The Life of John the Baptizer

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re talking today about John the Baptist. I think we’ve talked a little bit about his conception. I don’t think we talked about his birth or any of his life yet. Is that ringing true?

We danced around his birth, because we danced around Zacharias’s song in response to his birth.

Oh, that’s true. That was after he was born.

Yes, so we can now go out into the wilderness with John for about 30 years.

And eat some locusts and wild honey.

Yes, and then come back. Again, we’re emphasizing the historicity of everything, and Luke’s gospel in chapter 3 says –

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests…

So we’re identifying Roman rulers, Roman puppets, and the priests at the time. Luke is being very specific here as to when we are in history, as well as where we are.

…the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

We’re still sort of in the so-called 400 silent years. The silence has been cracked already by both Anna and Simeon, as well as the angels, as well as Zacharias, but that was 30 years in the past and as far as we know nothing really has come over the wire from heaven lately, and then here comes John. He’s been in the wilderness for 30 years eating locusts (which were clean animals) and wild honey, dressed something like a wild man with a belt of leather and camel’s hair. He is living like one who has had to flee into the wilderness because everything else has been destroyed.

There’s a prophetic message about his very person and his dress. Judgement is coming, and if you don’t repent you’re going to end up in the wilderness eating bugs and wild honey – not cultured honey, not developed carefully by beekeepers but just what you could find out there – because the day Jerusalem falls there’s not going to be anything. He is a prophet. There haven’t been any of those for a long, long time. His message is repentance. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

The Jews would understand what that meant. They could count the 490 years – 77 weeks from the decree of Cyrus to the present. They could tick off the empires in Daniel’s dream – golden Babylon, argent Medo-Persia, brazen Greece, iron Rome. There was a sense it was time. There was a sense around the world it was time, and there were all those rumors. They were 30 years old but something happened, and here comes John declaring the presence of the kingdom of heaven.

The words at hand are important. Our dispensationalist friends tend to say, “Well, at hand but not here.” That’s not what at hand means. At hand means I can reach out and touch it. It was there in the person of their king, who John will say “is standing among you, one greater than I whose sandals I’m not worthy to unloose.”

There’s a word for that sense of waiting in anticipation that would be at the door, but not at hand. If John wanted to say that, he would have said something different.

“It’s coming and could be here anytime,” anytime meaning tomorrow or 1,000 years from now. The problem with dispensationalism – and I’m talking traditional dispensationalism, what the modern version is doing I really don’t know – but the classic version is the kingdom of heaven was offered to Israel, Messiah’s kingdom, but they didn’t want it and so God put it on hold. He suspended it and opened this parenthesis called the age of grace or the church age.

So it came near, it poked its head around the corner, but then when the Jews snapped at it God withdrew it and pushed it 2,000 years to the future, at least, and it will come when Jesus comes. It’s the millennium, the 1000-year reign of Christ on the earth. But since Jesus talked so much about the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, they begin to make distinctions. “Well, the kingdom exists as a mystery now, but not the real kingdom that the prophets promised because look around. We don’t have any of that stuff. We don’t see Jesus enthroned in Jerusalem,” and so on.

Those are all very colorful reinterpretations and creative… I don’t even know what the word is for that, when you take a bunch of stuff and mix it all up and spew it out. There’s got to be a word. But since the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible’s introduction to America, that very quickly became the fundamentalist and evangelical interpretation of what’s going on here.

John is introducing Jesus to be their king. They don’t want a king, so Jesus turns aside and takes the cross instead and the kingdom is postponed, and the prophetic clock stops ticking and all prophecies are put on hold until the church is taken out of the world in the rapture, and then we go back online and the Jews are offered the kingdom again, and eventually they receive it as Jesus returns in glory.

I throw that out there largely so that if any of our listeners were ever enmeshed in that they can say, “Oh yeah, I remember stuff like that.” That’s not what the Bible says, so we’re just clearing some ground. What’s going on here is straightforward. John says the kingdom of heaven is at hand in the sense that it’s about to appear. It’s at hand in the sense that the king is there and he is about to inaugurate this thing that’s been promised by the prophets since the world began.

