[ p. 11 ]
WHEN John appeared with his proclamation, “The Kingdom of God is at hand,” there may well have been in his preaching a vagueness about the details of the coming age. The central message, however, was unmistakable, and to pious Israelites it was the greatest possible good news: the promised salvation was now at last to be fulfilled. Yet with this promise there was coupled a solemn and terrible warning: If the Kingdom was at hand, then judgment was equally at hand; men’s eternal salvation hung on a verdict soon to be delivered.
John was a new kind of prophet—a man with a flaming message in his heart; a stern preacher of righteousness; young and with fiery enthusiasm; the inaugurator of a religious revival that became the sensation of the day; a man who could plead, but who more often threatened judgment.
Everything about the Baptist emphasized the threat. He was a young man, wind-beaten and weatherbrowned from his wilderness life, clothed in rough yellow garments of camel’s-hair cloth, wearing a girdle of leather, his very costume recalling the prophets of old. There were a look in his eyes and a tone in his voice which made men feel that he had lived near to [ p. 12 ] God. His influence was great, his message impressive. All sorts of people flocked to hear him—plain members of the “proletariat,” who listened to his denunciations of social abuses; ecclesiastics who listened, curious, anxious, suspicious, doubtful; other men whose hearts he aroused to a sense of their own unworthiness; a few quiet, earnest folk who mourned over the moral decline of the nation and rejoiced at John’s preaching of the coming Messiah-King.
He was unsparing in denunciation. He addressed his hearers as a “generation of vipers.” He was indifferent to approval or disapproval. In himself he was nothing, and it mattered not what men thought of him. Compared with the coming Messiah, he was of so little importance that he was not fit to stoop down and unlace the Messiah’s sandals, a task that was relegated to the lowest slaves. A new kind of a revival preacher, indeed; not much in him to remind one of the revivalists of modern times, who think a great deal of what people say about them, are only too anxious to secure a personal following, and love to drink of the waters of adulation! “Never mind me,” said the Baptist; “listen to my message!”
Judgment might come at any moment. Already the ax was lying at the root of the tree, ready for use; if the tree did not bring forth good fruit it would be cut down and cast into the fire. John was fond of agricultural figures, and he drew another from a Palestinian custom at the wheat harvest. After the threshers have finished, they leave on the threshing-floor a pile composed of mixed wheat and chaff. Then comes the [ p. 13 ] winnower, with his “fan,” or large winnowing shovel. With this he tosses the mixture into the wind, which sweeps away the light chaff, while the heavier grains of wheat fall back purified. So the Messiah would act, until the threshing-floor was thoroughly purged. On the righteous he would send a “baptism of Holy Spirit” which would transform them into sons of the Kingdom; but the unrighteous, unless they repented immediately, could expect only a baptism of destructive fire.
Sincere repentance, however, would surely be effective; here John touched a note of hope. And to make repentance sincere, he gave to each class of his hearers simple but incisive moral teaching adapted to their needs. The multitudes in general were warned that repentance was of no avail if they failed to help others and to relieve suffering when they had the means: “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise.” The “publicans,” or tax-collectors, a class notorious for their dishonesty, were adjured not to exceed their legal duties. And even the rough Jewish “soldiers”— i.e., police [1] —were cautioned against the worst faults of police everywhere, violence and blackmail.
If his hearers accepted his teaching thus far, John believed he had a commission from God to do more than merely promise forgiveness. At this period of their history the Jews had developed a custom—not [ p. 14 ] yet universal—of subjecting converts from the Gentiles [2] to a rite of baptism. Its symbolism was obvious enough—a cleansing from the defilements of the past —but Jews never thought of their ceremonies as merely symbolic; rites to a Jew did not merely typify something, they actually accomplished something. So when John called his own ceremony “a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins,” he taught that those who submitted to this washing were—by special divine decree—really purged from the guilt of their past misdeeds.
That the Jews were already using baptism for the admission of Gentiles to Israel made the rite particularly appropriate for John’s purposes, for an essential element of his message was a warning to the people not to trust in national privileges. “Begin not to say within yourselves, ‘We have Abraham to our father!’ God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham! You members of the chosen race need purifying just as truly as if you were the despised heathen.” So the rite involved a conscious self-humiliation, an acknowledgment of national shortcoming. In this way John lifted the Messianic hope out of mere nationalism into the realm of spiritual expectancy.
In practice John presumably followed closely the ritual for the baptism of Gentiles. The candidates took their stand waist-deep in the waters of Jordan, while John, perhaps, remained on the bank. Then each penitent, after confessing his iniquities, bent [ p. 15 ] down to let the river flow over his head. When he stood up again, the ceremony was complete; he was assured that he could now safely face the Messiah at the coming judgment.
The training, however, did not stop there. While waiting for the Messiah to come, John insisted that his disciples must live as men in a dying world, rigorously, with arduous fastings and constant prayer. Such asceticism could never become popular. So, while we are told that great crowds went out to hear John and were admitted to his baptism, it does not appear that many of them continued long under such rigid discipline. Some there were, however, whom John schooled so thoroughly in his own unsparing way of life that they even refused to listen to Jesus when he in turn took up John’s message. These disciples continued as a separate body, made some converts of their own, and for a while tried to rival Christianity. Eventually, driven into Mesopotamia, they settled there and have maintained a continuous existence to the present day, under the name “Mandseans.” Their teaching has become corrupt and wild, [3] but they still reverence John the Baptist as the greatest of all God’s messengers on earth.
Not to be confused with the Roman soldiers, who could not have understood a word of John’s preaching; his language was Aramaic. ↩︎
At the beginning of our era Judaism was an active missionary religion, something a little difficult for us to realize. ↩︎
To the Mandasans the two greatest sins are dancing and wearing colored clothing. ↩︎