“John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea, and saying, ‘Repent,’ for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Matthew 3.1)
Prophets don’t have a wide circle of friends. There are good reasons for it. They never know when to shut up. That alienates people. They’re never satisfied with things as they are. That annoys people. They never see things the same way as other people see them. That aggravates people. As a result, prophets end up dismissed by others as loners, losers, or loonies. A prophet is always out of step with the rest of the world.
When the musical genius, Johann Sebastian Bach, was the organist at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany from 1723 until his death in 1750, parishioners complained regularly about him. They didn’t like his new and different and strange music that he wrote for the church service each Sunday. After his death, few people bothered with his music for almost a hundred years. Today, Bach is considered one of the greatest musicians of all times. Geniuses, like prophets, walk to a different drumbeat.
John the Baptist was the last in a long line of old Hebrew prophets, an underestimated, undersized, misunderstood group of people whose main job through the centuries seemed to be to ruffle feathers. As a whole, they were loud-mouthed, impolite, and unapologetic. All of them were irritating to one degree or another. All were daredevils in their public rants.
Most dressed the part. We hear “John wore clothing made of camel’s hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” At least he wore clothes. Some of his predecessors did not. Several of them would be locked away today if they walked our streets, or, if they escaped the law, they’d end up sleeping in cardboard boxes in dark alleys. Their presence in the public square now, as then, would not be tolerated.
When prophets saw something they didn’t like, they said something about it. Amos didn’t like how the poor got mistreated. He said so. Ezekiel took issue with the blindness of those in power. He said so. Jeremiah pointed fingers at the people for their empty morals. He said so again and again. Almost all of the prophets liked to use words like traitors, adulterers, or prostitutes to describe the actions of the people around them. Again, that didn’t make many friends for them.
So, when John the Baptist arrives at the Jordan River and starts calling the leaders of Jerusalem a “brood of vipers,” he was saying what most prophets before him had said. His listeners were surprised, stunned, and insulted. It didn’t stop him. He saw wrongs others seemed to ignore and he voiced his unhappiness with the mess he saw. Some of his favorite rants were, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none.” “Do not practice extortion.” “Do not falsely accuse anyone.”
He didn’t stop ranting until Herod the King locked him up for talking about the king’s adulterous relationship and, for good measure, Herod chopped off his head to shut him up. Yet, even that didn’t seem to work. It is one of the most troubling things about prophets—while they may die, their words never die.
We get to hear some of those words of John the Baptist today when he challenges his contemporaries to change their ways. “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance,” he tells them, warning that “every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” He shouted out the sinfulness he saw and he demanded that people acknowledge their sins. His battlecry—and for him it was a battle—was “Repent.”
Repentance implies a wrong turn has been made somewhere in our past and it is time to get back on the right path. It is the clarion call of every prophet. Within this call to repentance always can be found several components, especially: 1) self-examination, 2) a change in the status quo, and 3) a shift towards right living. Each component is unsettling to people who like the way things are, who prefer the world stay the same, who don’t want to dig too deep into their souls.
Self-examination is the starter on the engine that drives repentance because a change of heart is dead on arrival unless and until a person looks into the depths of the soul with brutal honesty and with eyes opened to his or her own wrongdoing. This requires Herculean effort because we don’t like to go deep into our souls, where dark deeds, dark desires, and dark demons hide in the blackness. It is a rare person who can stare into his or her soul without turning into a pillar of salt. Still, this self-examination is the first and the most important step towards any surgical removal of cancers in the soul.
If and when we can complete this self-examination of our souls, then we come to see that a change in the status quo is necessary. We can’t continue to live as we have lived. We can’t do as we have done. We can’t say anymore, “This is as good as it gets.” Again, this is difficult work because we inherently dislike change. External change is uncomfortable for us and internal change is terrifying for us. But the status quo must go if we are to get to a better self, which is the only way to a better world.
The third step in the process of repentance is a changed life, a life now geared towards goodness and truth, a life dedicated to light and to love. Without this change of heart, borne out in good deeds, repentance is incomplete and stalled. It is good intentions without good results. A genuinely converted life produces good fruit, as John insisted. It is the daily drudgery of planting the seeds of love in the black soil of this world, hopeful that our work in the fields will bring a harvest of goodness and beauty and mercy. Admittedly, all three stages of repentance are tough, but this last one may be the most difficult. It calls for a permanent change in the way we live, not just a pit stop along the way.
Someone once said that if we aren’t careful, John the Baptist can take all of the fun out of Christmas. There may be some truth to that thought. Prophets are not people you sit at the bar with to have a beer and to watch the game. The sacred text makes that clear when it tells us that John scared people away, telling them, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees.” That is not the description of a beer and peanuts type of guy.
Yet, John the Baptist is purposely placed at the doorway to Christmas. In many ways, he’s the bouncer at the bar, saying who gets in and who gets kicked out. Entrance in or exit out of Christmas is determined by the seriousness we apply to John’s message of repentance. Simply stated, Christmas makes the case that a ray of light has shot into the dark corners of this world and those who see it and believe in it are committed to turning the world upside down by living in it in a way so different and so strange and so much better from what the world is used to seeing that people are inclined to say, “Surely God has walked among us.”
—Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 