Crazy-shirts and raw locusts. Go!
Matthew 3:1-12; Romans 15:4-13; Psalm 72:1-7,18-19; Isaiah 11:1-10
John the Baptist was a really weird duck. There’s no two ways about it. You know the stereotypical crazy hermit? Long beard, unkempt hair, mouths off a little more than he should, slightly eccentric. Yea, that’s John. He had a normal enough childhood by all accounts. He grew up the son of a priest, so he likely was educated. But we also knew he lived in the wilderness for a while, presumably by himself.
So John was there, out in the desert, until the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (my favorite emperor, if you were curious). This turns out to be right around 28 AD for those of you who are interested in those things. So John shows up on the scene, hanging out near the Jordan river saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near”. In other words, “Change your life around, God’s about to do something awesome!”
Now, I mentioned before that John was a little odd. Matthew 3:4 describes him. He wore clothes of camel hair and a leather belt, and he ate locusts and wild honey. It’s not exactly typical behavior. But there’s someone else in the Bible who wore those exact same clothes: Elijah the prophet. In 2 Kings 3:8, Elijah is described as wearing a hair shirt and a leather belt. There’s a lot of references to John being like Elijah so this kind of thing made sense.
More than the symbolism, there’s a practical reason to wear camel hair. Israel’s climate is a little bit all over the place. In winter temperatures are between 40 and 50 degrees, while summer temperatures are well over 110 degrees. Yet people discovered that camel hair is an excellent insulator. It keeps the heat out in the summer and the heat in in the winter. So for someone who lived out in the middle of nowhere, camel’s hair would have been a good choice.
So there’s this weirdo out in the desert yelling about repentance and the kingdom of heaven, and people keep showing up to have him throw them in the river. When you really look at it, it’s kind of odd. But the whole idea of John’s baptism was to show the change in life he was preaching about. You went into the water as one person, a sinner, and you came out of the water another person, someone who had repented of sin. That’s part of the reason why we baptize people today. The other part is what’s coming next.
When the Pharisees and Sadducees showed up, he starts talking about someone else – someone greater than him – who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. That’s the other half of what happens in baptism, God the Holy Spirit comes on us in a new way. Of course, we know that John is talking about Jesus, but they people gathered around him didn’t know that yet.
So John is spending the vast majority of his time preaching and baptizing out by the Jordan River. His whole job is to get people ready, as evidenced by the quote in our gospel: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” Yet John the Baptist isn’t the only one with that call. Last week I talked about how Advent is a time when we prepare not only for Jesus’ birth, but for his Second Coming in power. Our major job as Christians is to do exactly what John did. We’re to be the voice crying out in the wilderness to repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.
Now I’m not advocating wearing hair shirts and leather belts. And I’m not saying we need to head out to the west desert and baptize people in the Great Salt Lake. We don’t need to go to the wilderness, because in a way we’re already there. As Christians, Jesus says we are in the world but not of the world. In a sense we don’t belong here, but we serve as a beacon of life in the wilderness of sin and death.
I’ve said a number of times that as Christians we have three jobs, and you can even argue that it’s three sides of the same job. Job number one, and the most important, is to love God with everything that we are. Job number two is to love everyone around as we have been loved by God. Job number three is to tell others about Jesus. I’m not doing as good as I’d like with any of those jobs, but I pray for the Lord to have mercy on me and help me to do those things.
In a way, John very much was an example of how a Christian should be. He loved God, he loved others, and he told people about Jesus. The main difference being that he did all that before Jesus showed up. Now it’s our job.