Matthew 3: 1-11
I never asked to be a prophet; it can be so difficult, and so painful, that it is humanly impossible. If it were up to me, I would be a simple priest with a wife and a family, like my father, Zachariah. What I find most difficult and painful about being a prophet is seeing; seeing so clearly the leprosy of my people, Israel.
Not all Israelites actually have leprosy. There are real lepers, and their condition is indeed painful to see. It starts with a gradual, growing numbness in the extremities, so gradual that the victim doesn’t know what’s happening, at first. He cuts and burns himself without knowing it until the infections are so far advanced they cannot be cured, and the infected part dies or is amputated. Sometimes even the voice goes, so that the victim can only endure his suffering in silence.
My people have become numb and dumb to the spiritual and moral disease that is slowly killing them. Who, I ask you, is indignant anymore about the corruption, the systemic exploitation of the poor and the powerless, the rampant idolatry and immorality? Who?
And most of those who share my indignation, like the rebels and the guerrilla warriors, are themselves murderers and brigands.
“A fish rots from the head down,” says a Galilean proverb. So, from Rome to Herod to the high priest to the rich land speculators and tax collectors, the moral and spiritual leprosy spreads. But the poor can be just as ruthless to each other. That’s why I must tell the police not to extort their fellow poor. The tax collectors—those masters of extortion—themselves came from the ranks of the poor.
Now, when most people think of prophets, they think of our ability to see far into the future. There is some of that in prophecy. But most of the time, God’s prophets are given to see deep into the present. And that, again, can be quite painful. While the nation goes on oblivious about its shared spiritual leprosy, the prophet sees it in all its painful, lurid detail, for the prophet is given to see it all from God’s perspective.
I would not choose for myself to be a prophet.
A prophet not only speaks the Word of God; the prophet feels it. Like a fire inside one’s bones, the prophet feels God’s anger, God’s hope, God’s pain and sorrow, and God’s tender, faithful love. When I weep and plead with the people, that is not for dramatic effect; those are God’s tears as he pleads his case through me.
A prophet not only speaks the Word of God, nor does a prophet only feel the Word of God; the prophet lives it as well. That explains my garments, such as they are, a simple camel’s hair tunic. My diet is as simple. When the land produces more locusts than wheat and barley, then I eat locusts. God provides, in one way or another.
But my dress and diet are not matters of mere convenience or economy. They stand as visible accusations against the purchase and disposal of human lives. In this corrupt society, one cannot even buy food or clothing without participating somehow in the exploitation of the powerless. When some people go poor raising food, while others cannot afford to buy food, what other word is there for that than corruption? I would rather eat locusts than be a party to that kind of violence.
There is no remedy for this widespread spiritual and moral leprosy than simply to start over again. That is what God is now saying to Israel, through his shocking call to baptism.
“Baptism?” they ask me. “You want me to get baptized? Me, a rabbi? Me, a priest? Me, whose ancestry stretches unbroken all the way back to Abraham? Isn’t baptism for Gentiles, for pagan converts to Judaism?” they ask in fastidious horror.
To which I reply, “Precisely. Your ancestor, Abraham, cannot absolve you of all this corruption, nor can your connection to him absolve you of the responsibility to do something about it. So, don’t hide behind your ancestry or your ethnicity; God can raise up descendants for Abraham from the stones around you. We are no better than the pagans around us and among us, no better, not even by birth. We are only more responsible to account for what we have done with all that God has given us through our ancestors. But we have gone so far astray that we must go back, like Jeremiah said, and “find the old paths you’ve left and walk in them again.” Start over, as even the Gentile converts do, and show it by baptism.
Some of my disciples think that preaching to thousands of people and having them hang on your every word is glamorous. So, they think, is telling the truth in all its grisly detail, and calling the powerful to account in words of ringing accusation. It would be glamorous and exciting, except that for every word I utter in public, there are ten words between myself and the Most High, and he keeps me honest; he keeps me humble. In the presence of the most holy One, who dwells in inapproachable light and truth, I am aware that I am a sinner no better than those to whom I preach. My very human weakness is ever before me, and before the One who sees all and knows all.
