John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
This is the way the world shall end
Hark, I will tell you more
The forecasts of alchemists, poets and priests
And weird millenarians huddling in fear
All have an incredible flaw.
This is the way the world shall end
Not in fire or in blood
Or pestilence sent by four horsemen grim
Or the press of a button at a psychopath's whim
Nor even engulfed in a flood.
This is the way the world shall end
At the sound of the angels' fanfare
But the whole of creation which God set in train
Will have long before then ceased to function at all
When, looking upon the break of that seal
And the angel poised with trumpet to lip
The onlooker says with a wearisome yawn
Blow it! I don't really care.
("Seventh Seal" / PJM 1988)
Is it less common than it used to be? I don't know, but I am under the impression that there are less people in the streets haranguing you about the end of the world than there were in years gone by. "The End Of The World Is Nigh," the sandwich-boards of the religious fanatics used to declare, and when I was younger, when the end of the world might well have been nigh, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, I was always able to think of at least one thing that I would rather do in the last four minutes than carry a sandwich board around on my back, looking glum. Indeed, I would have opted for the exact opposite of what T.S. Eliot imagined that the end of the world might be like.
When people hear, or speak, of John the Baptist, a first century AD end-of-the-world sandwich-board-man is what they tend to picture. I guess that it has something to do with the camel's hair cloak, the locusts, and the wild honey. That John the Baptist – wasn't he the first of God's hippies, they say.
No – he wasn't really an end-of-the-world merchant, in the traditional, accepted sense. He was the last prophet to announce the coming of God's promised Messiah. He spoke in reference to the first coming of the Christ, not to his final appearing… John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John the Baptist's preaching was a personal message with an individual focus, not a general cosmic warning, even though the sum total of personal attitudes and conduct could have a universal, if not cosmic, effect – either negative or positive.
Here was a challenge to you as an individual. John the Baptist invited you to look at your life, to be honest about what was wrong in the way that you lived it, and to decide what you were going to change in the way that you lived in order to bring your life more in line with the life that God wanted us all to live. Being honest with God was what was to win you forgiveness and acceptance in his sight. If you changed your life for the better, then that change would improve the lives of all around you too. You would treat them better. They would treat you better. And society on earth would gradually become more like the company of heaven. The sum total of individual holiness could have a general effect on society's overall wellbeing.
That was what the gospel of repentance meant – changing your life to a different direction for your own better relationship with God and for the universal benefit of all society. In a sense, it was an invitation to the rejection of selfishness and a reorientation to the practice of loving kindness towards others. You were to indicate your intention by a very symbolic act – the ritual of baptism. Indeed, there was a double symbolism. Your intention was indicated in the very act that represented the washing away of your past misdeeds.
Perhaps – no, there is no perhaps about it! – two thousand years later, that challenge to change still needs to be offered to a society that is glossily sophisticated, but manifestly broken. But forgiveness, personal improvement, holiness, greater wellbeing in society, call it what you will, is only attainable if you are honest about what society and you yourself have done wrong to get us all into this mess in the first place. Repentance is all about acting on honesty, isn't it? If you take the predominantly post-modern view that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and that value systems are merely individual, arbitrary, culturally conditioned, human constructs, then none of our previous thoughts will make sense to you. However, if you do think that there is no such thing as right and wrong these days, you have to find another reason for why society is in the mess that it is.
John the Baptist's gospel of repentance, and the two thousand-year-old Christian tradition, says that there is a set of eternal values for earthly life that God himself has revealed to us and to the generations that went before us. The finer details may need subtly tailoring to different historical circumstances and to diverse cultural situations, but essentially the general principles still hold true.
For those who would listen, John the Baptist's proclamation shook people out of their apathy and forced them to be honest. "It doesn't matter… I can't be bothered…" These sentiments were not acceptable answers or strategies. It does matter! You must be bothered! Human injustice, the effects of climate change, the results of financial fraudulence or the ultimate chaos of living on endless credit… People who are trying to awaken your conscience to these things are pleading with you to look at these concerns with the same sense of urgency. It does matter! You must be bothered!
But John the Baptist's preaching of a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins had one extra, critical dimension. His clarion cry was: Prepare the way of the Lord! Generations of prophets before John the Baptist had announced that God would send his chosen representative to his people, but John was the last to announce it, because he was the first to recognise that the Messiah of Old Testament expectation was already among them. Furthermore, he met him face to face and baptized the one person in human history who did not need the forgiveness of sins, because the Christ himself was to be the agent of the taking away of ours. If you knew that he was among you, would you not want to be living a life worthy of meeting him? And so the scene was set and the challenge was offered: John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
On the third Sunday of Advent, we celebrate the life, ministry and proclamation of John the Baptist. His earthly life coincided with the earthly life of the one whose coming he announced. Had you lived at the time of John the Baptist, you could have met face to face the Messiah of whom John spoke. But their earthly lives are over now, aren't they? John the Baptist was beheaded, Jesus was crucified, even though many testified to meeting him again on or for a short period after Easter Day. Saint Peter was crucified. Saint Paul, like John the Baptist, was beheaded. Many of the early Christian saints were martyred. A generation of Christians followed who had never met Jesus during the course of his earthly life.
But the strange power of Pentecost upheld all these generations, as it upholds us still. John the Baptist proclaimed what he knew – he could do no other, being a prophet, not a fortune-teller. He died in prison long before Easter Day. However, this second generation of Christians began to realise that there were three aspects of John the Baptist's proclamation, not two, because, unlike him, they knew of Easter Day and its incredible events. He who had come was not just an Old Testament Messiah, nor even just a present-day anointed and baptized Christ. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it almost better than anybody else: In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son…
A Son! That was the critical realisation that, together with the experience of Pentecost, laid the foundations for the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The millenarian, sandwich-board aspect of John the Baptist's and of the Church's subsequent, initial proclamation receded somewhat when the Risen Christ did not immediately return in glory and judgement. Early Christians started to ask people like Saint Paul what would happen to their loved ones who had died before Christ's triumphant return. The realisation dawned that whether Christ returned in your earthly lifetime, or whether you died before that return, you would still meet him face to face – on earth, or in heaven – and stand before him and say, "This is what I did with the life on earth that you gave me to live."
So John the Baptist's challenge to you was still valid, and it is still valid to this day. John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Choose to live the life now that is worthy of revealing no shame when you stand before Jesus Christ, face to face. That does matter! About that, you must be bothered!