A Contextual Reflection from Preserving Bible Times John the Baptist and “Repentance” Rediscovering Mark 1 & Luke 3 through the Lens of Context Where do Nicknames Come From? We know him as John the Baptist, the one who “baptized” Jesus and many others in the Jordan River. However, to Jesus’ first-century disciples, John, the only son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, would not have been known by that nickname. “Baptism” is not a Hebrew word; “immersion” is, and contextually there were five different reasons1 for a Jew to be immersed in the Gospel period: to go through a ritual purification. to commemorate the taking of a vow. to identify with and consecrate oneself to the authority of a rabbi’s teaching (for disciples). to initiate a new believer, i.e. a proselyte, into the faith. (now the only Western reason) to be consecrated into religious authority and dedicating oneself to a mission (Jesus’ reason). Jesus Inaugurated as the Christ Obviously Jesus did not have to be “baptized” into the faith! So what kind of immersion ceremony was it that John participated in with Jesus that day in the Jordan? Contextually it becomes clear that John participated in the “ordination” of Jesus for His messianic ministry. Jesus’ immersion not only formally anointed Him into His Messianic role, but at the same time Jesus consecrated Himself, i.e., totally aligned Himself, with the tasks that came with His Father’s Mission. The English word “baptism” comes directly from the Greek words baptisma (noun) and baptizo (verb)2 used to describe the multiple forms of Jewish immersion. The use of “baptism” with its current singular Western meaning is a good example of how Western translators lose the ability in English to adequately represent multiple first-century meanings for a word. We need to remember that while the Gospels were recorded in Greek, and then 1500 years later translated into English, Jews first spoke these words that had precise Semitic understandings. Thus if we need to give John an identifier, we might contextually consider renaming him “John the Immerser.” Traditional Misunderstandings Most of us in the West today conjure up images of John as somewhat of a wild man emerging from the Judean Wilderness (desert) to prepare the way of the Lord.3 Traditional representations and understandings often portray him with a modified caveman look draped in a grungy, matted camel’s hair outer garment (close-cut camel’s hair can actually make for an attractive tunic), eating “strange” things like locust and honey. This is a misrepresentation of one whom Jesus called the “greatest of all the prophets.”4 A Ministry of Protest Perhaps the best place to begin in understanding John the Immerser is to understand John’s context. The Temple leadership in Jerusalem was known by all to be utterly corrupt. The High Priest’s position was a “franchise” secured from Rome and rotated between a few Sadducean families who maintained that privilege by annually paying Rome significant sums of money.5 This “Temple franchise” allowed these families to run several businesses out of the Temple, all of which were very profitable because they were deliberately designed to cheat the people coming to worship, e.g. money changing and animal sales.6 During the time of Jesus, the Temple in Jerusalem might as well have been known as Temple, Inc. It was the Wall Street of its day and was a wondrous “cash cow” money machine for these “Board of Directors” families. The High Priesthood was a charade, a spiritual vacuum, and everyone knew it! Part of the yearning of the people in the land was for a return to authentic spiritual leadership in the Temple. The High Priest During the time of Jesus, the Chief Priest and the High Priests not only wore linen as prescribed in Leviticus7, but wore the finest of Babylonian linen.8 Coming as a prophetic voice that would stand against the corruption of the religious system of his day, John chose to wear camel’s hair. While the Temple’s “Board of Directors were elegantly dining on sumptuous buffets of food, John chose to eat locust and honey (permitted in Leviticus) therefore maintaining kosher.9 Contextually, everything about the ministry of John was a protest against what the leadership of the Temple in Jerusalem represented. Many people began to identify with John’s protest and were attracted by his message with some even following him as disciples. As a result, John was becoming the defacto High Priest of Israel in the eyes of these people. John’s Message John’s primary message to broader observant Judaism, and to the Sadducees and Pharisees in particular, was one of “repentance.” To Western evangelicals, the word repent usually means something akin to “fall on your knees, tell God (and perhaps someone else as well) you are sorry for what you have done, say you will never