The fact that it’s not quite what Israel expected is beside the point. It’s not what modern dispensationalists and premillennialists expect either, but it is nonetheless what God had been promising. So when John appears his message is not, “Go learn to use a sword. Go get some armor. Start passing out political manifestos and brochures.” His message is something that no one’s ready for, “Repent. Turn from your sins. Confess your sins to God,” because the coming of the king is only good news if you’re on his side. If you’re in rebellion then it’s not really good news. It’s kind of bad news.

All the gospels portray some aspect of John’s ministry. Matthew is the one I’m most familiar with, and I think one of you mentioned that he comes saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” At some point we’ll talk about the baptism thing, but the Pharisees and Sadducees come out to see him.

You get to the New Testament and so many things just suddenly are there, like Rome, but also Pharisees and Sadducees. What are these guys? During the time between the testaments, Jerusalem and Judea were being influenced by Greek philosophy and Greek culture. There were a group of men who stood up for God’s law and what God wanted of Israel, Israel’s purity. They were very tenacious about it and they offended a lot of people because that wasn’t the popular thing to do, kind of like today. Their enemies in time spoke of them as the pure ones, the Pharisees.

Unfortunately, over time they lost sight of standing for God’s word and started enshrining human tradition and human interpretation of God’s law, and we’re all good at that. “The Bible says no adultery. That means you can’t dance or drink or go to the movies,” so we’ve got that going on and they’re there, but they were considered the conservative ones.

Sadducees comes from the name Zadok. This was the priestly family, or what was left of it, and they were in bed with Rome. They were temple authorities and Rome decided who ran the temple and who collected the ton of money that flowed through that thing. They were Greek-minded. They did not believe in the resurrection or angels or human souls and everlasting life.

The Pharisees and Sadducees hated each other’s guts. You don’t really always see that in reading through the gospels because we’re so used to them being enemies of Jesus. Well, they were.

That was the thing that brought them together.

Yes. They disliked him for pretty much different reasons. To the Pharisees he pointed out their empty self-righteousness and manmade regulations, and how they didn’t even keep those really. To the Sadducees he kept interfering with what was going on in the temple – he cleansed the temple twice – but they were also afraid that this man might be some kind of rabble-rouser who would gain Rome’s notice. He talks a lot about the resurrection and things like that, and the value of the human soul, and they don’t like his theology, but mostly they don’t want him upsetting their deal with Rome.

So when John the Baptist appears, this is a prophet. This is a guy who everyone is saying is a prophet, so they need to check it out – the Pharisees because they are the self-appointed champions of orthodoxy, and the Sadducees because they’re the temple authorities and they are officially in charge of religion, although they don’t really believe much of it.

So they come out to see John, and John says to them in so many words, “You generation of vipers,” or to put it in Old Testament language,

You seed of the serpent. Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

“You guys are a bunch of hypocrites. Why are you here? You’re not taking this seriously.”

Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance, and think not to say within yourselves, ‘We have Abraham to our father,’ for I say to you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

In fact, God can do that because being a child of Abraham is a matter of true faith, not a matter of genetic descent. God made man from the dust of the earth, he can make more men from stones if he wants to, and declare them children of Abraham, justifying them by faith.

I have a tangent question. I wonder if I’m reading too much into the grammar and the English translation – but “We have Abraham to our father” sounds a lot like, “I have a Levite to my priest.”

That’s a good one. Rachel, you’re good with Hebrew.

But this is Greek. Yes, the word Abraham is based on the word father, but I don’t know if there are multiple words for father in Greek.

I’m wondering more about the structure of the sentence, whether it could be parallelism.

Micah, in the end of Judges, says, “Now I know God will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.” I’m wondering if the structure is supposed to remind us of, “Yeah, I’ve got an idol.”

I see. I thought you were trying to ask me about this one, and I’m going, “I don’t know.”

The idea seems very similar. Do not claim that you have an idol, even though it be Abraham. It’s not going to help you here. So John continues his sermon.

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees. Every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.
Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.

