The Wild Man of the New Testament - Celebrating St John

The Forerunner, the Baptister, the Immerser - our church’s namesake has a lot of nicknames. He’s also one of the few figures from Christianity to show up in Islam where he appears as the Prophet Yahya and is described in the Qur’an as “one of the righteous”.

Venerated and admired, today’s St John The Baptist is a far cry from the man himself. Dressed in animal skin rags, it would’ve been hard to pick him out from a line-up of the homeless. This was a man who ate bugs and went into the desert to scream about repentance. We have a word for that type of man - crazy.

It’s hard to overstate how wild and frightening St John must’ve seemed. Jewish society was highly ordered and rule-based. People valued cleanliness, propriety, and discipline. They had very definite ideas about what kind of Messiah to expect and someone who sent a rambling beggar to signal his coming was definitely not what they had in mind. 

Yet, according to Jesus, John was the man. “Among those that are born of women, there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist” - Luke 7: 28.

In Luke 7, Jesus chides those who went to gawk at John. He asks them what they expected to see - someone in fine robes? Someone more in tune with the mainstream, bending to the culture like a “reed in the wind”? Christ challenges their preconceptions, urging them to look deeper. In that spirit, I want to look a little deeper into who John was, and why he’s such a compelling character.

A fringe figure

The voice of one crying in the wilderness:

Prepare the way of the Lord;

Make straight in the desert

A highway for our God.

I’ve always had a soft spot for St John. As a child those lines he quotes from Isaiah about a voice crying in the wilderness thrilled me - more at home in an epic gothic novel than a boring Sunday school lesson. The poetry and promise of those words captivated me. As an adult, I realise that’s the point. 

This passage is meant to be shocking - this is something different, something world-changing is coming and you need to pay attention. John’s role, from the moment of his birth, was to be a warning. And where do warnings come from? The fringes. By definition, warnings aren’t mainstream. If everyone can see they’re headed for a cliff, you don’t need someone to warn you. It’s society’s outliers who spot the danger first, and they are rarely thanked for it. 

These are the people who are weird enough to be brave. They don’t follow the herd, they don’t keep their heads down and go with the flow. They see the truth and they speak it - no matter the cost.

For John, the costs were huge. The Bible doesn’t give us much of a look at his psyche but I’m willing to bet he didn’t care about being ostracised or mocked. The nickname ‘Crazy John’ (as he’s referred to in the TV series, The Chosen) wouldn’t have bothered him. But he lost more than society’s approval. He lost his freedom and ultimately his life.

After baptizing Christ in Matthew’s gospel, John next shows up in prison. Jailed for denouncing Herod’s relationship with his sister-in-law, John languishes in a cell while Jesus begins his ministry. Herod can’t quite make up his mind what to do with the contrarian preacher until his sister-in-law-turned-mistress steps in and demands his head.

And so ends John the Baptist. His head is served on a platter at the whim of an angry adulteress. It’s a tragic death, but also classic John - demonstrating his obstinate adherence to biblical truth and his disdain for ungodly rulers right to the bitter end. 

The significance of St John

Almost two thousand years later, the world has not forgotten St John, quite the contrary. His name is on Christian churches - of all denominations - around the world, he frequently appears in stained glass windows (bony legs notwithstanding) and other artwork, he has his own feast day in June, and there are numerous books and articles devoted to him.

Seems odd for a mere messenger. If you go to a concert, do you tell friends about the warm-up act or do you save your review for the main performer?

I have a theory on why John resonates through the centuries. Yes, he was related to Christ, told of his coming, and even baptized him but he’s also a potent symbol of the Christian revolutionary. Courageous truth-tellers are necessary in every generation, and that’s why St John continues to speak to us. Not just because of what he did, but who he was. 

John wasn’t only in the wilderness, he was the wilderness. The person out beyond society in a place where you have to face hard and difficult truths. John was also a man of seemingly conflicting passions, someone who spoke of majesty and kingdom while wearing dirty robes. A man who represented both an end (as the last of the prophets) and a glorious, new beginning (as a herald of the Messiah and a new era).

Our own era needs its St Johns. With North America currently in the midst of a heated culture war and actual war ongoing in the Holy Lands and Europe, the world desperately needs courageous truth-tellers who stand firm in the Gospel despite the cost.

You don’t have to put on stinky camel robes and snack on bugs, but we are called to emulate John’s courage in the face of persecution and opposition. Whether cultural conflict or inner turmoil, whatever war you’re fighting, be Team John.