Advent Quiet Day on John the Baptist Saturday 13 December at Elsieshields

First Address

Almost all we know about John the Baptist comes from the 4 Gospels of the New Testament. In this first address I shall draw on the first 3 Gospels especially, and in my second talk the focus will be much more on the Gospel according to St John.

St Mark, almost certainly the earliest Gospel to have been written, begins his narrative with the appearance of John the Baptist in the desert of Judea. This, he sees as the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. Here in Mark, therefore, we encounter the adult John, with his direct uncompromising message. So too, in Mark, we are introduced at the outset to the adult Jesus, on the verge of His public ministry.

St Luke’s Gospel, however, begins the gospel narrative with a time thirty years or so earlier, when the births and future ministries of both John the Baptist and Jesus are announced through the vision of the angel, Gabriel. Here the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus are in parallel. Unlike Jesus, however, John was born when both his parents were elderly and could not normally have been expected to be blessed with the birth of children. John’s father was Zechariah, an elderly priest of the temple, married to a woman called Elizabeth. At the time of the revelation the couple were childless. It was after Zechariah had been chosen by lot to enter a holy area of the temple to burn incense by an altar that the angel of the Lord appeared to him. This is what the angel told Zechariah, (I shall quote from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible), “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name, John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth; for he will be great before the Lord, and he shall drink no wine, nor strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” Zechariah, if you pardon the pun, is dumbfounded at the revelation. How can this be? I’m an old man and my wife too, is advanced in years! The angel answers that he is Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and has been sent to bring the good news. Because Zechariah has not believed the message, Gabriel tells him that he will be unable to speak until the time of the child’s birth. The delay in Zechariah coming out of the holy place had obviously begun to be disconcerting to the people who wondered what was taking so long. When he came out unable to speak, however, they realised that he had seen a vision and because he had lost the power of speech he could only make signs to them. After the time of his temple service was over Zechariah returned home and we do not hear any more of him until the time of John the Baptist’s birth when the birth of John was taken as a sign of great blessing to Elizabeth. On the 8th day following the birth, when John came to be circumcised, the local folk thought he would be called Zechariah, after his father, but Zechariah asked for a tablet on which he wrote, “his name is John”. At this Zechariah’s speech was restored, and he spoke, blessing God. Such extraordinary things, St Luke records, were spoken of throughout the hill country of Judea, as people asked themselves, “What then shall this child be? For the hand of the Lord was upon him.”

Apologies if what I have said in the last few minutes has been something of a pedestrian lift from a narrative which you will be familiar with, but I think it is important to build on these earliest foundations and examine what great things the people were expecting of this key figure in the New Testament. John’s place in the Gospel is, after all, unique. He was the one whom God had called to be His herald, the forerunner of Jesus’ ministry.

From birth to manhood. This was a period, in Jesus’ case of around 30 years, the time from the infancy narratives of the Gospels to the age, traditionally when Jesus began his public ministry. What happened during these 3 decades? The gospels are virtually silent in the case of Jesus’ life, save for the visit to the temple that St Luke records when Jesus was aged 12. You remember how Mary and Joseph had returned from Jerusalem with the rest of the pilgrims and discovered to their consternation that Jesus was not in the company. They hurried back to Jerusalem and found Jesus conversing and putting questions to the temple elders. They are asked by their son in the old King James version of the Bible, “Whist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business”.

With John the Baptist, however, there is not even one story of this kind to interrupt the silent decades. After St Luke tells us that “the child grew and became strong in spirit and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel”, we do not meet John the Baptist again in the New Testament until he appears by the river Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

So where was John the Baptist from the time of his birth until the time of his appearance in the Jordan countryside? St Luke says he was in the desert, and one idea that has been widely canvassed was that John the Baptist may have been brought up by a religious community such as the Essenes, who lived an austere life by the shores of the Dead Sea. These communities, we learn from the Jewish historian, Jospehus, were ascetic and their discipline very strict. They prayed communally several times a day like religious communities today but what particularly distinguished the Essenes was the practice they made of ritual washing a number of times daily. The likeliest explanation for this symbolism was that it expressed the idea of purity, or being made clean from sin. John’s baptism was, of course, different in one major respect and that was that baptism was a once for all act, rather than something to be repeated many times over. John’s baptism marked a decisive act, a turning to the Lord in an act of repentance.

One reason why John the Baptist has been associated with the Essenes is the emphasis they placed on water in a ritualistic action, but another is that if John’s parents were elderly when he was born it is quite possible that he was orphaned at a relatively early age. If this is so he may have been brought up by an Essene, or some such similar community like that at Qumran which has given us the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John was, in any case, a son of the desert and the description that St Mark gives us in his Gospel shows that his clothing and appearance were, like the desert itself, stark and striking. Mark tells us that John was clothed with camel’s hair and had a leather girdle round his waist. In this respect John’s appearance closely resembled the prophet, Elijah, and it is possible that John’s choice was deliberate. Certainly, some of his compatriots made the comparison between John the Baptist and Elijah explicit.

