Pure

We celebrate today the birth of a prophet. Of his birth, the Master said, no man born of woman before him was greater. No man before him was closer to Heaven (recalling that Adam and Eve were not "born of woman"). That is, no man before him was holier than St. John the Baptist. There was nothing of the fallen world about Him. He was "of God" — filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb.

May I pose the obvious question then? Why is it that this most holy figure should be represented pictorially as a kind of rough and rude mountain man?

I do not mean "Why today this should be so?" I understand that. I recall clergy at a Roman Catholic parish I served pleading with the people to come to confession. They pleaded, with the pastor saying that the clergy were kindly and understanding, "Not like 'John the Baptist over there,'" looking in my direction. He meant that I accepted the Church's teaching concerning sin (that is that there sin) while, by contrast, the other clergy followed the Jesuit Karl Rahner's "fundamental option" — the theological principle that sin drops away as an unimportant subject in the midst of loving God and neighbor. ("Love, love, love. Love is all you need.") By contrast, these priests asserted that anyone who still holds to a doctrine of sin is "Neanderthal," an evolutionary "throw-back," and, no doubt, the sort of person who does not shower or wear clean clothes. Yes, I understand that milieu very well, for I lived in it (and taught as a theology professor in it) for many years.

I do not mean, "Why is John the Baptist depicted as an inhospitable mountain man today?" I mean, "Why has he been depicted as being wild and rude for centuries and centuries — as the late thirteenth-century Byzantine icon posted with this reflection attests. In some depictions of the Baptist, with his wild hair and beard and hurly-burly dress, we can almost picture flies buzzing round him. We can easily imagine his person and rude dress giving off a stench. Is this not puzzling .... and completely out of proportion with who John the Baptist actually is?

And who he is .... is the example, par excellence, of the one who cleanses. Taking the mikvah bath, the Hebrew ritual of purification which was used for particular occasions, he made it the central fact and feature of his ministry. His role in history was to prepare men and women to enter into God's Presence: to wash them, to cleanse them, to remove the reproach of worldliness from them. The mere fact of his conception has taken away his mother's "reproach among people" (Lu 1:25). The mere mention of his name, John, reconciles his father, Zacharias, to the God Whom he loves and removes his reproach of muteness (Lu 1:63). His hallmark word, Metanoiete! (repent) declares first the inaugural word of Jesus' three-year ministry. This solitary word cries to the world from the wilderness: "Turn back! Be set apart from the world! You are going in the wrong direction!"

Here is the great crossroads of human life: the choice between darkness and light, between death and life, between the world and God. And the two who announce it, St. John the Forerunner and the Son of God, are pure and light-filled to a degree that defies comparison, then and always.

A right picture of St. John the Baptist, then, places him before a backdrop of Eden. For he is the man of Eden — pure, untouched by the world, newborn as the first morning of the earth, fragrant of the dews of Eden's pristine grass. He is the messenger from Eden, that scene of harmony between God and man. Animals do not flee from his side. Nor do noxious insects dare to alight upon the Divinity radiating from his person. People all over the Levant were not repelled, but drawn to him — not just a few, not only the extreme or the devout, but everyone:

If St. Peter writes that baptism was an antitype of the flood of Noah (1 Peter 3:20-21), then he must have seen the ministry of John the Baptist as a tsunami washing over the entire eastern Mediterranean shore, cleansing not only "the filth of the flesh .... but the answer of a good conscience toward God" (Ibid). It is not the wilderness, but rather a conscience separated from God that draws the human person down into the mud and the mire and, in the end, will draw flies.

Thus, in picturing John the Baptist as a surly cave man, we have reversed the true picture. But this should not surprise us, for it is said that "the devil is in the details." And the pattern of the devil is to turn the holy upside-down. For like a virus, evil has no entis, no being, of its own. After all, God made everything and saw that it was good. Evil's only option, then, is to take over and pervert the good that it might have life. And what better figure to pervert than the most holy John the Baptist? For goodness is the whole point of his birth and life: to be absolutely blameless and righteous before God.

