Page 37
Chapter VII
Jesus asks whether they went out to see a reed shaken by the wind, or someone dressed like a courtier—the last things to which anyone would compare John. There was nothing supple about him, as Herod found, and Herodias (Mark 6:17-20); he was not shaken by the wind; there was no trimming of his sails. The austerity of his life and the austerity of his spirit go together, and he preached in a tone and a language that scorched. He preached righteousness, social righteousness, and he did it in a great way. He brought back the minds of his people, like Amos and others, to God's conceptions and away from their own. Crowds of people went out to hear him (Mark 1:5). And he made a deep impression on many whose lives needed amendment (Matt. 21:26, 32; Luke 20:6).[27] We have the substance of what he said in the third chapter of St. Luke; how he told the tax-collectors to be honest and not make things worse than they need be; the soldiers to do violence to no man and accuse no man falsely, and to be content with their wages; and to ordinary people he preached humanity: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." It may be remarked of John, and it is true also of Jesus, that neither attacked the absent nor inveighed against economic conditions, as some modern preachers do with, let us say, capitalists and the morality of other nations. Neither says a word against the Roman Empire. Slavery is not condemned explicitly even by Jesus, though he gave the dynamic that abolished it. The practical guidance that John gave, he gave in response to men's inquiries.
Like an Old Testament prophet (cf. Amos 3:2), John tore to tatters any plea that could be offered that his listeners were God's chosen people, the children of Abraham. Does God want children of Abraham?—John pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if God wanted, he could make children of Abraham out of them; a word and he could have as many children of Abraham as he wished. It was something else that God sought.
"John," writes the historian Josephus a generation later, "was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both in justice toward one another and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for so baptism would be acceptable to God if they made use of it, not to excuse certain sins, but for the purification of the body, provided that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."[28] This interpretation of John's baptism makes it look very like the baptisms and other purificatory rites of the heathen. The Gospels attribute to John a message, richer and more powerful, but essentially the same; and the criticism of Jesus confirms the account. The great note in his preaching is judgement; the Kingdom of God is coming, and it begins with judgement. Again, it is like Amos—"The axe is at the root of the tree," "His fan is in His hand." And as men listened to the man and looked at him—his intense belief in his message, backed up by a stern self-discipline, a whole life inspired, infused by conviction—they believed this message of the axe, the fan, and the fire. They asked and as we have seen received his guidance on the conduct of life; they accepted his baptism, and set about the amending of character (Matt. 21:32).