WE MIGHT NOT HAVE LIKED HIM

Today is the feast of St John the Baptist, here portrayed by the immense Florentine sculptor Donatello. I'm not sure we should have liked him. He was extreme in every way. He went off to live in the desert where he ate locusts and wild honey -- the locusts, presumably, raw. In order to preach, he can't have lived entirely alone, unless he preached to the bees that provided his honey. Preaching, he was extreme also. "Repent!" he shouted, in what was presumably a hoarse if stentorian voice: "Repent!" He was a kind of extreme version of an Old Testament prophet, someone who said what God had commanded him to say, to whom God had commanded him to say it (even, sometimes, to the King), and let the chips fall where they may. 
What was he telling people to do? Matthew's original Greek (well, John actually spoke something like Aramaic, but we know about him in Greek) word translated as "repentance" is metanoia, which we might also translate as "changing one's mentality". This is interesting, because "repent" has come to connote feeling sorry, apologising to God and men, grovelling; whereas metanoia lays the accent on changing. And why is this necessary? Because the basileia tôn ouranôn, the "kingship of the heavens" has arrived. Not "will arrive soon": it has arrived. 
An uncomfortable situation; and John did nothing to make it less so. When you go to Luke, you get much more of what he said. Not concerned to flatter his audience, he called them a brood of poisonous snakes: a set of sterile fruit-trees, good only for firewood. He seems to have had a massive presence, for instead of going home or stoning him, they meekly asked him what, then, they should do? And he had simple, practical answers. To the ordinary  folk: if you have two coats, give one to the guy who has none. If you have more than enough to eat, share it. To the collaborationist tax-collectors he said, Don't take a rake-off, just collect what the rules say. To some soldiers he said, Don't do violence to civilians, don't make false accusations, be content with your wages. 
In other words, Shape up. Be decent people. Change your mindset. Simple decency, sharing, taking what you're given and no more. It doesn't seem like a huge program, yet it blew people's minds. Because there was that something more: the Why. The Reign of Heaven has arrived. I just seal your good intentions with water; but there is Someone arriving just after me, and He is the real thing. He won't be using water. He'll be using wind and fire. (Wind: pneuma is breath, wind, spirit.) He'll be bearing a flail and threshing you like corn; and the husks, the empty chaff, will go into the fire. 
In other words: guys, this is serious. It doesn't get more serious, it won't ever get more serious.  
And when the Someone turned up, just quietly standing in the lineup to get into the river and have water poured on his head, John couldn't believe it. You? Baptised by me? 
It seems that John was genuinely staggered. Perhaps not just by the fact that the Someone had really arrived and was standing in front of him, but that the Someone was not breathing wind and fire. And this may have marked a change, a metanoia, even in John himself. He had to learn that Yeshua, the chap he'd more or less known, or known about, from childhood, was a different kind of Meschiach: not an avenging angel but Isaiah's Suffering Servant.
It is interesting that John did not become a disciple. Instead, as far as we know, he went on being a fiery prophet until he admonished one King too many, and was beheaded by Herod. His own capacity for metanoia seems to have gone only so far.