The Wild Man at the River

The boy who had once stayed behind to talk with the teachers in the temple grew up in Nazareth and worked as a carpenter, fixing doors and building tables, until he was about thirty years old.

By then a man named John was preaching in the wilderness beside the Jordan River.

He wore clothes woven from camel hair with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. (Locusts are a kind of grasshopper. John picked his supper off the bushes, and wild bees left him honey in the cracks of the rocks.)

"Turn back to God!" John shouted over the water. "The kingdom of heaven is coming near!"

Long ago Isaiah had promised a voice calling in the wilderness, "Make a straight road for the Lord!" John was that voice.

People streamed out from Jerusalem and the towns around it. They told God the wrong things they had done, and John baptized them. Down they went under the brown water, and up they came, dripping, as a sign that they were asking God to forgive them.

Then some important leaders came down the bank in their fine robes. They did not think they had much to be sorry for.

John took one look at them. "You family of snakes!" he cried. "Who warned you to run from God's anger? And don't tell yourselves, 'Abraham is our father.' God could make children for Abraham out of these stones!"

(The riverbank was covered in stones, so the leaders could see exactly what he meant.)

"I baptize you with water," John told the crowd. "But someone is coming after me who is far stronger than I am. I am not good enough to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

One day that someone came walking down to the river. It was Jesus, all the way from Nazareth, and he waded out to be baptized like everyone else.

John stared at him. "I am the one who needs to be baptized by you," he said. "And you come to me?"

Everyone else in that river had come to be washed of their wrongs. Jesus had never done a single wrong thing.

"Let it be this way for now," Jesus answered. "It is right for us to do everything God asks."

So John baptized him, and Jesus went down under the water right beside the people who needed washing.

The moment Jesus came up out of the river, the sky split open. The Spirit of God came down like a dove and rested on him, and a voice spoke from heaven:

"This is my Son, whom I love. I am very pleased with him."

Jesus had not yet healed anyone or preached a single sermon, and his Father was glad over him already.

John's water was a sign, but water cannot make a heart new, and people climbed out of the Jordan and did wrong things again by supper.

Later Jesus told his friends, "I have a baptism to go through, and how heavy my heart is until it is finished!" He meant the cross. There he would stand with sinners closer than he ever stood in the Jordan. He would carry their wrongs down into death the way he went down under the river, and on the third day he would come up alive.

Fifty days later he poured out the Holy Spirit on his friends, and flames like fire rested on each of their heads. It was just what John had promised at the river: the one coming after him would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.