The voice in the wilderness who recognized the Lamb
John the Baptist is the hinge between the two testaments. The last of the Hebrew prophetic tradition and the first witness to the inaugurated kingdom, he stands knee-deep in the Jordan baptizing repentance and pointing past himself to the figure already coming behind him. Christ will say of him that no one born of women is greater (Matthew 11:11). John will say of himself that he is not even worthy to untie the sandals of the one he is announcing (John 1:27).
The birth is the angelic-announcement story Luke uses as the overture to his Gospel (Luke 1). Zechariah is a priest. His wife Elizabeth is barren and old — the recurring canonical pattern of the chosen son arriving against biological possibility. The angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah at the altar of incense and announces that they will have a son who will go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to prepare the people. Zechariah doubts. He is struck mute until the child is born. Elizabeth is six months pregnant when her cousin Mary, herself newly told of the conception of Christ, comes to visit. The unborn John leaps in his mother's womb at the voice of Mary. The greeting is the New Testament's first act of worship of the unborn Christ.
The ministry begins in the wilderness east of the Jordan, the same wilderness Joshua led the people through into the land twelve centuries earlier. John wears camel's hair clothes and a leather belt — the prophetic uniform Elijah wore (2 Kings 1:8). He eats locusts and wild honey — the diet of someone who is not part of the temple system. His preaching is two sentences in summary: *repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,* and *bear fruit in keeping with repentance.* The crowds come. So do the religious authorities, whom he calls a brood of vipers (Matthew 3:7). The baptism he offers is for repentance; it is, on the Jewish side, a ritual of purification that ordinarily would have been done by oneself. John's innovation is to administer it personally and to require it of Jews, not just of Gentile converts. The implication is that Israel itself needs the cleansing the Gentiles were thought to need.
The recognition of Christ at the baptism (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3, John 1) is the moment the Gospels turn from preparation to inauguration. Christ comes to be baptized; John tries to prevent him, knowing the proportion. Christ insists: "Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness." (Matthew 3:15) John baptizes him. The heavens open. The Spirit descends as a dove. A voice from heaven names the Son: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:17) The three persons of the Trinity are present and distinguishable in the scene the Christian iconographic tradition will paint a thousand times.
The "Behold the Lamb of God" identification (John 1:29) is the line the Christian church has not been able to read past. John sees Jesus approaching the day after the baptism and says to the crowd, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." The phrase reaches back into the Passover (Exodus 12), forward into the Servant Songs (Isaiah 53), and outward into the book of Revelation (where the central image of heavenly worship is a slain lamb on the throne). John is identifying Christ in the language the whole sacrificial tradition has been building toward.
John's vocation is to decrease as Christ increases. He says it explicitly to his own disciples when they complain that the crowds are now going to Jesus: "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John 3:30) This is, in the Christian editorial reading, the rare and difficult vocation of being the herald who is content to disappear. John's disciples leave him for Christ. He sends them. He does not protest.
The imprisonment and execution (Matthew 14, Mark 6) are squalid. John has called out Herod Antipas for marrying his brother's wife Herodias. Herodias' daughter dances at Herod's birthday banquet. The king, drunk and impressed, swears to give her anything. The mother coaches the daughter: ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The head is brought. John is buried by his disciples. The herald of the kingdom dies offstage at a court banquet over a grudge.
The question John sends from prison (Matthew 11:2–6) is the saddest moment in the Gospels. "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" The same John who at the Jordan had said *behold the Lamb of God* is now in a cell, asking whether he was right. Christ does not rebuke the question. He sends the answer in the language of Isaiah: *the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news preached to them.* And he adds: *blessed is the one who is not offended by me.* The pastoral compassion of the answer — given to a man whose head is about to be cut off — is the part the church has held closest.
Christ's eulogy for John (Matthew 11:7–15) sets the proportion. "Among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." The new covenant is a different order; even the greatest of the prophetic tradition is on the threshold of it, not yet inside.
Related entries: Jordan River, Elijah, Mary (Mother of Jesus)