His food was locusts and wild honey. There is a popular television programme featuring celebrities and their life in the jungle and as part of the exercise they are invited to eat all kinds of creepy crawlies. I can’t bear to watch that kind of thing and on the first reading it seems that John the Baptist was doing something similar in eating locusts. It came to me as a relief when I took O level divinity to learn, however, that an alternative translation of what John ate was that they were carobs, the seed of the carob tree. Recently I was fortunate to go to Cyprus where the tour guide told us that Germans refer to the carob tree as” Johannesbrot”, John’s food, or bread.

Now one of the reasons I chose John the Baptist to think on this Advent is that if we reflect on his lifestyle and his teaching, there is much in them that challenges us today.

John the Baptist ate frugally and had the simplest of lifestyles. He lived in 1st century Palestine, true, and was a member of a culture which differs radically from our own. Nevertheless, is John not the antithesis of so much that is regrettable in our consumerist throwaway society? Although it is not declared explicitly, advertising prompts us, as Christmas approaches, to spend to excess and to eat and drink more than we could possibly need.

St Matthew and St Luke both draw on a tradition which outlines some of John the Baptist’s ethical teaching, and here again we find, if we look at John the Baptist in a new light, that he is astonishingly relevant. Many of the problems in our world today are caused, I believe, by the fact that mankind, in his development, has never successfully transcended tribalism. Look at any of the world’s hotspots, the recent atrocities in India, the agenda of Al Qaeda worldwide, the perceived gulf between Christianity and Islam, then in the late 20th century, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda.

What insight does John give us here? When he came across Jews coming for baptism who trusted in the membership of their own race, or their descendancy from Abraham to win them salvation, he called them “a brood of vipers”. He told them they must bear fruits of repentance. It was not enough to say “we have Abraham as our father”. John told them unequivocally that it was no use saying that. God could raise up children for Abraham from the stones of the desert. One of the unfortunate things when one language is translated into another is that we often lose original meanings, and certainly this is so in the case of a play on words. This is actually what is happening here. In Aramaic the words for stones and children have a similar resonance to them. So here you see, John is showing us that to make a race or a religion an idol that will save us is folly. It can in no way help us escape from the moral imperative which is to be gracious and just towards our neighbour. This is a message which is as urgent and relevant today as ever it was when John addressed his hearers by the River Jordan.

This leads us on nicely to the remainder of John the Baptist’s ethical teaching. Luke records that the multitudes asked him, “what shall we do?” John’s reply accords with the central tenets of justice enshrined in the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. “He who has 2 coats”, John says, “should share with a person who has none”. And so it ought to be with food.

Tax collectors in the Gospels are represented as sinners who transgressed the law, and one of the main reasons why this was so is that they took more than their just due from the monies they levied. John doesn’t mince his words here and tells them that they should collect no more than is appointed for them.

The teaching of John the Baptist here, therefore, enshrines the central ideas of social morality that are at the heart of the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. These moral principles, the justice that God desires, stand the test of time and society as a whole is weakened when the wealthy and the powerful look exclusively to their own interests, and allow the disadvantaged to reap the consequences of their selfish actions. If you doubt the relevance of John the Baptist, think about the immense economic difficulties Britain and many other nations are in because of the excesses of an economic system which lacks moral control, where those in the Stock Market play with billions of pounds of other people’s money, risking the lives of millions in acts of reckless casino capitalism.

The last group of people we hear about who approached John the Baptist were soldiers. It is unlikely that they were actually Roman soldiers. They were probably Jewish soldiers who had a limited autonomy under the Romans to keep order in Jerusalem and its environs. When this group in society looked to John for teaching he advised them, “rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”

If you think well, all this is very fine but John the Baptist lived such a long time ago, what can he possibly say to us today that has any relevance, just call to mind the outrage that emerged when it came to light that the American military were abusing, even torturing the prisoners in Iraq. Rightly, the international community asks questions what is actually going on in Guantanamo Bay. And of course it’s not just the Americans who are open to moral scrutiny here. A number of British soldiers were also involved in actions against Iraqis, which given the speed that these events can be posted on the Internet, effectively place countless of their colleagues in danger of reprisals from insurgents. So it is possible for the military to get out of control and in an abuse of their position of power to terrorise the civilian population by acts of violence, bloodshed and rape. Consider these things in our world of today and look at John the Baptist’s teaching afresh. He stands for justice and challenges all of us to respond to our neighbour in ways that are consistently ethical. Inconveniently, John the Baptist also challenges those who control others from their position of power to look to their actions. One day they will be judged for them. John’s message was that the coming of the Lord in judgment was about to take place. The axe was poised to strike at the root of the tree and any tree that did not bear good fruit would be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Here, then, and appropriately striking the note of judgement that was about to come to the earth, I shall close this first talk. In the second, I shall focus on John’s baptism and his spirituality.

Introduction

Second Address