And yet being a prophet is not all pain, anguish and tears. Those moments and those words shared with the Almighty are sweeter than the wild honey of the fields, by which God also sustains me. I would not be so aware of this world’s darkness had I not also been given to see the beautiful light. God’s heart, and mine, would not be so broken over the fallen state of humanity if I were not given to see the power, the potential and the beauty there is in every man and woman.
What keeps me going then is not outrage, certainly not a sense of superiority, but the tender mercies of God. To him then I pour out my weariness, my anguish, my unfulfilled hopes for human love and a family and for the same peace, quiet and prosperity in this life that everyone else naturally wants. My very common human weakness I lay out before the Almighty, and he loves me anyway. Such a faithful, powerful God will not be stymied by human stubbornness. Knowing such a God is enough to assure me that my labors will not have been in vain.
I have also been given to know that I will not see the fruit of all my labors, not in this life, at least. I am trying to break it to my disciples that there will be no school of John’s prophets to follow me, as there were for Samuel, Elijah and Elisha. There will be no sect of John’s Jews as there are Pharisees, Saducees and Essenes today. I am the last of this line; something new is breaking into the world. There is One coming even whose sandals I am unworthy to untie, the Promised One, the Desire of the Nations, “the Shoot from the Stump of Jesse.” I baptize with water, but he will baptize in the Spirit of the prophets. He will usher in the new covenant promised through Jeremiah, written by the Holy Spirit on the innermost heart, rather than on tablets of stone. He will cleanse us, Jew and Gentile, from our sins, because He is the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world.
And I have seen him. He came to me, of all things, for baptism, as though he needed to repent. I’ve always known of him, as Jesus, my cousin from Galilee. But the Most High gave me to see into His soul, as He often does when people come to me for baptism. My mother, Elizabeth, had also told me to keep an eye on him. And there he was one day, standing in the Jordan between a man who confessed to the sin of adultery, and another who confessed to embezzlement. That’s how full of grace he is: the sinless friend of sinners, who doesn’t mind being confused for a sinner.
When I then saw the Holy Spirit descend upon him like a dove, and heard the heavenly voice say, “This is my beloved Son,” I knew that the end of my life’s work was fast approaching. My work with my disciples then changed, from forming them into followers of me, into followers of Jesus. I must decrease, so that He might increase.
But my struggles were not over. A prophet is only human, after all. Not long after the joyous moment of Jesus’ baptism, King Herod had me arrested and thrown into this prison cell. Here, in the loneliness and darkness of this dungeon, it felt like even God had abandoned me. My faith wavered and I began to wonder if I had succumbed to wishful thinking when I first believed that my cousin Jesus was the Messiah. Not only was I deep in doubt, I was angry, even at Jesus. You see, as long as I was the only prophet in the public eye, Herod didn’t dare touch me, I was that popular. But once Jesus caught the public eye with his many, mighty miracles, I was yesterday’s news. So Herod felt free to do with me as he liked. Yet, if Jesus is the Messiah, what keeps him from sending twelve legions of angels to wipe out Herod and his crew, and rescue me? I would have settled for twelve peasants with pitchforks! But my days in this darkness just kept passing, one after another.
So I sent two of my disciples to ask Jesus if he was really the One for whom we were waiting, or should we wait for someone else? That’s how bad off I was.
Jesus told my disciples, “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the poor hear good news.” When they brought that message back to me, I only got angrier. Here I am, stuck and rotting in this prison, and all Jesus can do is quote to me from Isaiah the prophet. I know that passage, too, and it hasn’t sprung me from this hell hole yet!
But then, something about those words struck me. “Did he really add the words, ‘the dead are raised to life?” I asked my two disciples.
They looked at me like I’d gone mad and said, “Of course that’s what he said, ‘the dead are raised to life;’ Are Herod’s wild parties upstairs ruining your hearing?”
Now what’s so big about ‘the dead are raised to life,’ you wonder? You know, not many of us Jews have our own personal scrolls, so we are very careful about how we memorize our sacred scriptures and quote them. We wouldn’t just throw in an extra phrase like, “the dead are raised to life” in a Bible verse if it’s not there. Not without reason. And those words are not there in that passage.
