Christ’s Baptism of Fire

“Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”—Matthew iii. 12.

The passage: John says of Christ, “His fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

When we compare John the Baptist with the Lord whose way he prepared, we commonly stress the severity of the one and the graciousness of the other — the servant standing apart from the world, the Master entering freely into it; John a righteous Reprover condemning sin, Jesus a merciful Saviour bringing forgiveness.

Whatever truth is in this, it seems to clash with the words I have just read. There John speaks expressly of Christ, and does not say, “My words are terrible, His will be all gentleness.” He says: “I baptize with water; He will baptize with fire. I preach repentance; He will thoroughly purge His floor and burn up the chaff.” The contrast runs the opposite way from how we usually put it. The forerunner is sent to save men from ruin; He of whom John speaks comes with power to destroy.

I think we need to examine this carefully. Perhaps we have never seriously asked what men need from a King and Deliverer, and how the Christ we confess has met that need.

The parts of John’s discourse hang together. He denounces the Scribes and Pharisees as men of surface faith who trusted in having Abraham for their father; he tells them the axe is laid to the root of the tree; he says the Teacher whose shoes he is unworthy to unloose will baptize with a Spirit that reaches the depths of human hearts. His own work, he is convinced, is to tear off veils, show men themselves as they are, often reverse their relations to each other, level the hills and exalt the valleys. But he cannot do this radically. He can only awaken the self-righteous man to wonder whether he is righteous at all — whether he is not furthest from righteousness. Another must drive that conviction home, must look into the man’s very self and make him feel detected. John was sent to stir the conscience to a sense of wrong; making men right belonged to other hands. What he declares is that the Discoverer of wrong, the Restorer of right, is at hand and about to appear. If there were no such one — no guide of men’s thoughts, no inspirer of good, no condemner of evil — he had nothing to hope, nothing to bid his country hope. If there were no such one, there was no Christ, and all the Prophets had said was delusion.

If a king were coming such as the Pharisees hoped for — one who would give their sect the upper hand — the Desire of Nations would prove only another of the tyrants the world groaned under. But if He was not this, He must be the very reverse: one who comes sifting, overturning, burning. No symbol could fit Him better than the fan and the thoroughly purged floor.

The Jew, familiar with such emblems from the Prophets, would understand the House of Israel as, in some sense, this threshing-floor — and any Scribe would be ready to translate it for him, turning simple, living language into abstract and difficult language, as dictionaries do. The threshing-floor was a living image; even the dullest peasant, by watching its operations, could grasp something of the meaning, or at least know there was a meaning to be grasped — where the Scribe’s book-phrase would stifle his mind as it had stifled the Scribe’s own. But in what sense did the floor mean the House of Israel? The man who had heard John’s call to repentance was coming to know: not a mere crowd within geographical bounds, but a message to him. The Kingdom of Heaven was near him; he was to turn to God; he was to look for One whose axe was at the root of the tree and whose fan was in His hand. His own heart was part of that threshing-floor, the part most needing his attention just then. And concerning himself with it did not separate him from his people or lessen his sense of belonging to a family — quite the opposite: as the hidden springs of his life opened, as he saw the evil he’d noticed in others was in himself too, as he grasped that the Lord who cared for Abraham’s children was not indifferent to him, he felt something of what it meant to belong to a nation God had called to know His name. To have Him so near might be terrible — Moses had said so — yet blessing and terror must be strangely joined. Could a man truly be a man without this? Had he ever known anything of his own mysterious existence until this glimpse of One overlooking him, calling him to account, meeting and judging him?

The Israelite took the true benefit of his covenant only in grasping this. As long as he looked for outward glory or outward deliverance he was, like the surrounding nations, an idolater of the hardest kind. Only when he acknowledged an invisible Sower and Husbandman cultivating his whole inner being, working in him to bring forth fruit worthy of the divine seed; only when he believed this Husbandman was acting on the whole House of Israel as on himself, that it might witness God’s Wisdom, Righteousness, and Mercy to mankind; only when he looked for a fuller revelation of these than had yet been granted, and desired that revelation to separate the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff, in himself and all his brethren — only then did he truly enter into his people’s history or claim the treasure their fathers had received.

