John the Baptist uses an image that is puzzling to us but that would have been powerful indeed to his original audience. Speaking of the coming Messiah, he says, "His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn" ....
A threshing floor was a flat piece of ground on which stalks of harvested grain would be laid and subsequently pressed or crushed, so as to separate the edible wheat from the inedible chaff. A winnowing fan was a kind of pitch-fork that a farmer would use to throw the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air, so that the wind would carry off the lighter material and leave the heavier substance behind. This act of separation was indispensable to the preparation of good bread.
The Messiah, John the Baptist, is telling us, will perform a similar work on our minds and hearts. He will separate the good from the bad, the loving from the wicked, the godly from the self-absorbed. Most of us allow the better angels of our nature to exist alongside our inner demons, and the result is a spiritual hodge-podge. When Christ approaches us, he comes with his winnnowing fan, which means he will toss things around a bit! This helps to explain why the Lord says he has come with a sword and why the author of the Letter to Hebrews insists, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."
~Very Rev. Robert Barron
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