Better understanding the Gospel

with Marie-Noëlle Thabut

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Those who come to John the Baptist are the humble, the crowd, the people, the outcasts (likely the tax collectors and soldiers who accompanied them): for them, the prophet's harsh words are Good News. Humbly, they ask: what does it mean to convert? John the Baptist has a simple answer: our conversion is measured by our attitude toward our neighbor. Later, along the same lines, Jesus will say: "It is not those who say to me, 'Lord, Lord...'"

But, all things considered, the crowds who approached John's baptism and asked him, "What should we do?" could very well have answered for him! For his preaching was in the direct lineage of the prophets: practicing justice, sharing, and non-violence was their favorite theme. And because John truly acted like a prophet, people began to dream: could he be the Messiah? After all, they had been waiting for him for so long. "The people were waiting," Luke specifies.

THE PEOPLE WERE WAITING… FOR THE MESSIAH… AREN'T THEY STILL???

John's response on this point is very firm: no, I am not the Messiah, but I tell you, he is coming, his coming is imminent. "He is coming, the one who is more powerful than I."... "With many other exhortations, he proclaimed the Good News to the people." When Luke speaks of Good News, he means this: it should be understood as "he proclaimed to the people the Good News (implied) of the coming of the Messiah." And John defines the Messiah in two ways: first, he is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit; second, he comes to exercise God's Judgment.

First, the Messiah is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit; for it was known, since the prophet Joel, that in the Messiah's time, God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. But first, a few words about baptism: first observation, it was not Jesus who invented the act of baptizing, that is, immersing the faithful in water! Since John baptized before Jesus began his public ministry. We know that there were also baptismal ceremonies at Qumran. But it is true that in Jesus' time, the practice of Baptism was recent and very uncommon; and besides, you may search the Old Testament for the words "baptism" and "baptize," but you will almost never find them, neither in Hebrew nor in Greek. Nowhere in Jewish law was it stated that one had to be baptized: the rite of entry into the community was circumcision. And if, in the time of Christ, a certain John could be referred to as "the Baptist", it was because there was indeed a distinctive sign there.

It is difficult to say what meaning was attributed to Baptism in the Judaism of Jesus' time: religious renewal movements were multiplying, and that of John the Baptist was one of them, but not the only one. What we do know is that, throughout history, the Jewish religion included water rites, ablutions (it never involved complete immersion, whereas, as its name indicates, Baptism is a complete immersion in water): they all had a purpose of purification in the biblical sense of the term; it is not about washing away sin, but about allowing a person to separate themselves from everything that ties them to the profane world in order to allow them to come into contact with the sacred realm, that of God.

With John the Baptist, a new step was taken: he gave Baptism a new meaning, that of conversion and the remission of sins. But he himself announced that with Jesus, it would be something entirely different: “I baptize you with water… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit* and with fire.” Our twenty-first-century ears no longer grasp the enormity of this statement. It is not the word “baptize” that is enormous, since John the Baptist is in fact baptizing Jews in the waters of the Jordan. But it is the continuation of the phrase, “with the Holy Spirit and with fire,” that would have struck you like a bombshell had you heard John the Baptist. The expression “Holy Spirit” was practically nonexistent in the Old Testament, and the rare times it was used, the adjective “holy” meant the spirit of the holy God, but the Spirit was not conceived as a distinct person.

Why? Because at the beginning of the Covenant between the God of Sinai and the people of Moses, the first priority was to deliver this people from polytheism and reveal to them the one God: it was too soon to unveil the mystery of this one God in three persons. People readily spoke of the Breath of God, which gave man his life force, or even which moved man to act according to God's will, but it was not yet revealed as a distinct Person. The words of John the Baptist opened the door to this revelation: he announced a baptism "in the Holy Spirit" and no longer a baptism "with water."

Secondly, the Messiah comes to exercise God's Judgment. This aspect of the Messiah's vocation was also very present in the Old Testament. First, all the meditation on the ideal king expected for the Messianic era presented him as the one who would eliminate all evil and establish justice; secondly, the Servant Songs in the second book of Isaiah strongly emphasized this point: the Servant of God, the Messiah, would carry out God's judgment. Very commonly, this judgment of God was evoked as a purification by fire (we find the word "fire" here) and by a sorting process: "His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor, and he will gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire." "John the Baptist's listeners knew this image, they knew that it is indeed Good News because this sorting will not eliminate anyone: this fire is not a fire of destruction but of purification; as the gold nugget is purified of its dross to be even more beautiful, this fire will rid us all of what, in each of us, is not in accordance with the kingdom of justice and peace established by the Messiah.

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Note

*Jesus takes the decisive step by linking Christian Baptism to his own Paschal journey: henceforth, those who believe in his name are given the grace to be immersed in the fire of Trinitarian love. The baptized are grafted onto him and share in his victory over evil and death.

Additional Information

- John the Baptist invites us to share; this is not to surprise us; but it seems that he invites us to share without prior inquiry: could this perhaps be what conversion is? Very often, before coming to the aid of others, we ask ourselves if they deserve our attention; without realizing that, in this way, we are still in the problem of merit, and not in the gratuitousness of love.

- "The strap of his sandals": the rabbis recommended not to impose on a slave of Israelite origin a difficult or humiliating task, such as removing his master's shoes or washing his feet." (cf. R. de Vaux, "Institutions of the Old Testament," Volume I, p. 134).

- The publicans: we would call them tax collectors today; they were responsible for collecting taxes on behalf of the Roman occupiers; but the similarity ends there. Our tax collectors had no say in the amount of the tax; the publicans, on the other hand, were levied a certain sum by the Roman authorities and then collected it from the population: they could be tempted to collect more than they had paid! By extension, any public official was considered a publican.

- The soldiers: these were probably a kind of police force made up of mercenaries who accompanied the tax collectors. (Jews were not allowed to recruit an army, so these were not Jewish soldiers; as for the Roman soldiers - the occupying army - they generally did not mix with the population).

Luke, as always, takes great care to emphasize the radical difference between the ministry of John the Baptist and that of Jesus: the baptism of the Forerunner is a plunge into water, as a symbol of a desire for purification. Christian baptism will be a plunge into the fire of the very Spirit of God. And Jesus takes the decisive step by linking Christian baptism to his own Paschal journey: henceforth, those who believe in his name are given the grace to be plunged into the fire of Trinitarian love. The baptized are grafted onto him and share in his victory over evil and death.

- "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." : the Greek preposition "kai" says not an addition but an equivalence; it must be understood as "in the Holy Spirit which is fire", that is to say "in the fire of the Holy Spirit".