Donatello, John the Baptist
This second Sunday in Advent we were invited
to contemplate that disconcerting hippie, Jochanan the Baptizer. Not a friendly
type, yet he seems to have attracted big crowds, who came to him, not vice
versa. In other words, they went out of town, mostly on foot, and travelled
into the desert to hear this famous prophet. He was not a nice man. He wasn’t
particularly clean, dressed in what appear to have been tatters, as thin as an
anorexic, or as you and even I would be if we lived in 115F heat and fed on
locusts and wild honey. (NB: he was ahead of his time, as we are now coming
back to eating crunchy insects; but if you have to catch them first you’re not
going to put back a lot of the calories. Also, have you ever tried to find wild honey?) So he was a bit of a
famous spectacle, worth half a day’s hike to go and see. Moreover, he harangued
people, which they always like: he told them, in a voice hoarse with shouting,
that they were on a fast train to a blank wall, and that the only way out of
the misery they were creating for themselves was to drown.
To drown in the river, and then come up and
out. What you will have drowned, he said, is the Old You which, whatever you
thought of it, wasn’t worth squat, and definitely not worth saving. What you
come back on dry land with is the New You, which at least has a chance.
It worked. Masses of people came out to see
him, drowned the Old They in the Jordan, and emerged looking slightly dazed and
wondering what the New They would look and feel like.
Then there arrived some classy types, the
spiritual establishment, who came out – why? The story doesn’t say explicitly,
but one assumes they came out polite, intellectually interested, but with a
seriously sceptical attitude, to take a look and possibly sneer. Yet something
seems to have happened, because at least some of them appear to have got in the
waiting-queue for the drowning. And at that point Jochanan lost his temper.
Brood of vipers, he called them: crawly and vile, yet with a kind of low
cunning. What got into you, he asked them furiously, to make you come here to
escape what’s coming to you?
We don’t know what they replied. One or two
may have ended up persuading him they were sincere; we can assume that the
others left in a huff, growling at that uncouth and unmannerly man.
But having touched on what was coming, he
went on to say that there was Someone on the way much, much more powerful than
he, who was coming with a flail, to sort out the harvested corn on His threshing-floor.
What I’m doing, he said, is giving you a chance to turn from weightless,
pointless and useless chaff into decent grain which He can then bake into pita
bread to feed the next five thousand poor hungry buggers. Do it now, before the
flail arrives. Go drown; come up; go home. Be new.
What, one wonders, did they feel like during
the next week, when the circumstances of their lives clearly hadn’t changed?
One suspects that they sort of trudged on, trying to remember that they were
now grain, and wondering what that was going to mean. Until the man Jochanan
had told them about did arrive. But
that’s another story.
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