Notice that all three verses end with the word fire and it’s the same fire. It’s the fire of judgement. Yes, later on tongues of fire are associated with the Holy Spirit, but the context here is that Messiah is about to step onto the stage of history, you’re about to meet him, and he comes as with a threshing fan in his hand. The idea here is that Israel is God’s threshing floor.

The temple actually is built on a threshing floor. It’s a place for separating the wheat from the chaff, and that’s the figure he develops here. There are within God’s people the true seed of Abraham, but there’s a lot of chaff and husk and garbage. Threshing floors were usually built on hilltops so the people would go in with threshing forks and throw the wheat up in the air, and as it fell the breeze could come and blow away the chaff, and the kernels would fall back and be collected, so that’s the image here. If there was no breeze you took a fan and you fanned it.

Messiah is here. He’s fanning his threshing floor. He’s in the active process of separating the true seed from the false seed, and the false seed is going to be burned. He baptizes with water and with fire, so I guess now we have to talk about baptism.

In John’s gospel in the account of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to Jesus they ask a peculiar question of John. They ask, “Who are you? Are you Messiah?”

“No.”

“Are you Elijah?”

“No.”

“Are you that prophet?”

“No.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” (quoting Isaiah).

“Well then, if you’re not Messiah and you’re not Elijah the forerunner, and you’re not that prophet [the prophet that Moses promised] then why are you baptizing?” Notice the words, “why” are “you” baptizing, not “What are you doing? We’ve never seen this before. What is this baptism thing you speak of?”

Now, they knew what he was doing. The concept of baptism is deeply rooted in the Old Testament – the flood’s a baptism, the crossing of the Red Sea was a baptism, or explicitly said to be such.

All the washings.

Yes, there’s all the washings. In fact, the writer of Hebrews will say that the old covenant stood only in diverse kinds of washings, and the word is baptisms. So all of those washings of various sorts, the sprinklings and the pourings, were all baptisms and they each had a particular meaning, and they’re all going to come together here in the baptism of Jesus, and of believers.

Here the emphasis is upon purification. You need the Spirit to cleanse you. In fact, he says of Jesus,

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost…

So there’s John’s inspired interpretation of what baptism is primarily about. The waters that cleanse are representative of the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart and life of the believer, generation and sanctification, and ultimately a resurrection.

The three more common forms of baptism in the Old Testament, aside from sprinkling to include people in the covenant when it was originally made, were sprinkling the tribe of Levite to set them apart to the priesthood, cleansing a leper, someone who was living dead, cleansing and resurrecting, and then if someone touched a dead body they had to be sprinkled with water on the third day and the seventh day or they would be wrapped up in covenantal death permanently. So those are at least some of the things that go into this.

The Pharisees and Sadducees recognized this, but these things mostly were done by priests in the temple. Here John is not baptizing lepers. He’s not baptizing people who have touched dead bodies. He’s not setting apart people to priesthood (is he?), so what in the world is he doing, why is he doing it, and in the wilderness of all places. Why not in the temple?

And he’s not dressed properly, especially for priestly service.

We need to remember that he is a priest. His father was a priest and his own birth was announced in the temple. Later on, Jesus when he cleanses the temple will be asked by the Sadducees, “By what authority do you do this?” and Jesus says, “I’ll ask you a question. The baptism of John, was it from God or from man?” A lot of people look at it and say, “Ooo, cool question. You really shot them down. Ha! They can’t answer you.”

He was answering their question.

Yes. If they couldn’t answer his question then he had no place to go and that’s their problem. If they said, “Well, John came from heaven,” “Oh, then John is a priest and a prophet and he set apart to priesthood, and by baptism my Father anointed me with the Holy Spirit, so I am a priest. I am the High Priest and I have the authority to take care of my father’s house, so there’s your answer.”

When they said, “We cannot tell,” he said, “Then I guess I can’t tell you where my authority comes from, can I?”

I have this exchange with Gretchen a lot, where I’ll tell her the answer to a question and then she’ll ask me the same question immediately. I’m like, “Do you remember what I just said?” and she’s like, “Nope,” and I say, “Well, I guess you didn’t care enough to learn the answer because you weren’t listening.”

