[ p. 10 ]
THE Palestine of Jesus’ manhood was in a condition of spiritual tension caused by the ineluctable advance of the Roman power. Against the dominion of the Greek Seleucids, two hundred years before, the Jewish nation, led by John Maccabaeus, had victoriously asserted its independence and integrity. But now the intermittent aggressions of the Seleucids had given way to the slow and steady pressure of mightier Rome. Galilee was indeed still ruled, as a kind of native state, by a Graecized son of Herod the Great; but Judaea, and the holy city of Jerusalem, had now fallen under the direct control of a Roman procurator. The vision of an Israel triumphant in this world was fading fast.
The more vehemently were the thoughts of the pious Jew and few Jews of Palestine were not, in some way or other, pious turned toward the expectation of a miracle. It was half spiritual, half [ p. 11 ] material. Something dim and majestic and terrible would happen: God’s vicegerent, the Messiah, would come with power; at his coming the world would end ; a new world would begin with God himself for King. Thus God would deliver, his chosen and confound their oppressors. The expectation, though intense, was vague. But out of the mists of prophecy and foreboding certain things showed clear. The last words of the last of the prophets, Malachi, had been: “Before the dawning of the great and terrible Day of the Eternal, I will send you the prophet Elijah.” Thus it was fixed that Elijah would be the forerunner of the superhuman and awful figure of the Messiah, who should come to judge all the world.
But Elijah would come only after a period of chaos and tribulation. Such, at least, was Jesus’ own expectation expressed in the words: “Elijah comes first to restore all things” to restore them from the chaos in which they were plunged. But whether the time of chaos and tribulation was that which the Jews were then enduring or some more terrible condition which was to befall them who could say? A voice of authority was needed to declare these things the voice of a prophet.
[ p. 12 ]
A prophet appeared. One John came out of the desert to declare that the great and terrible Day was indeed at hand, and that the way to escape the Wrath of God was to be baptized as a sign that a man’s soul was cleansed from sin. John himself made no direct claim to be Elijah; but, if his words are truly reported, a claim to be Elijah was implicit in his declaration that he was the immediate forerunner of a Mightier One, a fierce and terrible Judge. In any case, even of those who believed in John, only some held him to be Elijah; the others believed simply that he was a prophet And, above all, Jesus, who certainly believed in John, did not believe that John was Elijah, He was to believe it afterward, but much was to happen to him before that belief became possible, and necessary. What Jesus went out to see in John the Baptist was a prophet. And he saw a prophet, and he heard him proclaim that the great and terrible Day of the Eternal was at hand. A fierce gaunt man, clad in a rough camel-skin, who ate no food but what the stony place would yield him—wild honey and locusts, [ p. 13 ] vermin of the desert spoke vehemently of the imminent Wrath, and the Mighty One to come.
“Whose fan is in his hand, and he shall winnow bis threshing-floor, and gather his wheat into his garner, and burn the chaff in the unquenchable fire.”
Yet that wrath and the judgment of that coming One might be escaped by the baptism of remission of sins. Those who bore the mark of this new sacrament for none had baptized a Jew before the coming of John those who repented of their sins and were washed in the Jordan as a sign, is sheep go down to the stream and are washed and a new bright mark is set upon them by the shepherd these should escape if their deeds were true to their mark of regeneration. These the coming One would spare.
John said grimly :
“A stronger than I comes after me, whose very sandal-thong I am not worthy to bend and unloose. I baptize you with water; but he will baptize you with fire.”
The menace of that fiery trial struck fear into the hearts of some whose heads were proof against it Pharisees, who believed that the roll of the [ p. 14 ] prophets was long since closed, Sadducees, who scarcely believed in prophets at all, were among those who came out to see and remained to be terrified. Not many of either, for few of the Pharisees expected a new revelation, and few of the Sadducees desired one; but enough for John the Baptist to turn upon them with the withering words :
“Offspring of vipers ! Who gave you the hint to flee from the wrath to come?”
“Offspring of vipers!” The name was to cling to them, and to be put into the mouth of Jesus himself, although his name for the Pharisees and his condemnation of them was other than John’s. John’s vision of them was his own, the vision of a desert anchorite who had seen the snakes gliding away before the oncoming fire.
Yet John baptized them, with a fierce word of warning, mistrustful of their repentance:
“Bring forth fruit worthy of repentance. And think not to say to yourselves : ‘We have Abraham for our father.’ I tell you God can take these stones and make them sons of Abraham. Already the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree [ p. 15 ] which does not bear good fruit will be hewn down and burned.”
But the Pharisees and Sadducees who obeyed the command of John to repent and be baptized were few. The Sadducees had made their peace with the world, and the Pharisees had made their peace with God. Were the Pharisees, who governed every act of their lives by the written and unwritten Law, to confess themselves sinners in need of repentance? They had dealt justly with God, they had pored over the books of his Law, they had squeezed the last drop of precept from them, in their agony to walk in his ways; therefore the wrath to come, if it came, would find them unafraid. They were righteous men.
And in the deepest sense in which that uncongenial word “righteous” has ever been used, the Pharisees were righteous men. They were not many—some six thousand in all the land—a confraternity of servants of God, members of a strict and narrow Church, such as Christianity itself has produced many times since then, and gloried in the creation ; men who served the God they knew, in the way they knew. They dealt justly with their God ? and expected justice from him. Doubtless [ p. 16 ] they received it. For it was not the God whom they served who branded them forever with the name of hypocrites. It was another God ; and He, when they refused to repent at John the Baptist’s summons, had not yet been born.
The sinners and the common folk, who knew that the Wrath could not leave them unscathed ; the tax-gatherers and soldiers who sold themselves to the alien power; the harlots who sold themselves to everybody these obeyed John’s summons. The men and women who had something to repent of these repented. And they asked what they were to do. They had repented, they had been baptized, they had saved themselves from the wrath, but what came next?
John himself hardly knew. What came next, for him the prophet was the Mighty One and the Wrath and the End of all things. Against the glare of that impending consummation all human action showed grotesque and irrelevant. And John’s own recorded words to his anxious converts have their tinge of futility. The tax-gatherers said, “What shall we do?”
He answered, “Exact no more than is your due.”
The soldiers said, “What shall we do?”
[ p. 17 ]
He answered, “Do not be tyrannous ; do not arrest people on false charges ; be content with your pay.”
And to the common folk at large he said, “Let the man with two shirts give one to him that has none; and the man who has food do likewise.”
John could think of nothing better to say. His words struck lukewarm, or positively chill, on souls wrought to white heat by his vision of the End of All. He had need to be more than a prophet to have teaching adequate to such an apocalypse. In his words we still can hear, down the long whispering gallery of the centuries, the faltering voice of one who sees surely timeless things, but is uncertain in the world in time. When it came to the question what to do, during the sickening interspace while the end was not yet, he had no more to say than the Pharisees themselves. To do them justice, they would have said more than he ; they would at least have said to the soldier and the tax-gatherer, “Leave your hireling service.”
But John had eyes not for things that are, but only for things to come ; and even those he could not see. The Mightier One was among the sinners whom he baptized, but he did not recognize him. [ p. 18 ] He was not the first, nor yet the last of prophets, to be dazzled by his own vision, and blink bewildered at the world that is. That one among his crowd of sinners should be the Mightier One than he—that thought never entered his mind: for it was none other than the arduous, the all but unthinkable thought, that the timeless world and the world in time are one.