Advent 1 - Prepare the Royal Highway

1 Prepare the royal highway; The King of kings is near! Let ev’ry hill and valley A level road appear! Then greet the King of Glory Foretold in sacred story: Hosanna to the Lord, For He fulfills God’s Word!

Preparation is a word that can adequately describe the Christmas season. We prepare our homes, we prepare meals and we prepare parties. At work we prepare the office for the season, we prepare our stores for holiday gift buying, we prepare our restaurants for people who can’t prepare their own meals. We prepare for pageants and plays and church services even. We prepare presents and the tree and the front yard. Christmas itself is like a king coming to visit and with good reason, because Christ our king did come to visit us that first Christmas. The words for this verse come from John the Baptist. Luke chapter 3 tells us that John said, “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all mankind will see God's salvation.”

John then goes on to condemn those prideful Jews who had a sense of laziness in devotion to God because of their heritage. The people became rightfully alarmed and asked what they could do. Of course they didn’t get to work on road construction. No instead John told them to share food and clothing with those who didn’t have any. He told them not to steal or be dishonest in their employment. He baptized them. He warned them of the very real threat of eternal separation from Christ. He more or less tried to get them to be Christlike before that was even a thing. Now their acts of kindness did nothing for them. Their baptism alone did not save them just like their blood line to Abraham did nothing for them. John instead told them to look toward Jesus, that judgement came from the very same God that was now coming to be with them in flesh. That in Christ alone their hope was found.

John had them prepared for their Savior. John has two messages coming from his mouth and he wants people to know that they need to decide which side they want to be on. The first is that your king is coming! Prepare like you would if your king were coming to town. Their kings would be welcomed into town with great fanfare and pageantry as a show of love for their royalty to be graced upon them as though he were there to live like one of the peasants. Unlike a king however, Christ actually did come to live as one of them. To work like one of them as a carpenter. To serve in the temples like one of them. To hunger like they did and to be tempted like they were. The other option was to be against the king, and being against the ruling class and the punishments received for such acts was no strange concept to these people. This section ends with Herod locking John up in prison due to John rebuking the actions of him along with people not sharing coats and taking too much during tax collection. Christ was a great king, one like they had never seen or would they see again this side of Heaven. But crime and punishment is very much a purpose of the ruling class as well and John makes that perfectly clear. Those who would reject their king would be like the chaff of a farmer. Thrown into the fire, but even the chaff burns up, this fire would be eternally unquenchable.

It’s not a very Christmas-y message, these warnings probably don’t fill you with the warmth that Bing Crosby does, or if it does make you feel warm it’s probably out of fear that you may be chaff in the fire. But it did fill those people with a sense of warmth. You see they asked, “What can we do? John, are you this Christ?” They couldn’t wait to serve and love their new king. John says don’t waste your time celebrating me, I’m nobody. I’m not worthy. John wasn’t worthy and no person that day was nor are you or I even with our future knowledge of just what it was Christ accomplished that first Good Friday and Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday. But what does happen? Jesus is baptized by John. John is worthy of Christ through Christ Himself. John the Baptist received full birthrights through Christ’s perfect life and death. John was not the king people thought he was, but he ended up being like a prince. So have we. Not that we deserve praise and adoration or prepared royal highways when we come into town. Nor would we ask for it.

That said, we should act as though we are now part of this royal family, not by dressing up in fine garments or by marching around with authority. Rather, we try to reflect what makes our King the greatest king this Earth has ever known. I’m often reminded of this through acts of Christian charity and help. One of the members at my church once saw a woman pulled off to the side of the road and so he came over to her. She was having tire trouble and trying to figure out how she was going to fix this herself. The young able bodied man changed her tire for her and she tried offering money and he rejected it, but she still wanted to thank him. Instead he told her he had done this to serve both his love for Christ and his love for her as a neighbor, he simply could not bring himself to be thanked. He had a coat and she didn’t. It was what needed to be done. However Christ, his king, was deserving of thanksgiving.

How then, do we prepare ourselves for our king? Our king is coming again, does that mean we should start gathering palm fronds and getting together with the road commission making sure that roads do not curve or incline. No, of course not but we want to make sure we don’t throw aside the royalty Christ has shared with us. Jesus Himself brought this to light in Matthew 22:

“₁Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: ₂"The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. ₃He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. ₄"Then he sent some more servants and said, 'Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.' ₅"But they paid no attention and went off--one to his field, another to his business. ₆The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. ₇The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. ₈"Then he said to his servants, 'The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. ₉Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.' ₁₀So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. ₁₁"But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. ₁₂'Friend,' he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?' The man was speechless. ₁₃"Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' ₁₄"For many are invited, but few are chosen."”

The very people John tried to warn, those who were so proud of their great ancestry are the same who turned down the invitation to their Heavenly Father’s banquet for His Son. The world was then invited to be part of this Heavenly royalty but how often do we see people not turning to Christ. Then there were those who showed up but they don’t belong there. It’s not our clothes that get us removed from Heaven, it’s that this man who was chosen to become part of something greater, something that was off the table for him. He was careless. How often do we see people in our lives that show this careless attitude? I believe in a god. I’ll go to church when I’m older. The Bible is a nice story. I was Catholic growing up. ..

But those guests at the wedding were not the royalty intended to be there. They may not have had silk robes and expensive fragrances. But upon their gracious invitation they dressed themselves as much as they could, they were among royalty and they wanted to be part of it. Likewise, we’re not holy, we’ve all fallen short of perfection, but we can change that tire when we’re able to, we can give a coat if we have it, we can tell the news of our newborn King, because we’re not worthy to untie Jesus’ sandals, but Jesus has made us worthy and has elevated us to sons and daughters, not even servants. Prepare yourselves, Christ is coming again. Think of your heart as a road. What’s winding you away from your king, where are the rocks and potholes that cause you to stumble? Open the gates to your heart that the King of glory may come in!