That sounds like my own daughter Emily. She was having a terrible time with her class. They kept asking the same questions, not study questions or content questions but like, “Do I have to put my name on this? Do I have to put a date on this?”

I used to have rules against the “what about” questions. “But what about…. But what about…” especially when we would grade things, because they would always ask the same thing or slightly different. “You need to discern that those things are the same. Please don’t ask again.”

“What about…? What if they said it this way?”

“That’s the same answer so give it to them.”

And then there are the ones like, “What if they say Jack the Ripper?”

“That’s not even in the Bible.”

“Do you think that’s a valid answer? Let’s think about this.”

“Don’t be cute right now. We’re trying to grade this.”

So Jesus was not being cute. He was not being sassy. He was asking a very real question. “Are you capable of receiving my answer? Because if you don’t believe John the Baptist was sent by God then I haven’t got anything for you. If you do, game set match, and I can tell you exactly why I have the authority to do this.”

If they had said, “No, he’s from man,” they were afraid the people would stone them for criticizing John, and there in passing is something I want to mention now and probably again. As we read through the gospels we run into John in all four right off the bat, but he very quickly passes off the scene, so it seems.

And yet as late as Jesus’ passion week the Sadducees are still afraid of offending the people over who John was. John was extremely well-known, extremely popular. When we get to the book of Acts, Paul will be traveling through Ephesus and meet a bunch of disciples – he calls them disciples, which at that point meant Christians – and yet they don’t know about Jesus. That’s kind of hard.

“But you’ve been baptized?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of baptism?”

“John’s baptism.”

“Okay, let me explain some things to you.”

John’s reputation kept spreading – the impact he had during those six months or so. His ministry was not very long. Remember he was six months older than Jesus so he started earlier. Now, his ministry did not end when he baptized Jesus, but it began to decline. In fact, his disciples and the Jews generally came and said, “The one that you are pointing to, people are leaving you and they’re all going and listening to him,” and John said, “Good. He must increase, I must decrease.”

That was the point.

“I’m the friend of the bridegroom, not the bridegroom, and this is what’s supposed to be happening.” And yet the impact lingers. We look for it as we pass through the gospels and on into Acts, and we keep seeing that God used this man in a very powerful way. The whole concept of baptism is reintroduced, refined, redefined, and refired by his ministry.

And of course the great thing that he gets to do is not simply prepare the way of the Lord by calling Israel to repentance, but he actually gets to introduce Jesus. He gets to baptize Jesus, set him apart to his work as Messiah, as prophet, king, and priest – particularly to the priesthood because John’s a priest. So Jesus shows up and he’s about 30 at the time, again being six months younger than John.

We’re not told if they’d ever met. One of my students once pointed out that if John was faithful to the requirements of the law then he went to Jerusalem three times a year, and Jesus would have too. We’re not told that they ever ran into each other. God in his providence simply could have kept that from happening, but then again you wonder.

But they were also related, so the likelihood that family would connect – I mean think of family in general. “Oh, we’ll see you at the next festival.” That’s very common, and clearly Elizabeth and Mary had been close. Obviously, it would depend on how much longer Elizabeth and Zacharias lived, but presumably they would have had some sort of connection, given what we see between the two moms.

We’re told that John grew up in the wilderness, but that does not necessarily mean that he never came into civilization. And given the requirement particularly of Passover, it would seem very strange if he didn’t, especially being a priest, because that could get you excommunicated.

You could write all kinds of fun stories about them almost running into each other three times a year every year until they’re grown up, but when John looks at him – and we’re not told how, whether it’s by spiritual gift or simply because he has in fact met him before – he says, “I need to be baptized of you, and you come to me?”

However, in John’s gospel he says, “I did not know him until the one who sent me, God the Father, said, ‘The one you see the Spirit of God descending on and staying, he’s the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” So John seems to have had an inkling of who Jesus was, but apparently maybe not completely sure until the Spirit descends. Or at least it was, “Oh, you’re the guy. Oh boy, are you the guy.”

So it’s not like the Far Side comics where you would have Moses eating his breakfast cereal and parting the milk, as a child. It’s the opposite of that kind of thing. Jesus actually blended in as a child.