First, then, John’s disciples were to learn that their hearts were under another’s tillage than their own. The seeds sown in them were not self-sown; they could not give them life, nor even by their own skill keep the birds from carrying them off or weeds from choking them. They were subordinate husbandmen; the harvest depended on submitting to the chief Husbandman, not thwarting His plans. And as with the field, so with the floor where the harvest was carried: they could not winnow it themselves, could not separate corn from chaff. If no one more skilful than they existed to do this, their labor was wasted — the corn would feed no one and seed nothing.

Next, they were to be sure this discipline, being divine, would be thorough — “thoroughly purge His floor” — not insincere or indulgent like our own pretended self-examinations, or like well-meaning friends who mix in fresh chaff of their own and leave us in greater doubt what is wheat and what is chaff.

Thirdly, those who heard and understood John received two lessons, seemingly inconsistent. They were sure the One conducting this sifting over them and the whole nation was the Lord of the spirits of all flesh, who had revealed Himself to their fathers through the Prophets. Yet they were told of a man standing among them who claimed the floor as His own, and would prove it by purging it. John himself often found the two hard to reconcile — but they were reconciled in the experience of those who repented at his preaching. They could find no dominion over their hearts real or satisfying unless it was divine — exercised by One who knows past, present, and future; and none real or satisfying unless it was also essentially human — involving the sympathy and participation of one who shares their sorrows and temptations. As the thought of a righteous God they had sinned against replaced the thought of a mere angry Power, they longed more and more to see Him as He is — and grew certain this was only possible in the life of a Man.

But again: a man merely displaying a model of excellence would have answered nothing to their need of One who could sway, quicken, and renew the very motions of the spirit. A baptism with the Spirit — power dwelling in them to overcome what was corrupt, partial, solitary in them, to make them possessors of Truth and not merely its subjects, fellow-workers with God and with men — this was the promise all John’s words pointed toward, the baptism his own prepared for. If no one existed who could give this baptism, his had been in vain.

Yet this baptism was no mere gracious gift; it was bound up with a judgment awaiting each man and the whole land. Would not John’s converts often wish to escape it? Not in their truest moments, when they were really turning from evil to good. They would always long that the fires not utterly destroy their nation, and hope it would come through them; they would pray to pass safely through the fire themselves. But they could not pray that the fire be less than real and mighty, or quenched by pity for its victims — and least of all that they be spared what their fellow-countrymen bore, standing untouched while the land suffered. The dread of being a stupid, careless spectator of their nation’s calamity would have seemed to them the worst possibility of all — the surest sign of a divine curse, proof they had received none of the blessings the great Deliverer came to give.

I have been careful to take these words literally. If John had said, “Christ will accomplish a great work of salvation now; thousands of years hence He will come again to gather the wheat and burn the chaff,” I would follow that reading. But he gives us no excuse for such a paraphrase. He describes this as the immediate, great work of the Divine Word who came after him and existed before him. When John later sent disciples to ask whether Jesus was He that should come, he must have meant them to apply this test: is He doing what I said He would do — gathering wheat, burning chaff? And whatever John or his disciples made of the answer, I believe it accepted and rested on that very test: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” By all these acts the Son of Man fulfilled that character. He gathered wheat: what the world thought worthless He sifted, separating it from the accidents that made it look contemptible, claiming it as treasure — the most beggarly human body recognized as bearing the stamp of His creative wisdom and love. What had brought it to decay and death was an intruding element with nothing to do with its true substance; that He redeemed, and the intruder fled at His word. The gospel He preached to poor men’s hearts — by lips and by each act of individual grace — did the same work: it claimed every human heart, however wretched, as God’s own, a subject of His care; it invited every heart to trust Him and submit to His discipline; and it made every heart conscious of the vanity, self-sufficiency, and slavery that hindered such trust and chafed under such discipline. The more His voice was heard and felt, the more He separated wheat from chaff, teaching that their union was temporary and unnatural, one doomed to destruction, the other gathered into His barn.