But the reason, you see, why Jesus added those words is because those were the very words used by another rabbi whom I respected quite highly, who lived and taught at the Qumran community in the desert, east of Jerusalem. It was like a Jewish monastery, if you will. You guys will also be scratching your heads for two thousand years, wondering where those extra words come from, until some shepherd boy in 1947 goes into a cave near the Dead Sea and finds some jars that contain the scrolls with that community’s writings, sermons and Bible scrolls. You ask me how I know that; I’m a prophet, for crying out loud.
In those scrolls you’ll read this beloved rabbi’s words about the wonders we expect from the coming Messiah. And in his meditation on that very passage in Isaiah, he adds those very words, “the dead are raised to life.” Which Jesus then quoted back to me. Even though Jesus wasn’t part of that community, he knew about my beloved rabbi and his teachings. And he knew how quoting that rabbi would encourage me, who had staked my very life on that same hope, of the dead being raised to life.
And to think that I almost missed the point of Jesus’ answer to me. Yes, he said in effect, he is the Messiah whom we have long awaited, who will raise the dead to life.
There was something else for me in those words, “the dead are raised to life.” They gave me courage to face what is coming next, even as they confirmed to me that I shall not leave this dungeon alive. Yet those words were also a promise to me, that I shall be one of those who are raised from the dead, to life.
Still, facing death is the loneliest thing I’ve ever done. The delights of knowing God don’t take away the need, nor the joy of human companionship. Some of my disciples regularly risk their own lives to visit and encourage me, for which I am grateful. But they can walk only so far with me on the path to death.
I do not fear death itself. I have already tasted in prayer the delights that await me at the Almighty’s right hand. It is dying that scares me. I’m afraid that dying might hurt. I’m afraid of dying unworthily, of being so overcome by fear or anger that I might do or say something I have no time to retract. Most of all, I’m afraid of not having done all I could for God and my disciples, so that they might understand, they’re not supposed to start a school of John’s disciples to compete with Jesus and his followers. Was there more I could have done? Or should have done? It will soon be all out of my hands, and in those of the Faithful One. And the Most Merciful.
I hope my confessions do not scare you. In fact, I hope they even encourage you. I hope they dispel the notion that the prophets are somehow different people than yourselves, or better people than yourselves. We’re not. I hope I’ve also laid to rest any notion that God cannot do great things through you, for you and I are made of the same clay. You also have the same Spirit within you and among you who dwelt in prophets like me. What more do you need?
So I encourage you to follow in my footsteps and be prophets yourselves. Or rather, be a prophetic people, together. No, you don’t have to experience divine dreams and special revelations. You don’t even have to wear camel’s hair and eat locusts. Nor do you need more courage, nor more faith than what I have. Courage is not the absence of fear, but what you do with your fear. Likewise, faith is not the absence of doubt, but what you do with doubt. I’m not the only prophet of God to struggle with doubt; just read Jeremiah or Habakkuk. But I disbelieve Herod and his henchmen, and their cruelty, cynicism and skepticism, more than I have ever doubted God and his goodness. They are stuck in a prison much darker, deeper and stronger than the one in which they have tossed me. Theirs is a prison of their own making. Like the leper who is just beginning to lose all sensation in his hands and feet, little do they know yet just how far advanced is their sickness of spirit.
Herod’s henchmen mock me and ask, “Where is your God now?” But I have served and trusted my God precisely so that I might glorify him in times and places like this. I struggle, and choose to believe precisely so that this place and these people do not overcome me. I trust and worship the God of Jeremiah, Joseph and Daniel, who were also dropped into dungeons, so that I might overcome the assaults of this kind of evil.
And if God and his Anointed One do not come to unlock this prison door before the executioner does? The Promised One has already come into our dark world of souls imprisoned by the chains of evil. As long as I am God’s servant, I shall be free. As long as I look to Him, I shall have light in even the deepest, darkest dungeons. And when “the dead are raised to life,” I shall have back all that I have lost or sacrificed for him, and more. I shall even have that family and the children I longed for, maybe even a school of prophets like me, if you carry on my work of testifying to the Messiah, the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world, and of helping the world get ready for his coming……… again.