Yes. The only thing unusual about Jesus, of course, was that he didn’t sin, which no doubt greatly endeared him to his siblings – the sibling who never does anything wrong, and you could never blame things on because no one’s going to believe you.

The Gnostic gospels speak of Jesus as a child making doves out of clay, then animating them, giving them life. There are other Celtic traditions that say that Jesus went with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, as far as Britain, and there either taught the druids or was taught by the druids. I guess it depends on who you believe and who you think has priority. No, Jesus lived in Nazareth and grew up and became a carpenter. He’s actually called that once in scripture. He’s called a carpenter’s son a couple times, and he blended in.

So when John says, “There’s someone standing among you,” I remember as a child thinking, “Are they looking around? Are they trying to find Jesus?” Probably. What will they see? A bunch of very ordinary people, and if Jesus was standing there he would look as ordinary as everybody else, except he was probably the person not looking around. He was not glowing. There was no halo. He was not particularly dressed all in white who looked like a surfer dude from California in the ‘60s or a Renaissance emaciated model. He was just like everybody else.

You see, he had to be wasting away because of Gnosticism. If he were actually to eat food and get three square meals a day and have a normal-sized body he would be not fit for heaven or something.

Something like that. Where’s our Gnostic bell when you need it?

I have it. <ding!>

I was talking to a couple friends at church and reminding them we had a Gnostic bell, so we should use it when we can.

So Jesus comes and John is standing in the Jordan. The Jordan has a long history, reaching back to when the children of Israel crossed Jordan into the promised land and were baptized to Joshua in the Jordan. You can think of Naaman, the Syrian general, who was baptized in Jordan.

As a side note on the first one, looking at the geography, the most likely location of Jesus’ baptism is very close to the crossing of the Jordan. It’s somewhere a little bit to the east of Jericho. There’s a couple different locations that they suppose, but that’s the one they think is most likely so it would make sense that John would pick that, because John’s picking the location where he’s baptizing. It may be actually very close to there.

I had a friend who was baptized in the Jordan River and he was like, “It’s a fun little Christian one-up thing to do.”

And you can buy little bottles of Jordan River water too. I don’t know why. Well, I have a piece of the Berlin Wall. I guess it’s something.

When John is telling Jesus, “We shouldn’t be doing this,” Jesus says, “Suffer it now.” That means permit it now. It’s not telling John to suffer. “Permit it now, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” In other words, there is a law that they’re honoring, and John figures it out. Presumably it’s the law that you need to be purified to be set apart to the priesthood.

Once John baptizes him, heaven opens and the Holy Spirit descends in bodily form like a dove and lights upon Jesus, and the Father’s voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased.”

I was thinking about this the other day in the context of Noah and the ark, where the dove stayed and rested when there was a safe place to be for new life to begin. It was just cool to think about.

That’s one of the places we could draw parallels, and the clearest one I suppose, except that there’s also the Spirit hovering or fluttering above the waters in creation. This is a new creation, a new Adam, out of water.

We’re talking about harmonizing the gospels, which we will talk about a good deal more next time, so what happens next? Apparently the next day John seeing Jesus coming said, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

So at which point did Jesus go into the wilderness? It sounds like it will be after this, but not too far after this. Or there may be a way of reading it otherwise. I haven’t spent time with it, and for our purposes it doesn’t matter a whole lot. But John in his role has first pointed out that Jesus is the one who baptizes with the Holy Ghost and now he calls him the Lamb of God.

That’s going to bring everyone’s mind back to Passover and back to the morning and evening sacrifices and the various Levitical offerings. And if they understood what those things meant they would have some sense of, “This man is going to be a substitute like the lambs on the altar, which means he’s going to die, bearing our guilt and our sin. How does that work and how can this man do this?” would be the obvious questions at this point. “And what in the world does this have to do with the Holy Ghost? And weren’t we talking about the kingdom of heaven? We’re looking for a king with armies and banners and trumpets and all that, someone who can chase Rome out and put us in their place on the throne of the world. What is this repentance stuff? What is this Lamb of God? Cleansing? What?” So the whole message of the Old Testament collides with the perversions that God’s people had made out of it.

