Advent 2A: The Voice in the Wilderness

The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia chat about Matthew 3:1-12, the Gospel lesson for the second Sunday of Advent, Year A. This text has it all: baptism, repentance, locusts, and wild honey. Listen as your hosts discuss John the Baptist as a type of Christ, the ecological and eschatological implications of the text, the ongoing work of baptism, and the wild voices we ignore.

Charlotte: Well, what are locusts in the Bible? They’re described as the instruments of God’s wrath…

Chad: Judgement…

Charlotte: ...as the repercussion of sin. So he’s already starting to destroy, in some small way or symbolic maybe, this instrument of wrath. That’s being put aside now. To be eating the thing that causes famine! He’s consuming that which consumes fields and starves people. And wild honey, the only association I’ve got for honey is these lands flowing with milk and honey. So he’s standing in this cusp between wrath and paradise here, but he’s clearly leaning into the paradise part because he’s already being shown as a type, let’s say, of Christ, as one who is literally destroying the instruments of death. And where is he doing all this? At the Jordan.

Chad: Where they cross over into the Promised Land...

Charlotte: So all of this is happening in this huge eschatological space...

It’s not just about to happen; it is happening. It’s about to, and it is, but it always has also. I mean, the intersections here of time. Salvation history, we view as a kind of continuum; on the cosmic scale it isn’t. It already has happened, is happening, will happen. So all of these points between Eden, Exodus, the wilderness, Elijah, the Babylonian Captivity, all of that coalescing in this: the activity of God brought then to this moment.