Saint John the Baptist

And yet crowd after crowd left their markets and their fields and walked a whole day from Jerusalem down into that sunken land, hot as a furnace, just to stand and listen to him. He did not promise them an easier life. He made them look straight at what was crooked in their own hearts, made them share their clothes and food with those who had nothing, and then plunged them into the cold water as a sign of being washed clean to the root.

In the Jewish society of that time, a childless woman carried a kind of invisible stain; people whispered behind her back, thinking it a sign of some sin not yet forgiven. Over the years the couple must have learned to live with those looks, and to swallow their hurt each time the house next door rang with children’s voices.

Then one day the lot fell to Zechariah, one of the many priests of the division of Abijah, to enter the sanctuary and offer incense. It was an honor that might come only once in a lifetime: he alone went in, while the whole crowd waited outside. In the thick, drifting smoke, an angel appeared, standing to the right of the altar of incense. Zechariah was so frightened that his whole body went rigid.

The angel reassured him: do not be afraid, your prayer has been heard; Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall name him John. The child would be great in the sight of the Lord and would go ahead to prepare the way for the Savior, in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah.

The old man blurted out a very human question, and who could blame him?

“How can I be sure of this? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.”

Not an argument, just the question of a man who had waited so long he no longer dared believe in miracles. But that very question struck him dumb: he could not say a word until the day the child was born.

Those nine silent months must have been the strangest of his life: a priest used to explaining the law to the people, now able only to gesture, to write, and to listen. Perhaps that enforced silence gave him time to let what had happened sink in, instead of rushing to tell the whole village.

Of the years that followed, Scripture says only one thing: the boy grew and became strong in spirit, and lived in the wilderness until the day he appeared before Israel. No one knows how old he was when he left home, or where he lived, ate and slept through all those years. One theory holds that he spent time with the Essenes, an ascetic community living apart near the Dead Sea, but that is only a scholar’s guess with no firm evidence. The desert kept John’s secret, as it keeps all its secrets, until the day it was ready to roar.

Nothing about his appearance commanded respect in the usual way: a camel-hair cloak scratching his skin, a belt of animal hide, meals of locusts and wild honey, the diet of a man living without any comforts at all. Yet when hundreds of people gathered round him on the muddy riverbank asking what they must do to change their lives, he gave them no lofty spiritual formula. His answers were practical and ordinary: whoever has two coats, give one to the person who has none; whoever has food, do the same. To the tax collectors, despised by everyone for cheating the people, he said only: do not collect more than you are owed. To the soldiers who liked to harass and threaten honest people to squeeze money out of them, he said only: do not extort, do not make false accusations, be content with your pay.

There is nothing lofty in those words, only everyday matters of food and clothing that any decent person ought to know. But perhaps that is exactly why they touched people’s hearts. For John, repentance was not a warm feeling as you stepped out of the water. It meant sharing your food and keeping your hands clean in a job that easily breeds greed.

People began whispering to one another, unable to hide their hope: could this be the Messiah the nation had awaited for centuries? John put a stop to that at once, without letting it go to his head in the least. He pointed to someone still to come:

“One more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

“It is I who need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me?”

he exclaimed, trying to hold him back. But the man answered calmly: “Let it be so for now, for it is fitting for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Then the heavens opened. Something like a dove came down, and a voice from above was heard: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” The writer of the fourth Gospel also keeps another sentence John spoke the very next day, when he saw that man passing in the distance:

“This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

Two disciples standing beside John heard those words and quietly left their teacher to follow the stranger. One of them was Andrew. That same day Andrew ran to find his brother Simon and brought him to meet the new teacher. It was the start of a chain of encounters that would change history.

There was no bitterness in those words. They sound like the sigh of relief of a man who has finished the task he was given and has nothing left to hold on to for himself.

John was locked up there. The immediate reason was that he had dared to denounce Herod Antipas publicly for marrying Herodias, the wife of his own brother, Herod Philip. The Law of Moses, in the book of Leviticus, clearly forbade taking your brother’s wife. To marry Herodias, Antipas also had to put away his first wife, the princess Phasaelis, daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea. That decision cost him dearly: Aretas, enraged, went to war, and Antipas’s army was badly defeated. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing at the time, adds that Herod imprisoned John because he feared John’s influence over the people might turn into a revolt. So two motives, the private grudge of a woman exposed and the political fear of a suspicious king, closed in on one man.

Lying in the moldy darkness beneath his jailer’s marble floors, John still heard news now and then of what the man he had baptized was doing: healing the sick, driving out demons, teaching the crowds. He sent his disciples to put a blunt question to him:

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for someone else?”

It was a strange question from the man who had been so certain on the riverbank. Perhaps in prison, when time crawls and hope wears thin with each damp, lightless day, even a prophet may waver. Scripture tells us nothing more of that inner struggle; it simply leaves the question there, bare and unexplained.

Jesus did not reproach him for asking. He told the messengers to go back and report exactly what they had seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor hear the good news. Then, as the messengers turned to go, he faced the crowd and said something that left everyone stunned:

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist.”

The girl ran to ask her mother what to request. And the mother, still nursing her hatred for the man who had dared to condemn her marriage in public, whispered the answer in her daughter’s ear: ask for the head of John the Baptist, on a platter.

Here was a man with the power of life and death in his hands, who knew perfectly well whom he was about to kill (Scripture records that Herod feared and respected John and even liked listening to him), and still he went ahead, all because of a rash oath sworn in a drunken moment. Perhaps that is the most frightening thing in the whole story: knowing what is right is never enough if, at the moment of decision, we choose to save face.