loan and if the debtors were not able to pay the whole family were mercilessly sold into slavery, the Law of Moses leveled the interest rate to zero, and ordered the cancellation of all debts in every seven years, regardless of the size of the debt and the circumstances of the creditors.
Whereas in Babylonia the land was either the property of the King, or the temples or the land aristocracy exploiting the work of the farmers and the slaves, the Mosaic law decreed that the land is not for sale, the land must be owned by the clans and was allocated according the tribal affiliation. In the case of whatever reason, a piece of land was sold, the land must have been returned to the original owner without any reimbursement of the buyer, every fifty years, which was called the Great Jubilee Year.
Whereas in the Babylonian Law code there was hardly any space for redemption or correction of the character, in the Law of Moses the cancellation of all debts appears, and forgiveness of sins develops as a theological narrative.
It also answers the lingering multigenerational and collective punishment issues in the Book of Ezekiel, chapter 18.
He wrote, “if the wicked turns from all his sins that he has committed, and keeps all my statutes, and does that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live. He shall not die. None of his transgressions that he has committed will be remembered against him. In his righteousness that he has done, he shall live. Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked?” says the Lord Yahweh; “and not rather that he should return from his way, and live?”
“But when the righteous turns away from his righteousness, and commits iniquity, and does according to all the abominations that the wicked man does, should he live? None of his righteous deeds that he has done will be remembered. In his trespass that he has trespassed, and in his sin that he has sinned, in them he shall die.”
“Therefore I will judge you, house of Israel, everyone according to his ways,” says the Lord Yahweh. “Return, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity will not be your ruin. 31 Cast away from you all your transgressions, in which you have transgressed; and make yourself a new heart and a new spirit: for why will you die, house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him who dies,” says the Lord Yahweh. “Therefore turn yourselves, and live!
In the Lord’s words there is the eternal life, indeed. That is why John proclaimed to the multitude along the coast of the river Jordan, that be aware that the ax of the wrath of God, also “lies at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down, and thrown into the fire.”
Come and be baptized, change your way of life, produce good fruit in your hearts, prepare the way of the Lord, the Kingdom is near. That is why the baptism of John was such a great symbol. It was not a little becoming wet by sprinkling the water on someone’s head, but it was submerging in a living water, like a river. The submerging meant to symbolize not really, or only the washing away of the person’s sins as the water washes away the dirt, but the submerging symbolized a metaphorical drowning, dying to the person’s whole more life, and ascending from the water meant the rebirth but spiritual resurrection from the dead. The river itself symbolized the spiritual border between this life and the Afterlife.
May the preparing the way of the Lord lead into spiritual rebirth in our hearts. AMEN