John the Baptist was a Nazirite. His was a life of close harmony with God, set apart from a world that rejected God:

Gabriel refers to the purity vow of the Nazirite set out in Chapter 6 of the Book of Numbers.

Recent work on this subject (A Survey of Ancient Jewish Writings, the New Testament, Archaeological Evidence, and Other Writings from Late Antiquity, 2005) emphasizes that Jacob's favored son, Joseph, was a Nazirite, whose departure to alien Egypt vividly expresses his separation from his brothers (Ibid). By tradition, the Most Chaste Spouse Joseph, was also a Nazirite, whose name and sojourn in Egypt plainly attest this identification (Ibid).

We would recognize the Nazirite's purity vow as part of the process of theosis:

During the first century, a related purity movement, the Nazarenes, refused to eat meat and avoided the ritual slaughter of animals, "preferring the ideals of the pre-Flood diet" (James Tabor, "Nazarenes and Ebionites"). In this, we recall the Noachic Covenant, which made concessions to man's lust for blood-meat, outlining conduct of life after the Flood. Yes, following the Flood, man is permitted to eat other animals, so contrary to Eden's ways, but eating blood or the "life of the flesh" (Gen 9:4) continues to be out of bounds, according to the Noachic Covenant.

And I think it worth noting, as an aside, that the Archangel Gabriel encounters Zacharias not beside the Altar of Sacrifice covered with blood, but before the Altar of Incense: "Let my prayer be set before You as incense" (Ps 141:2).

We also see this concession to eating flesh-meat demanded by the grumbling people of the Sinai wilderness during the Exodus. They reject God's provision of food, complaining each night that they have been separated from their flesh pots in Egypt. To these rebellious spirits, God also concedes .... but in a particularly grotesque fashion. And the people respond in a frenzy of blood lust:

God slew them "while the meat was still in their mouths."

What is the alternative to blood-meat by the canons of God? It is the Bread of Heaven:

One ritual stands out among the first-century Nazarenes, who eschewed meat and practiced purity, and that is baptism. Baptism was a central feature of their ritual. They were known for their devotion to it.

We said earlier that "the devil is in the details." And there is one detail in the depiction of St. John the Baptist that has been decisive: a tiny detail of translation involving a single phoneme. For thousands of years, we have been handed the canard that St. John the Forerunner, the holiest among men preceding Jesus, squatted in the wilderness devouring grasshoppers. The Greek word is ακρις / akris, locusts.

Yes, it is true that the Book of Numbers, from which we receive the terms of the Nazirite's purity vow, makes no mention of diet, only of "strong drink" and of permitting the hair to grow. But the Book of Numbers is also our only source for the grotesque narrative concerning the people Israel's demands for blood-meat and of the LORD's slaying them while the flesh was still in their mouths.

Do we not see St. John the Baptist in his fullness as the man of Eden through the clear lens of our souls? Do we not see him dressed only in natural clothing, having no spot of the corrupt city upon him, following a diet of ενκρις / enkris, not akris. And what is this enkris? It is the holy food of honey cakes called Manna. How could we have gotten this wrong?! And, in this, we recall the exultant tones of our God from Psalm 81, Who tells us that this Divine food betokens obedience to His Word and His ways, not grumblings and back-biting in the tents.

St. John was the Forerunner, showing man the future. But he was also the Ancient, who pointed man back to man's most happy past. His ministry was like unto the Great Flood, wrote St. Peter, cleansing the world that followed the Fall. He lived in perfect obedience to God's word, even living the life of Eden. All men and women were attracted to him, for his life was fragrant of holiness. And his ministry was to call us back, back to Eden:

which means, "Make a U-turn!" .... back to Eden, where we encounter the Holy One of God standing at the gate. "Remember, me, O Jesus!" we cry in our own humble strivings after purity and holiness. And to such as these, the Holy One replies:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.