Sometimes, Improbable Things Happen Before Breakfast

By Brenda Evans

One morning last month, while I ate a bowl of sticks and straw (as my husband calls it) a woman named Rebecca told me that moths drink the tears of birds. Who knew? I didn’t even know that birds made tears, much less that moths sometimes came alongside and “drank their sorrows” for them.

Later, on the patio, an Eastern Tailed Blue butterfly with wings the size of half dimes landed on my wrist, put down her tiny drinking-straw proboscis, and sipped my salty sweat. I know my thirsty butterfly was female because, unlike the flamboyant sapphire-colored male, her blueness was muted almost to gray. Still, she was lovely and found my wrist to slake her thirst. Moths drink tears, and blue butterflies gulp human sweat—all strange to me, yet makes me glad, somehow.

That is often how things are with us: gladness and strangeness all wrapped together in one event. John the Unconventional Baptizer, for example, shouted about Jesus and money and repentance in the wilderness. Who would have thought? People had come to the east side of the Jordan for baptism. “Just get on with it, man,” they may have said. In plain and earnest language, John the Forerunner told them they were not ready because they were bleak human wasteland on the verge of judgment. They needed more than water baptism.

He told them to repent and to give good evidence of it. Perhaps he raised his voice; perhaps he whispered. I don’t know, but I do know he was blunt: “You’re a brood of belly-crawling vipers. Jesus is coming. You better prepare yourselves and bear fruits worthy of repentance because He will throw unfruitful ones into fire” (my paraphrase of Luke 3:7-9).

Talk about hellfire and brimstone! Three groups were troubled by his words. “What shall we do?” they asked. “Besides, what are fruits of repentance?”

To the first group, John kept it simple: be unselfish, he said. If you have two shirts, give one to a person in need. The same with food—don’t keep it all for yourself. I wonder what his listeners thought. What “religious” things did they expect John to ask of them? Fasting, prayer, synagogue attendance? No, he taught: be generous, think of others’ needs and not just your own. That’s how to show that you have renounced greed.

When was the last time your buddy said, “Hey, friend, let’s go eat a steak and talk about how to renounce greed”? Greed is either a taboo subject, or else we think it’s not such a bad sin after all. Just the other day I heard that old catchphrase greed is good. I thought we didn’t use it anymore because everybody was already living it, but it’s back, a slogan for a new generation.

John the Baptizer brought up greed to show what genuine repentance means. “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise,” John said. I wonder, of all the examples of genuine repentance John could have used, why did he focus on greed, not once but three times?

When the second group, tax collectors, queried him, he was even more abrupt: “Collect no more than is appointed” (Luke 3:13). Tax collectors’ reputations stayed tainted because they often fleeced the public, demanding tolls from traders and travelers far above the Roman government’s guidelines. Of course, they pocketed the excess. Greed was the breath and blood of the tax-collecting business, and John said they must not be half-hearted about repenting of it. Do your tax-collecting right, he warned. Collect what is due, no more.

In another twist on the subject, John addressed the third group—soldiers—people with swagger and weapons, people who could intimidate and exploit for gain. This band of soldiers may have been under Herod Antipas who later had John beheaded at a birthday party. Whomever they served, John knew their reputation as shakedown artists. Their craft might include intimidation, false accusation, a body search, threats of violence, even blackmail. Whatever the tactic, a soldier was in a position to extort and do harm for monetary gain. So, John instructed them, “Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages” (3:14). In other words, don’t shake people down so you can put more money in your bag.

If you want to talk about besetting sins, greed is right up there at the top. It is one of what I call The Big Three That Start with G: Greed, Gluttony, and Gossip. John the Baptizer doesn’t talk about the other two—neither do most of us—but he does hammer away at greed out there in the wilderness. Perhaps even more interesting is that John also offered a remedy for greed. He had already demanded repentance and the “fruits” that give evidence of that repentance: generosity, honesty, and fairness. But at the very end of his last response to the questioners, John shared the remedy: “be content” (Luke 3:14).

If you think of some of the nastiest names you know—Achan, Ahab, Judas, or, let’s go modern, Bernie Madoff—all were bedeviled by a deep discontentment that birthed greed in one form or another. Each wanted more power or land or status or money, like us. We grouse about greed on Wall Street, but we accept it on our street and at our house. We also forget that John’s final word on the subject was “be content.”

Covetousness, avarice, rapacity—whatever big noun you use, greed is born in a small, discontented heart and mind, and both Peter and Paul warned that it grows to become large and all-consuming. They used the Greek noun pleonexia to label greed’s most extreme form. A desire for more and more, or to rhyme it: our insatiable desire to acquire.

Pleonexia is the unwillingness to be satisfied with what we have. It’s a spirit of always grasping at yet another thing: money, power, position, and status. It’s such a deep longing that Moffatt translates it “lust” in 2 Peter 2:3, and the ESV nuances the meaning even more in 2 Peter 2:14: “hearts trained in greed.” In addition, Paul warns that greed is characteristic of the wicked (Romans 1:29) and “not fitting for saints” (Ephesians 5:3).

John the Baptizer is in some ways an enigma, a throwback to the Old Covenant prophets, yet on the razor’s edge of the New Covenant message. He was a son of promise, a forerunner, a man who knew his place in history, and a man who took that place at the feet of Jesus, whose sandal strap he did not feel worthy to stoop down and loose (Mark 1:7). So John was on the same page with the God of the Old Testament, who abhorred greed, forbade it, and punished it (Micah 2:2-3) and also on the same page with Jesus, the New Testament Lamb of God, who warned, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses” (Luke 12:15).

As I said at the beginning, sometimes gladness and strangeness are all wrapped up together. To me, that’s true of John the Baptizer. He was a strange and unsettling man, yet he made repentance clear and understandable. I’m glad, because all of us need his message: renounce greed, be generous, be fair, be honest, and be content.

About the Writer: Brenda Evans is a freelance writer who lives in Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Learn more at www.fwbgifts.org.