Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith
your God. 2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,
that her warfare is accomplished , that her iniquity is pardoned
: for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her
sins. 3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare
ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway
for our God. 4 Every valley shall be exalted , and every
mountain and hill shall be made low : and the crooked shall be
made straight, and the rough places plain: 5 And the glory of
the LORD shall be revealed , and all flesh shall see it
together: for the mouth of the LORD hath
spoken it. — Isaiah 40:1-5
Make Them Come To You
John The Baptist could have lived and labored in virtual obscurity the rest
of his life had something odd not happened: he became
successful. Most every story ever told, from the dawn of time,
contains a story arc of humble beginnings and early struggle to
enormous success and the consequences thereof—sometimes good,
usually not so good. Whether we admit it or not, most pastors
are, in fact, competitive. As Christians, we are (or should be) happy for
another church’s success, but there’s also a godly (and
sometimes ungodly) jealousy involved. Small churches often
behave like hardware stores competing for the limited pool of
black customers in the area. A ministry actually led by God does
not always grow into a huge megachurch and a huge megachurch is
not always led by God. God measures success differently than we
do. For us, it’s all about numbers. Numbers, quantity, is all
but irrelevant to God, who measures our success by our
effectiveness. We can labor all our lives and reach only one
person for Christ, but, to God, that’s a home run. That’s what
we were there for. Churches relentlessly counting heads and
struggling to attract new members (Buy One Get One Free) are
typically using the wrong approach to building God’s church.
They are usually trying to build the bricks-and-mortar building
itself. Churches are not buildings. Churches are people. A
pastor could organize a healthy, prosperous, and effective
church with a Facebook and Twitter account. The church was
intended to be fluid, responsive, changing as it needed to.
Christ never intended His followers to exhaust themselves and
their resources in these massive, multi-million dollar
structures. You meet in houses, in cafes, in public areas. If
there is the big mega-tent, you share it with other churches. A
bricks-and-mortar facility should, ideally, be running 24/7.
The lights should never go off. It should be shared by many
congregations, its resources available to Christian believers.
Instead we have padlocks and gates. Them and Us. This is not
ministry. This is not what Christ died to give life to.
John, the weird, struggling pastor way out of town talking to
himself, looked around one day and discovered something odd:
rather than his going into town and buying real estate and
setting up folding chairs in a storefront—people were coming to
him. First a trickle, and then in droves [Mark 1:5], people
curious to hear about this new kingdom of which John preached,
tipped out of town, traveling into the wilderness to hear him.
Many believed John’s words and repented of their sin,
being baptized in the Jordan by John and his disciples.
John’s isolation, well beyond the boundaries and strictures of
the local pastoral Old Boys’ Club, allowed him the freedom and
imperative to speak for God, to speak to God, and to hear from
God. This was simply not something John would ever be allowed to
do under the auspices of the established religious leadership.
"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." —Malachi
4:5-6
Jesus replied, "To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands." Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist. —Matthew 17:11-13
Success, however, has consequences.
So long as John was essentially talking to himself, the powerful
religious leaders of the day all but ignored him. Who cares. So
what. He’s out there on his own, by himself. John was no threat
to their positions of authority and adoration. By virtue of
heredity, John could rightly have taken his place among them,
likely bumping some old fossil out of a cushy High Priest gig. I
imagine these men were glad, if not thrilled, that John had
apparently gone insane. That he was out there, away from his
proper seat among them, dressing like a homeless guy and eating
bugs while rambling to himself about nonsense.
But, when John became successful, when the priests’ own
congregations began tipping out of town to hear John, the
situation likely became a numbers game. Joseph Caiaphas, the
High priest, was a political appointee, put in place by the
Roman Governor Valerius Gratus. The two previous high priests
had served only a year before being ousted, therefore it is
reasonable to speculate Caiaphas was under some pressure to keep
the Jews in line. Caiaphas’ father-in-law Annas had been deposed
two years before, but still held a great deal of esteem in
Jerusalem and was still referred to as a “High Priest,” a family
rivalry that likely also influenced Caiaphas’ decisions. This
noise coming from the north of the mad Levite John and his nutty
baptisms likely caused Caiaphas real concern over his own
position. There were serious concerns about Roman rule and an
insurgent Zealot movement in Beit Shammai to eject the Romans
from Israel. If John The Baptist was fomenting an insurgency or
an alternative Halakha—body of Jewish law—like the Shammai, that
could potentially divide the Jews and/or antagonize the Romans
to intercede. John
converting a few folks was irrelevant to Caiaphas. Several
thousand folks, in synagogue on Saturday but tipping out of
Galilee to see John on Sunday, was a real threat.