Unfortunately, like some of our dispensationalist brothers of an earlier generation, they can’t work it out. The dispensationalists were still looking for a kingdom that came by power and force, by purely outward means. They expected to see Jesus sitting on the throne in Jerusalem, ruling from the throne of David, conquering the nations of the world.

In fact, in terms of dispensationalist history – I think The Late Great Planet Earth appeared around 1976 or so, someplace in there, and Hal Lindsey stated that God unequivocally promised the Jewish people that they would reign over the earth through the person of their Messiah. That’s pretty bad. The Jews are going to rule over the world and Jesus is going to be their instrument. What? But that’s where this kind of thinking went.

All John has to say about repentance and bringing forth fruits that match your repentance, and judgement to come, and Messiah separating the good seed from the bad seed, these were hard things. A lot of people, particularly religious people, could not receive them, but Jesus will say the publicans and harlots believed him, and all kinds of people.

Luke’s gospel tells us the kinds of questions asked. “We’re soldiers, what do we do?” “We’re publicans, what do we do?” Anybody could come, but it means you had to part with your sins, and each person is asking, “What does that mean in my case?” and John told them.

I’m guessing we’re probably slipping toward the end of our time so we should probably fast forward. At some point John catches the attention of the tetrarch of Galilee, whose name was Herod. He’s the son of Herod the Great, and Herod makes the mistake of listening to the guy. Herod is a miracle-monger. He’s a guy with religious passions and interests, but to him it’s all kind of a game. It’s kind of, “Ooo, isn’t this fascinating? Isn’t this interesting? Ooo, here’s this holy man. I need to talk to him and find out what kind of weird things he’s saying because he just fascinates me.”

Unfortunately for Herod, John kept saying things like, “You need to clean up your moral act. You need to stop sinning. Here are some very specific things you need to do,” and to some degree Herod actually listened, but eventually John poked his finger at a very sore spot.

Herod had arranged for a divorce. He arranged for his brother Philip’s wife to divorce Philip and marry Herod. That’s called incest, divorce, adultery, and who knows what all else went into that. So John just kind of puts a finger in Herod’s face and says, “It’s not lawful for you to marry her. You need to break this off. You need to undo this.” So Herod’s new wife, Herodias, wants John dead but Herod is still fascinated with the guy.

He actually has him come and visit him, and John keeps telling him, “Here’s stuff you need to do,” and he’s listening and he’s doing the stuff. Herodias wants him to be really dead though, so on Herod’s birthday she arranges for her young beautiful voluptuous daughter Solome to do a rather seductive dance before Herod and his assembled lords, and Herod is so taken with it that he promises her whatever she wants, to half his kingdom – you know, the traditional formula.

She runs back to mommy, and apparently they had already worked this out, but it sounds like maybe she’s just getting confirmation. “I can have anything, and you want this?”

“Yes, this is what you’re going to go ask for.”

“Okay, whatever you say.” So she goes back and asks, “Bring me John the Baptist’s head on a silver plate.” Herod was like, “Oh, I didn’t see that coming. I like John. He’s a cool guy. He’s kind of weird but I like talking to him, but all my lords are watching and I did swear so okay, fine,” and he sends a soldier to go behead John, and John’s life ends there.

At least three of the gospels I believe record it, the synoptics, and it’s a hard thing because many of Jesus’ disciples had begun their spiritual pilgrimage under John’s tutelage, and to hear that their former mentor was dead was quite a blow. Jesus respects this and takes them out into the wilderness to get away from things, but the people follow him and he has to preach to them because that’s what he does. That’s his heart, his love.

You want to hear a weird tidbit about music history?

Yes, this would be a great time for a weird tidbit about music history.

There’s an opera named after Solome, the daughter of Herodias. It’s by Richard Strauss and the opening of the opera was advised to be delayed because the opera was based on a play written in French by Oscar Wilde, who was at the time on trial for homosexuality. So Strauss’s friends and advisors were like, “This might not be the time. Big controversy here,” and Richard Strauss said, “Are you kidding me? Any publicity is good publicity,” and he opened and, as far as I know, it was a smash hit.