The same holds in His discourses with the Apostles. Their minds, we’re told, were full of poor, vulgar notions; the Scriptures bewildered them, Christ’s own words often bewildered them; their hearts were hard and slow, signs left little impression, today’s events erased yesterday’s lesson. Only afterward could they see what process they had been undergoing — how wonderfully He was winnowing chaff from wheat. Yet they show us how little mere words, even His, could accomplish this alone. They had to pass through the fires of desertion, of felt insincerity, cowardice, self-contempt; they had to see their Lord taken from them and all their hopes dashed, before they could become heralds of a risen Lord and a divine hope. And when they were called and empowered for that work, the baptism of fire their Master had also undergone came along with the baptism of His Spirit: these messengers of peace were charged, truly, with turning the world upside down, and became the offscouring of all things, a spectacle to angels and men.

So too we understand the other side of Christ’s teaching, often thought of a different spirit — His denunciations of the Scribes and Pharisees, His asking them how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Their pride, self-righteousness, exclusiveness; their belief that they were the wheat and the people mere chaff for the wind to scatter; their false picture of God as hard-hearted and self-seeking like themselves; their determination to feed their countrymen only husks of outward religion, and their consequent growing inability to feed on anything else themselves; the utter confusion of good and evil in supposing gracious acts could spring from an evil spirit — these were the heaviest calamities that could befall them. Persisting in this state, they must be shut out from God’s presence, shut up in their own selfishness. These burning words express the indignation that perfect love must feel, and always feel, toward what is contrary to love. They show us something of the unquenchable fire in which all that is base, inhuman, and false must be consumed — and that if it could be quenched, God’s love itself would be quenched. They show, too, how dangerous and sinful it is to turn these words about fire into arguments against trusting that love to the utmost, against believing it surrounds us and all creation. This wall of fire is around us — let us acknowledge who built it, and desire that it do its work, for us and for the whole Universe.

I have spoken of John’s words as fulfilled at once when Christ came in the flesh. I believe they have gone on fulfilling themselves in every age since His ascension. Men who discovered their own deep need have asked earnestly for One who would forgive their sins, but just as earnestly, without separating the two requests, for One who would destroy their sins — who would set an everlasting barrier between the enemy within them and the part of them that clung to a Friend and sought fellowship and likeness with Him. They felt that no message lacking this separation was truly gospel, and no one desiring or working it in them was other than the Christ. They grew sure that clinging to any destructive habit, or to anything that set them against other men, meant resisting a mighty power seeking to break their chains and make them one. They learned to welcome sufferings once they saw this was their purpose — good fires, signs that they were baptized with the Spirit, and that He would not leave them until He had made them what they were created to be. The course of history and the trials of nations read the same way. As long as a people retains strength, vitality, faith, there is wheat Christ will gather into His barn — and so that nation will be subjected to repeated fires, that its chaff of untruth, baseness, and heartlessness may be burned away. It might even be said that a nation is always in such fires, for the time of prosperity searches us as much as the time of tribulation, and is harder still for telling wheat from chaff — all the more reason to remember there is a Lord doing this, and doing it thoroughly.

That the chaff in God’s Universal Church, and in every part of it, may be thoroughly burnt up, we ask each time we say the Litany or the Lord’s Prayer. If we begin to think our own Church has no chaff needing to be burned, we sink to the condition of the Scribes and Pharisees, and prove ourselves near a consuming fire. It is a strange doctrine, spread by some Christians and some unbelievers alike, that we should dread having our opinions challenged or our wrongdoing exposed — “Take care,” the warning runs, “yours is a tottering house; let one brick fall and the whole may collapse.” If our house is indeed tottering, built on sand, Christ’s words oblige us to believe it must and ought to fall — no scheme of ours can save it, He will frustrate them all. But if our house stands on Him, on the rock, then though we cannot ourselves discover what wood, hay, or stubble we have built into it, He will discover it, and will burn it away. So we must tell such friends they have it backward: they urge on us, because we are Christians, a course that would only be sensible and wise if we were not Christians. If there were no Christ, it would be wisdom to cling to all today’s notions and superstitions, since giving them up would only bring worse ones tomorrow. But because we believe in Christ, who came into the world with a fan in His hand and has used it ever since to purge His floor, we are certain He will let no falsehood dwell beside His eternal Truth. He will go on winnowing and threshing until every grain of wheat — every good thought, desire, and hope in any heart — is gathered into His garner, known to have come from seed He planted; and until all the chaff mixed with it, whether religious notions, philosophical conceits, or ordinary selfishness and fleshly lust, is separated from it and cast into the unquenchable fire.