December 6, 1998

This is the time of the year when everyone starts to make their top ten or top 100 lists. It is, after all, the end of the year and nearly the end of the decade. I saw a list of top 100 business leaders last weekend and the top ten hits of 1998 have come out (I, of course, didn't agree with them). If you had asked me who I would pick as my top ten list of characters in the Old and New Testaments, I can't say that I would have listed John the Baptist among them. I think I would have listed Moses, the law giver and leader of his people out of slavery. I might have listed Isaiah or Jeremiah, the two prophets who most influenced Jesus.

John the Baptist would not have made my list. He is not the most attractive character. He wouldn't be starting any fashion trends. (Lois, I liked your saying at eight o'clock, "He was not cosmetically correct.") I don't think he would have people signing up for the John the Baptist Diet Plan, and his manner of speech was rather crude. Yet, taking a Stand for God the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus saying that John the Baptist was the greatest man who ever lived. Why? They had few things in common.

Jesus and John were related. They were about the same age. Tradition records that they might have been just a few months apart. They were both brought up in religious families. John's father was a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. And both John and Jesus' roots were in the Old Testament. They both talked about the coming of the Kingdom of God. They both stated that repentance is necessary to enter that Kingdom. Beyond that, the similarity between Jesus and John ends. And that is where our story gets interesting.

John's roots were in the prophets, Old Testament prophets whom he had learned about at the seat of his masters. John's inspiration goes all the way back to Elijah, who lived 800 years before. Elijah wore a coat of rough camel's hair, a material out of which nomads would have made a tent. He wore a leather thong for his belt just as Elijah did, and Elijah got in trouble with the people in his day because he criticized the royal family, namely a queen named Jezebel. John the Baptist in turn didn't pull any punches when he criticized the royal family in his day, the Herods and notably Herodius. Elijah had called down fire from heaven on the enemies of the Lord, and John predicted a similar demise to the wicked of his day. The God who John the Baptist presents is a God whom Elijah revealed; the God of wrath and vengeance would not spare anybody who didn't agree with him, but would utterly destroy. To hear John the Baptist was to hear of the God whom Israelites had worshipped 800 years before.

Now Jesus also claimed his inspiration from the prophets, but he went back to Isaiah who had spoken of the day when swords would be beaten into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and there would be no more war. He claimed the psalmist spoke of God as the shepherd tending his flock. Like John his cousin, he claimed the prophets in his tradition, but instead of proclaiming wrath and vengeance he looked to the future and to the Kingdom of God and of love. In his treatment and attitude toward the people, Jesus could hardly be confused with his cousin John. John had deserted the city and family life in order to live where God had called the people of Israel during the exodus event. John called people names. He pointed out sins and he was right, but he spared no one his wrath. When Jesus preached to people, he was to point out where everyone shares in the Kingdom of God. He spoke of God as a father. He called people sisters and brothers. He used very simple language.

The contrast between Jesus and John continues, not only between the two men, but also the groups of people who came out to hear them were equally different. Picture the scene. John the Baptist, out in the wilderness on the far side of the Jordan River. People came from Jerusalem and Judea. They had to go far out of their way to find him. The kinds of people who I think went out to see him fall into two basic categories. The larger group was composed of just the curious. They came to hear John preach an antique gospel. They came to hear him attack the royal family and the priests and the Pharisees. When they had seen and heard enough, they went home and reported it to either the police or the preists of the temple, or just gossiped until everything was forgotten.

Some people came to John with more serious intentions. They were the people who were defeated by life, who were at the end of their rope. John offered them hope. John offered them a God that they could relate to. Never mind that he offered them a God that was 800 years out of date, but at least he offered them a God who was powerful and real. The people who heard him were lonely and sick, poor and discouraged. They needed something desperately to go on. The message which John preached went straight to their hearts, and one by one, they went to the Jordan River where John would baptize them, starting them on a new path again.

We know the rest of the story...Jesus will show up on the scene. He came from Nazareth, probably because John was his cousin and he wanted to hear what John had to say. And there he stood among the agents of the priests and the royal family, and there were the broken, the poor and the rejected. And I think the longer Jesus stood there and looked at the two groups, the clearer it became that he needed to make a decision about where to stand. He shouldered his way through the crowd and walked down to the water. Even though he did not agree with his cousin John, he agreed to be baptized by him. Was it because Jesus was defeated by life? No. Because he wanted to be washed clean of a life of sin? Absolutely not. It was because he saw the people going to the water; the kind of people honest enough to confess that they could not live without God. They were his kind of people.

Do you see what John the Baptist did? He presented Jesus with a decision and the decision determined what kind of ministry Jesus himself would follow. That ministry was public. Beginning that day on the bank of the Jordan River, that ministry was not to point fingers at sinners and to present an angry and vengeful God, but to proclaim a God who loves us and who is accessible to us.

John the Baptist compelled many people to take a stand for God. John the Baptist compelled Jesus himself to take a stand for God. And that, my friends, belongs at the top of our top ten lists. That is why, in this season of Advent, we honor John the Baptist and the innumerable host of men and women who, for the most part are nameless and forgotten, to challenge others to take a stand for God and by so doing have prepared the way of the Lord. AMEN

The Rev. Sean A. Cox
seancox@stmargarets.org
06 December 1998