“I’m a Christian,” said my oldest daughter, seven-year-old Miriam.
“Really?” I replied. “So what makes you believe that you are a Christian?”
“Because I love God, God loves me, and I know Jesus came back to life after dying on the cross.”
It was a Thursday morning, and I was preoccupied with writing this article and considering the words of John the Baptist from the passage in Luke 3. John seems so out of place in Advent, I thought to myself. He speaks such harsh words of judgment and repentance when what we truly want to hear is Tiny Tim’s “God bless us everyone” to put us in the Christmas spirit. Instead John shouts in our faces, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. . . .
John the Baptist is an acquired taste, like roquefort. He’s complex. He is an amalgamation of unanswered questions: Is he a zealot acting out the Exodus as a kind of political comedy sketch? Is he the leader of a rival faith community, a serious threat to the fledgeling Jesus movement? Is he a kind of Enkidu figure—a fugitive of our collective consciousness from the epic Gilgamesh—who crawls out of the wilderness, learns our ways well enough and then attempts to wrestle and pin our society to the ground, only to be admired briefly and then destroyed?
Whatever John is, he’s not easy to put on a cracker.