do it again, and then rise up in a forgiven state.” While that is included within the first-century Hebrew understanding of repent, there is a much more to it than that. For a first-century Jew, to repent was to “fundamentally change the way you see and understand everything.”10 To put it into our 21st-century vocabulary, first-century “repentance” meant to “change your worldview and all the paradigms that come with it.” It embodies a “turning from” one way of understanding things and “turning to” a new, very different way of seeing and understanding things. This kind of repentance involves “a transformation of the entire person.”11 Thus if we were going to be true to the nature of John and his message, we might consider renaming him “John the Repenter.” In its Hebrew roots, repent also carries with it the understanding of being restored as in “He restores my soul (Psalm 23:3).12 It encompasses being brought back, e.g., suggestive of a lost lamb being put back on the right path. Fusing these various aspects of repentance together as a Hebrew would view it, repentance can be understood as having your faulty (spiritual) eyesight corrected back to 20/20 vision so you can see things clearly. In other words, it is to have the cultural and religious glaucoma removed from your eyes so you can spiritually “see” the Kingdom of God as Jesus meant it to be understood. The irony of John’s message of “repentance” is that it fell on deaf ears for many who heard it. In observant Judaism, there was no felt need to repent of anything. For the Sadducees, wealth was a sign of God’s approval regardless of how you acquired that wealth. The Pharisees were prisoners of their observant Jewish “forgiveness” paradigm. In their three-fold sin management system, being “right with God” came from: 1) exercising scrupulous behavior, 2) going to the ritual purification baths when ceremonially unclean, and 3) participating in the prescribed Temple offerings and sacrifices. It was the religious “system” that imputed “forgiveness” to you and having done those three things, you had no need to repent. You were “right with God” by definition. John’s Real Message With this contextual backdrop, we can see that by challenging his religious culture to repent, John was in effect declaring to the religious leadership that “while you may have a ‘wealth theology,’ or a ‘system’ that you think is covering your sins, I am here to tell you it is fundamentally not dealing with your sins from God’s perspective. You need to radically change your understanding. It is not the nature of your behavior but the moral condition of your heart that ultimately matters to God. And unless your sins are dealt with from Heaven’s perspective, you will never be right with God and judgment will inevitably come.” Not a popular message to be sure and one that most in leadership ignored. But it did resonate with many of the common folk who knew something was not religiously right in this land. John’s Disciples In the First Century, disciples of a rabbi were those who chose to identify with that rabbi’s message.13 When disciples felt strongly about that message and wanted to commit to living it out in their own lives, they immersed themselves as an act of consecrating themselves to that rabbi’s authoritative teaching (the third reason for immersion itemized in the first paragraph). This added contextual backdrop tells us that John’s disciples would have personally identified with his call to “change your religious paradigms.” They would have been those who would have made the decision to submit themselves to John’s authoritative teaching of the need for repentance. Thus his disciples would have agreed that they too needed to fundamentally rethink and reexamine everything they held to be true about what it meant to be right with God. Jesus’ Call to Repentance In Matthew 3:2 Jesus initiates His ministry with the call to Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Interestingly enough, the call to “repentance” is often in conjunction with the Kingdom of God giving added weight that repentance involves completely changing your worldview and its paradigms so you can “see” the Kingdom of God. Thus it should be no surprise that Jesus chose some of Rabbi John’s disciples to become some of His first disciples. Even though these earliest disciples of Jesus had already identified with John’s clarion call to fundamentally change the way they saw and understood things, they had no idea what a radical new understanding of everything Jesus was inaugurating! They were the first ones to be “immersed” into a whole new community way of living that Jesus was calling the “Kingdom of God.” His Kingdom was a completely new way of doing things here on earth as they are done in Heaven – that sphere where God’s Will and Ways reign in the hearts and minds of His people.