The Man in the Desert, and the Voice from Heaven

Out in the wilderness of Judea, in the dry empty hills above the Jordan River, there lived a man called John. He was the son of the old priest Zechariah — the baby whose name his father wrote on a tablet, on the day his voice came back. That baby had grown up, and he had spent his life out in the wild places, away from the towns. It was the fifteenth year that Tiberius Caesar had been emperor in Rome. Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. Herod was the ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip and a man called Lysanias ruled the lands further north. Annas and Caiaphas were the chief priests in Jerusalem. And that was the year the word of God came to John, out in the wilderness. He wore a rough coat of camel hair, with a leather belt round his waist like the one the old prophet Elijah had worn long before, and he ate locusts and wild honey. Locusts are big grasshoppers, and out in the desert people ate them. And he went all round the country along the Jordan, calling on people to be immersed in the water with a changed mind, so that the wrong things they had done would be forgiven. And he shouted: “Have a change of mind! The kingdom of the heavens has come near!” He was the one the prophets had spoken about, hundreds of years before. God had said, *Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, and he will get your road ready.* And Isaiah had said: *A voice is crying in the wilderness: Get the road ready for the Lord; make his paths straight. Every valley will be filled in, and every mountain and hill brought down low. The crooked roads will be made straight, and the rough places will be made smooth. And all people everywhere will see God’s rescue.* And the people came. Jerusalem came out to him, and the whole of Judea, and everybody who lived along the Jordan — out of the towns and into the desert to listen to a man in a camel-hair coat. And they waded into the river, and he dipped them under the water, one after another, while they said out loud the wrong things they had done. That is why he was called John the Immerser: he put people right under.

Some of the important religious men came down to the river too — Pharisees, who were very strict about every rule, and Sadducees, the party of the chief priests — and crowds of others with them. And John did not make it gentle for any of them: “You children of vipers! Who warned you to run away from the anger that is coming? Then grow the fruit that goes with a changed mind. And do not start telling yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father.’ I tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham out of these stones on the ground. The axe is already lying at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not grow good fruit is going to be cut down and thrown into the fire.” And the crowds asked him, “What should we do, then?” And he said, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the one who has none. And whoever has food should do the same.” Tax collectors came to be immersed as well. They were men who gathered the taxes for Rome, and many of them took extra off their own neighbors and kept it. And they said, “Teacher, what should we do?” And he said, “Do not collect any more than you have been told to.” And soldiers asked him too, “And what about us? What should we do?” And he said, “Do not take money off anybody by force, and do not accuse anybody of something they did not do. And be content with your pay.” All the people were waiting and wondering, and every one of them was asking himself whether John might be the Christ — the one God had promised to send. And John answered them all: “I immerse you in water. But someone is coming after me who is stronger than I am. I am not good enough to bend down and untie the strap of his sandals. He will immerse you in the Holy Spirit, and in fire.” At harvest time, a farmer broke his grain loose from its husks on a hard, flat threshing floor, and then tossed it up into the wind with a big wooden fork. The heavy wheat fell back down, and the wind blew the light chaff, the dry husks, away. And John said, “His winnowing fork is in his hand. He is going to clear his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, and the chaff he will burn up in a fire that never goes out.” He said many other things like these, urging the people on and bringing them the good news. That is how the good news about Jesus Christ began: with a voice shouting in the desert.

And then one day Jesus came down from Nazareth in Galilee to the Jordan, to be immersed by John along with all the people. And John tried to stop him. He said, “I am the one who needs to be immersed by you — and you come to me?” And Jesus said, “Let it be this way for now. This is the right way for us to do everything that is right.” So John let him, and he went down into the river with everybody else. And the moment he came up out of the water, while he was praying, he saw the heavens torn open, and the Holy Spirit coming down on him like a dove, in a shape that could be seen, and settling on him. And a voice came out of the heavens: “You are my Son, the one I love. I am delighted with you.”

And straight away the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness, to be tested by Satan, the Accuser. He was out there among the wild animals. He was there forty days and forty nights, and he ate nothing at all; and at the end of it he was very hungry. And that is when the Accuser came. He said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to turn into loaves of bread.” And Jesus answered him with words Moses had spoken to the people of Israel in the wilderness, long before — and all three times he did the same: “It is written: a person is not to live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God.” Then the Accuser took him into Jerusalem, the holy city, and stood him up on a high corner of the temple, far above the ground, and said, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: he will give his messengers orders about you, and they will catch you in their hands, so that you do not so much as knock your foot against a stone.” And Jesus said, “It is also written: you are not to put the Lord your God to the test.” And then the Accuser took him up a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and everything splendid in them, and said, “All of this I will give you — if you will fall down and bow to me.” And Jesus said, “Go away, Satan! For it is written: you are to bow down to the Lord your God, and serve him only.” Then the Accuser left him. And messengers came and looked after him.

