“John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Catholic edition RSV, Mark 1:4)

From his childhood St John the Baptist was conscious of the tremendous destiny for which God had created him – that he should be the new Elijah charged with the almost terrifying responsibility of preparing the Chosen People for the Coming of their Divine Saviour and Judge.  That destiny determined the manner and course of his whole life and in order to fit himself for it, he withdrew in his youth to the terrible wilderness of Judea to the south east of Jerusalem.

It is a place of unspeakable dreariness and desolation, quivering relentlessly with the heat; a barren waste of mountains and gorges, and cleft and pinnacled precipices, the whole land twisted into tortured shapes by the convulsions of the Earth’s crust that formed it millions of years ago.  From its ridges can be seen to the east the huge pit that is the Dead Sea, into which the River Jordan flows, nearly 1,300 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.

And it was in the wilderness of Judea overlooking the Dead Sea that John lived alone in the caves until he was nearly 30 years old.  He existed on the wild honey which the bees make from the sap of certain trees (1), and locusts, which are still used for food in some parts of the world today.  His clothing – a garment of camel’s hair and a leather girdle – was a deliberate reminder of the similar clothing worn by Elijah himself (2 Kings 1:8).

So he lived there with God, engrossed in prayer and meditation and the reading of the Scriptures, until the stark fact of God’s flaming holiness and the inevitability of his searching judgement on sinners, had become part of John’s very being.  He absorbed the atmosphere of that harsh and terrible and burning land, which fitted so well the hard and disturbing message that burnt into his soul until he could contain it no longer.  His hour had come and he went down into the Jordan Valley.

The river here runs through a gigantic trench, 15 miles wide, its sides formed by the grim walls of the mountains of Judea and the mountains of Moab, which tower up above the valley.  He made for the busy ford on the main route from Jerusalem through Jericho and across the river into Transjordan.  And there, in a broad open space among the tamarisk and oleanders and willows and reeds, St John the Baptist began his life’s work as the last of God’s prophets.

It was more than 400 years since a prophet’s voice had been heard in Israel, and that was Malachi who had foretold the coming of John the Baptist as the second Elijah.  Since then there had been a return to the days before Samuel, the first of the prophets, when “…there was no open vision” (1 Samuel 3:1).  So the Psalmist mourned in his song, “…there is not one prophet more: no, not one is there among us, that understands any more” (74:10).

But the Israelites knew that this silence from Heaven would one day be broken when the prophecy of Malachi was fulfilled and the last of the prophets appeared to usher in the King and Lord of all.  It was John the Baptist who broke God’s long silence, “…preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Catholic edition RSV, Mark 1:4).  The news thrilled through the whole land and soon the banks of the Jordan were thick with men and women.

His message hit them like a stone.  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”.  “Bear fruit that befits repentance…” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 3:2,8).  In the judgement that was coming, repentance alone would save them.  The fact that they belonged to God’s Chosen People would avail them not at all.  “…do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 3:9,10).

And he went on to warn them of the coming of a greater and even more disturbing figure than himself.  “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming…will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 3:11,12).

A vast number, including both honest and steady-going men like Peter and Andrew as well as many shady and reprobate characters, responded to his message.  As St Mark tells us, “And there went out to him all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 1:5).  Only the nation’s religious leaders – the Pharisees and Sadducees – stood aloof.  They were the men who believed that their membership of the Jewish People and their outward observance of the Jewish religion, made their own repentance unnecessary.  Therefore John reserved for them his harshest utterance, comparing them to snakes which flee before a forest fire, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 3:7).

So this fierce, unflinching spokesman of God delivered to his hearers the most essential and the most unpopular of all messages – “Repent!”  It is the most essential because until a person repents of his or her sins, he or she has no personal relationship with God.  That becomes clear when we remind ourselves of what sin is.  It is a rebellious independence of God, the assertion of our own will as opposed to the acceptance of God’s will; and it manifests itself in all those particular sins of thought, word, act and omission which are so familiar to us.

