Does Camel Hair Come In XXL?

Graciously, my disturbed reader shared with me that the real drive for Matthew in all the genealogical stuff is to prove that the Messiah was indeed descended from David. To me, it seems silly. I mean, those that believed that the Messiah was  the Messiah would naturally be happy with a genealogy that went “The Messiah came from David. So, Mary was betrothed to Joseph…” whilst those less likely to accept that the carpenter’s son was also God’s Son would notice that certain liberties were taken with the lists and accuse Matthew of tampering with evidence… Anyway, it was good to know that it was for more than just the sake of it. 

 

After the birth of Jesus and his surviving the assassination attempt by Herod, Jesus sort of goes into limbo for three decades. At the end of chapter two, we read that the family has settled down in Nazareth, presumably living a fairly typical life. We know from elsewhere that at around 12 years of age, Jesus made a trip to Jerusalem. There, he impressed some Rabbi’s and “got lost” on the way home, although, it was actually his parents that got lost as the lad never actually left the city! But for Matthew’s purpose, nothing happened until just prior to Christ’s public ministry kicking off with the arrival on the scene of John the Baptist.

 

This John fellow is enigmatic. In the line of the Old Testament prophets, he did some pretty bizarre things. His clothing seems to be less than conventional, even if it was (based on my somewhat limited exposure to camels),  aromatic. His message was pretty simple. “Repent.” It strikes me that this is pretty much the first public proclamation by Jesus a few chapters later. John is baptizing in the Jordan, calling for repentance due to the proximity of the Kingdom of God. 

 

I can imagine this drew two main responses. Those that thought that too many locusts had upset the balance of his brain, with all that standing about in the water and desert sun pushing him over the brink into sheer madness. After all, it had been 400 years since the return from exile and there was no sign of the Kingdom to come. In fact, all these proconsuls, kings, Herods and whatnot tended to indicate that, if anything, the kingdom was actually further away, didn’t they? Just another barking fundy in the desert with no idea of the social mores that let us all get along.

 

But, obviously, there were also those that thought, “At last!” Finally, their hopes would be realized and they could throw off the shackles of oppression. Perhaps this John was the one who would raise the Jews to nationhood once more, and establish a return to a National Kingdom under one who was the same as, and, yet at the same time, better than David. After all, wasn’t he a lot like Hezekiah? Didn’t those guys call for reformation? Didn’t Ezra and Nehemiah preach the need for a return to righteousness to preclude the restoration of the people? Perhaps John was like that! Maybe we should pack some pickled figs and a rock hyrax or something, and go down there and see what he is up to!

 

And go they did. In all the movies there are long lines of people waiting to be baptized by John, with attendant hangers-on and on-lookers sitting and standing on various dunes and cliffs around the river. It seems to have had something of an air of a first century church picnic. And to some degree this is borne out by the text. We are told that not just locals, but folks from other places in the district and some even further afield were coming to see him.

 

His message does not seem to have been tailored to cater to the masses. We know that folks came and heard his call to a repentant state of heart before God, and were baptized, but I wonder how many found themselves like the Rich, Young Ruler Christ was to encounter a little later on. I wonder how many were disturbed by his ‘rantings’, how many dismissed him as a lunatic. I wonder how many came with friends and relatives and watched with astonishment as they rose to descend to the river and receive the baptism.

 

Certainly he was drawing a crowd. So much so that the local clergy got together a delegation and went out to see what all this fuss was about. Right here before even they have had a chance to be demonstrated as the ‘bad guys’, the Pharisees and Sadducees get it in the neck.  Before they have even done anything wrong, they are set aside for wrath.

 

This troubled me until I realized that I was approaching Scripture as a novel and wanting to see my antagonists and protagonists built up so that in some sense what John was saying was justified and their sentence to destruction was deserved. I wanted to rewrite Scripture as if it were to say “When John saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, just after they had beaten up a widow and stolen her cloak, not to mention burned down the house of a guy who was very holy but didn’t tithe his cummin and oh yeah there was a baby inside that died, he said “You offspring of vipers!””  That I could deal with. That would not assault my 20^th century western morality that tells me ‘You’re saved because you deserve to be and do all the right things.’ 

 

But John is a prophet! He knows their hearts. And the Pharisees and Sadducees are not innocent of having done ‘nothing wrong.’ Their robes and hats and whatnot stood in stark contrast to the camel hair and leather thong of John, yes? Now I understand why he dressed weird and ate … what he ate. Because it set him fundamentally and irrevocably apart from the established religious leaders of the day who sought far more than righteousness from their flock, but wealth. And power. And to constrain and bind them with a multiplicity of laws and regulations,  all of them supra-scriptural. They did not walk onto the pages of Scripture straight out of the author’s head as pure, new and undefiled. They were arriving on the scene straight from history. They were real. They existed. We might say “Now as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was preaching, some S.S. Nazis walked in and he said “You brood of vipers.”” We know that these were not innocent folks with a clean slate who Bonhoeffer just happened to be picking on.

 

What we do see, however, is that John had a firm grasp on the fact that when God delivered His people, it was intimately connected with judgment. Repent, yes! The kingdom of God was at hand, you betcha! Fire and winnowing forks, Judgment certainly! What John had not grasped, could not have grasped without direct revelation from God, was that Christ was to suffer that judgment, not mete it out.

 

So John the Baptist contained a strong ‘Already/Not Yet’ element. Yes, Judgment is a part of the coming of the Kingdom. Yes, Jehovah will consume the wicked like a devouring fire; a fire from which there is no escape and this will inaugurate the establishment of the Kingdom. But in the final, ultimate sense, that is the language of Revelation and not the language of the Gospel. In the Gospel, sin is dealt a death blow but it is by personalizing it in Christ and not by obliterating it from the masses leaving only the righteous. This approach had been tried before, after all. You may recall the flood incident when all who were not righteous were destroyed and only Noah and his family found favor in the eyes of God. Yet, immediately after landfall – here we go again with the sin. Something more effective, more dramatic was needed than a quick swap of elements from water to fire and a repetition of a previously failed ‘experiment.’ 

 

John was not, ultimately, a popular guy. I am familiar with enough of his story to know he dies in the end. But I want to be more like John. I want to wear the equivalent of camel’s hair and leather belts to set myself apart from the plastic-haired, crispy-baked tele-evangelists that mock my faith by using it as a vehicle to reach whatever personal goals they have. I don’t want snuffle at the same trough of excess as they do, despite what my waistline says. I want to want to (no, not a mistake. My desire does not yet match the reality…) be so hideous to the god of this world, that he conspires to arrange my beheading. I’m not there yet, but it’s a goal. I want to be sure that under duress and pain, torture, whatever, that my faith is so resolute that I can know that, yeah, life is good, but to be with Christ is better.

 

I have some work to do.