Caiaphas arranged for a group of Pharisees and Sadducees to go to John and inquire abut what he was doing out there. This was an insulting breach of protocol. John’s hereditary standing among the Levites demanded that the top guy— Caiaphas—speak to him general-to-general. Caiaphas was likely more concerned about appearances and about the mischief Annas might create with the Romans in his absence, so he instead sent representatives, insulting John and violating the Jews' own hierarchal order.
This is what many
pastors do when they insist on only meeting with or working with
people they consider their equal. It is an artificial hierarchal
order where no hierarchy should exist. Jesus’ death and
resurrection did away with divisions between God and man. This
nonsense of “ordained” ministers somehow outranking “licensed”
ministers is simply not biblical. Neither is the foolishness of
“bishops” out-ranking “pastors” and so forth. We should treat
one another, all of us, with respect. There should be no Big I
and small “u.” But this is our tradition, this nonsense where we
esteem one another based on ridiculous and largely unmerited
titles, where we allow cronyism to run wild. I have experienced
churches who would not return phone calls of people whose names
they did not recognize or whom they judged unimportant or
insignificant, and pastors who routinely hand off meetings with
people they esteem unimportant to subordinates (or, just as
often, ignore the request). This is the nonsense of Matthew 3:7, these pious
Church Folk feeling too important, too high and lifted up, to
meet with some crazy nobody like John: a guy they’d have
completely ignored had not John’s growing popularity now
threatened their position.
John, predictably, lit into these guys on the spot:
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and
Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them:
"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming
wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not
think you can say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our
father.' I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up
children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the
trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be
cut down and thrown into the fire. 11 "I baptize you with water
for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful
than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you
with the Holy Spirit and with fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in
his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his
wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable
fire." —Matthew Chapter 3.
Speaking to these powerful, esteemed men in such a way was simply not done. To do so in public, likely within earshot of multitudes of Jews, certainly demeaned these men in the eyes of the people they routinely lorded over. For John, a Levite priest, it was certainly a bad career move. John's egregious lack of diplomacy and tact undermined his boldness and leaves the student to wonder how much of that was God-directed and how much of John's forthrightness was just John winging it. We comfort ourselves in the benign Sunday School reading of John being in perfect harmony with the Holy Spirit at all times. But the Holy Spirit, as we know it, had not yet been given. Moses smashed the tablets in rage when he came down from Mount Sinai. Solomon, the wisest man in human history, ultimately turned to worship pagan gods.
In creative writing, we often employ a technique known as foreshadowing: revealing traits or behaviors or actions by our main characters that will often preview events or choices to come. John's rant at the Pharisees may or may not have been directed by God. Success often erodes discipline, as many preachers become full of themselves and increasingly less humble. The harder it is for your pastor to simply admit he was wrong, the longer the intervals between your hearing your pastor ever say, "I'm sorry," or, "I screwed up," the more likely that success is fattening up his ego.
For me, this is the lesson of John, a guy totally broken for God's purpose, who ultimately suffers one of the worst things that can happen to a preacher: he became successful. And, following that success, he began wandering off-message. Being submitted to God does not make you any less human, any less prone to mistakes or any less vulnerable to all tat applause, all that adoration directed at you. Your own voice, ringing in your ears, it's easy for pastors to keep on preaching long after God has stopped speaking. We just gas on, completely in self, something we'd never have done back before we were successful, when we were still humble, broken, and disciplined.
I believe John was still in a good place with God, here, and his rantings to the Pharisees were consistent with his purpose. They were on his turf. He was where God 2wanted him to be. This was Go's message and His warning to these religious leaders to get their house in order. Because, what came next would change everything forever.
Christopher J. Priest
21 August 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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