And until we end that rebelliousness against God by our own repentance, there can be no communion between our darkness and his light.  People who repent have not only changed direction, they have changed sides as well.  They have turned their backs on their sins by turning their faces to God.  Thus repentance is a change from rejecting God’s Sovereign rule over one’s heart and mind to embracing that rule.

Such a change of attitude leads inevitably to a change in oneself – in one’s motives and aims, in the way one thinks and lives; in a word, a change from a self-centred life to a God-centred life, in which one is ready and willing to become what he wants one to be and to do what he wants done.  It means to begin with, renouncing out of love for God, all the thoughts and desires and conversations and actions and habits which cannot be shared with him, the all-holy God.  And as a prelude to all that, it means repudiating the sins of one’s past life by confessing them all, as those who were baptized by John confessed their sins.

And not only is repentance the most essential of all messages, it is the most unpopular as well.  And it does not need much imagination to see why. For repentance inevitably means an upheaval in one’s soul.  It is like a surgeon’s knife cutting out all the bad.  It goes too deep for people’s comfort and is too far-reaching in its effects for their liking.  Of its necessity, however, there can be no doubt.  “Repent”, said John on the banks of the Jordan.  “Repent”, said Our Blessed Lord as he began his ministry in Galilee (Matthew 4:17).  And before his Ascension he charged his Apostles, “…that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name” (mark that, in his name) “to all nations…” (Catholic edition RSV, Luke 24:47).

In order to justify – or rationalise – their refusal to listen to God and to repent, people will believe anything.  They will equate sin with crime or with such serious offences as they themselves have never committed.  Or they will regard sin as so normal and natural an element in anyone’s life as not to be sin at all.  That is a very old expedient which St John the Apostle dealt with bluntly, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (Catholic edition RSV, 1 John 8-10, our emphasis).

It is even possible to produce for oneself – consciously or half-consciously – a kind of spiritual profit and loss account, in which regularity at the Eucharist is set off against the sins of one’s daily life so that one comes out on the right side in the end.  That was the attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees who rejected John the Baptist’s call to repent.

A more general justification for refusing to repent is found in the idea that God does not bother about right or wrong or about holiness and sin; or if he does, he does not bother overmuch.  And so, as one need not worry about God, one need not worry about one’s sins either.  Here we have a clear example of that spiritual blindness which is one of the worst effects of sin on the soul – the utter failure to appreciate that stark fact, which burnt its way into John the Baptist’s innermost being, of God’s flaming holiness and the inevitability of his searching judgement on sinners.

For people’s sins are a dark shutter of their own making which effectively cuts them off from God, and if deliberately persisted in, from salvation also.  For it is God who offers us salvation and it is he who lays down the conditions for it; and those conditions are unalterably determined by his own scorching sanctity.  And the first of them is our repentance.  Without that there can be no relationship with him, no salvation and no Heaven.

For salvation is the union of one’s spirit with God in love; and Heaven is that union in its final and perfect state in his visible Presence.  And therefore both are rejected by those who refuse to renounce their sins and refuse to turn from them.  But when we turn to God in penitence and love, confessing our sins, “he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (Catholic edition RSV, 1 John 1:9).

An Advent prayer for repentance

Heavenly Father, as we prepare to celebrate the Birth of Our Saviour, help us to see the true state of our souls and not to shrink from facing up to the sins we have committed.  May we confess them all, sincerely sorry for having turned away from you and firmly resolving to try not to sin again.  Cleanse us from our sins, strengthen us in our weakness and stir our wills, that during this Advent and for the rest of our lives we may love you more dearly and serve you more faithfully, day by day.

“Then cleansed be every breast from sin;
make straight the way for God within,
prepare we in our hearts a home
where such a mighty Guest may come”. (2)

References

1. Daniel-Rops, H. (1955) Jesus in his time, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

2. Coffin, C. (1736) trans Chandler, J. (1837) On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry.  Available from:
http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/o/o752.html (Accessed 26 November 2011) (Internet).

Bibliography

Morton, H.V. (1934) In the steps of the Master, London: Rich & Cowan Ltd.