Not surprising. People were probably more surprised that homosexuality was actually a crime in England at the time.

That brings us to the end of John’s ministry. Next time I think we’ll look forward and move forward. Our goal is not to exegete every chapter in the gospels. That’s way beyond what we can do or want to do, but at least to sort of unscramble the “Bible people, Bible times, Bible lands” thing.

I know growing up as a child I had the impression that the Pharisees were always hostile, that the disciples were always stupid, and that there was no particular rhyme or reason to the things Jesus did. But there’s actually a very clear development. He has a program, he has an agenda and he works it out. Especially toward the end of his life it’s not simply God’s providence, it’s Jesus himself orchestrating events to force the issue and to bring him to the cross at just the right time.

So we’ll look at some of those things and we’ll look at some of the broad trends of his preaching and such, but we want to move quickly because if you want to hear about the gospels you need to be in church every Sunday, preferably twice, worshiping the Lord and hearing the preaching of his Word. We’re not a substitute for that.

Right. Let’s wrap up with some recommendations. Do you want me to go first?

Yes, of course.

I’m going to recommend finishing things that you started a long time ago. My example for this is the “Make Me A Swifty” podcast series that our friend Savannah and I have done. We have recorded all the episodes now. We took an unplanned year-long hiatus when I was having morning sickness for eight months – well, there was a cold season at the beginning, then there was eight months of morning sickness, and then there was having a newborn, and then there was another cold season, but we finally got there.

The third-to-last episode released this morning, the day we’re recording this, and the next ones will be following, and it feels good to have finished something. I’m the queen of not finishing things.

I feel your pain.

I do as well, yes.

Rachel, you got anything?

I do. Mine is kind of an unusual recommendation. It’s sort of a recommendation, I’ll put it that way. I guess my recommendation is to have pets. The thing that I wanted to say is that nobody knows this because nobody ever sees the video of our podcast, but to this point with every one of our episodes I have had a little companion named Ellie with me. She has bonked into the microphone and done all sorts of things that David clips out.

Ellie passed away this last week when she was almost 17 years old. She had a good long life and was with us for all the podcasts up till now, so I recommend having a pet, even though it is extremely hard at the end to lose them, but they are wonderful and a gift from God.

We did a whole podcast about pets and why we should have them.

I must have missed that one.

Mine is really weird, weirder than yours but it builds on yours. I recommend not putting your cats down just because they look sick. Our cat of many, many years was looking really out of it back around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and there was a plan, and I didn’t stop it – what’s the nice word? – to have her euthanized.

Put to sleep I think is the nice word.

Yes. But at the last minute my wife seemed to be having second thoughts and I said, “Honey, are you sure you really want to do this?” and she said, “No, and I talked to Haley and she already said no, so we were crying,” so I said, “Okay, let’s not do it then. Let’s wait. She’s not dead yet,” and she’s perked up and kind of recovered. She used to haunt the garage and now she sits on the couch and waits for people to come and pet her, so don’t give up too soon.

I had a little dachshund when I was young and my parents were saying, “He’s getting old. He’s going to die.” “No, wait just a little bit longer,” and then he died. But there was a feeling in letting God take him and not – you know. Where I come from you take them out in the back and shoot them, but I escaped that mentality.

So love your animals while you can. They’re here for a short time, by and large, unless they’re turtles, but they are gifts from God and we should be thankful for them.

Amen. I know some people who had those giant rabbits, the Flemish Giants. They had a pair and they were fine as long as they had the pair. Then one of them died and the other one was so mean and vicious that they had to take it out into the woods and shoot it. Rabbits, man. Who knew.

Just say no to rabbits. That is also my recommendation. I have lived with rabbits and I say no to rabbits.

On that note, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We’re going to have to find some new software solutions in the near future so we appreciate your ongoing support.

Thank you also to our transcriptionist, who makes this podcast available to you in your inbox. If you’d like to receive that you can look us up on Substack. Just Google it. I receive Substacks but I’ve never gone looking for a Substack, so I don’t really know how it’s done but I suppose it is a thing that you can do.

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Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.