John was immersing people at Bethany, on the far side of the Jordan. And the leaders in Jerusalem sent some priests and Levites down to him, men from the Pharisees, to find out who he was. They asked him, “You — who are you?” And John told them straight out, and did not hide anything: “I am not the Christ.” “Then what? Are you Elijah?” “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet, the one everybody is waiting for?” “No.” “Then who are you? We have to take an answer back to the people who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” And he said, “I am a voice, crying in the wilderness: make the road straight for the Lord — just as the prophet Isaiah said.” And they asked him, “Then why are you immersing people, if you are not the Christ, and not Elijah, and not the Prophet?” And John said, “I immerse in water. But standing right here among you is someone you do not know. He is the one coming after me, and I am not good enough to untie the strap of his sandal.” Untying a man’s sandals was the job of a slave.

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and he said, “Look — the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I was talking about when I said, ‘A man is coming after me who is ahead of me, because he was here before me.’ I did not know who he was myself. But this is why I came immersing people in water: so that he would be shown to Israel.” And John said this about him: “I saw the Spirit coming down out of heaven like a dove, and it stayed on him. I did not know him. But the one who sent me to immerse in water told me, ‘The man you see the Spirit come down on and stay on — he is the one who will immerse in the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen it. And I am telling you: this is the Chosen One of God.”

The day after that, John was standing there again with two of his own followers when Jesus walked past. And John looked at him and said, “Look — the Lamb of God.” And the two of them heard him say it, and they went after Jesus down the path. And he turned round and saw them following, and said, “What are you looking for?” And they said, “Rabbi” — which means Teacher — “where are you staying?” And he said, “Come, and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him the rest of that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two was Andrew. And the first thing Andrew did was go and find his own brother Simon, and say, “We have found the Messiah!” Messiah means the Christ, the Anointed One. And Andrew brought Simon to Jesus. And Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon, the son of John. You are going to be called Cephas.” Cephas means Rock. It is the same name as Peter, the name he came to be known by. The next day Jesus wanted to go back north to Galilee. And he found Philip, and said to him, “Follow me.” Philip came from Bethsaida, the same town as Andrew and Peter. And Philip went off and found his friend Nathanael, and said, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and the prophets too — Jesus, the son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” And Nathanael said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” And Philip did not argue with him. He said, “Come and see.” And when Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said, “Look — a true Israelite, with nothing false in him.” And Nathanael said, “Where do you know me from?” And Jesus said, “Before Philip called you, while you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” And Nathanael said, “Rabbi — you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” And Jesus said, “You trust me because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than that. I tell you the truth: you will see heaven standing open, and the messengers of God going up and coming down on the Son of Man.”

Later on, John was handed over and locked up. Herod, the ruler of Galilee, shut him in prison, because John had told him plainly that he was wrong to take Herodias, his own brother’s wife, and wrong in all the other evil things he had done. When Jesus heard that John had been handed over, he went back to Galilee. And he left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum, a fishing town on the shore of the lake, in the old lands of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali. Many foreigners lived among the Jews up there. And that was Isaiah again, from long before: *Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the road by the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations — the people sitting in darkness have seen a great light, and on the ones sitting in the land and the shadow of death, a light has dawned.* And from then on Jesus went about bringing the good news of God, and saying, “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Have a change of mind, and trust the good news!”

And walking along the edge of the lake one day, he saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, throwing a net into the water, because they were fishermen. It was a round net with weights all round the edge, and they threw it out flat so that it dropped over the fish. And Jesus said to them, “Come and follow me — and I will make you fishers of men.” And they left the nets and went after him, that minute. And a little further along he saw two more brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They were in a boat with their father, mending their nets. And he called them; and they left their father Zebedee sitting in the boat with the hired men, and went after Jesus. And so it began. He went all round Galilee, teaching in their meeting houses, telling people the good news of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. And word about him ran out through the whole country, all the way up into Syria, and they carried the sick to him from everywhere: people in pain, people with evil spirits in them, people who fell down in fits, people who could not move — and he healed them. And great crowds began to follow him, from Galilee and the Ten Towns, from Jerusalem and Judea, and from the other side of the Jordan.