John Baptist at the Jordan

A SPONTANEOUS camp-meeting, with no precedents, and no committee of arrangements. There are no well-adjusted seats for hearers; there are no convenient cottages for visitors. They are all in the open air, in the open country, where most of them never were before. Many of them are living as they never lived before. All of them believe that, this time, something is to happen. And, from east, west, north, and south, they have flocked together here, first to be baptized by this prophet John, and then to follow wherever he chooses to lead them.

From the uncultivated plain, dry and desert indeed, you descend over a line of white, clayey hills to a flat or terrace, which seems the basin of an old lake. This is covered with low shrubs of the “ agnus castus.” A second descent brings you upon another terrace, which is a thick jungle of willows and tamarisks. With one more descent you come to the river-bed. The river itself is not broad, sometimes not more than sixty feet wide, and the depth, except in floods, from six feet to four. On the eastern side of the river, as it would seem, in a country without villages, where men must encamp if they stay at all, are gathered these crowds, who are called together by the announcement that Elijah has appeared. It was from this very wilderness that Elijah disappeared. And now he has come again !

We are apt to read the Bible in that Stupid, Gradgrind way which results in keeping the whole story on one level. We take it as all wonderful and all a matter of course at the same time. So the average feeling about John Baptist—if people take the trouble to have any feeling about him — would be, I suppose, that it was the most natural thing in the world for him to go out into the desert, to dress like a Bedouin, and to live like one. But, in fact, it was just as much a thing of course, and just as little, as it would be to-day for the only son of a manufacturer in Akron, or a lawyer in Pittsfield, to leave his father’s house and family, leave all the associations to which his father and mother were bred, leave all his “ reasonable prospects for life,” and go up into the Upper Missouri country, or the wild lands of Lake Superior, or the forests around Katahdin, and live there alone in the fashion of Indians. The distance of removal is greater in these modern illustrations, but the contrast between the life of John’s father, which in the natural order of things he would have inherited, and the life which he chose is not greater. To all which we shut our eyes, and plunge on, mumbling, “ Oriental custom,”Eastern ways are so different from our ways.” But if ever there were people of set ways, they were priests of the regular course of Abia. So that when a young gentleman of one of these hierarchical families went off alone into a wild country, and took on himself the costume and the life of a Bedouin Arab, the matter was not such a humdrum and every-day business but what people should inquire about it. And those people who found he was dead in earnest came together to know what had happened and what was going to happen.

Nor was this an “ Oriental custom,” as we say so blandly, a thing of every day, like going down to a camp-meeting at Martha’s Vineyard now. All sorts of people came together here who were not accustomed to come into the wilderness, and they came from all sorts of places. They were people not much used to seeing each other, too. Real Bedouin, who were quite at ease in camp life, came face to face with quiet people, town bred, who were a good deal astonished to find themselves sleeping under the stars, or sitting round a fire together, telling stories in the open air before bed-time came. Jerusalem Jews were not over-civil, as we know, to Galilee people; and neither of them had much fancy for the people who belonged to Edom, on the eastern side of the river; and all of them hated the soldiers through and through. But old prejudices or old likings were, in this case, swayed and overruled by the eager desire to know what Elijah had to say, if he were Elijah, and what Elijah wanted them to do, so that they might be free of these grinding oppressions.

How large a troop of them assembled, or how long they stayed, no one can tell. But this is clear: that John and his camp-meeting excited much more of the attention of that country for many years than did Jesus and the multitudes who surrounded him. Here was a camp with a leader. It all looked as if it might be used for a purpose. These people assembled as if they meant to do something. It was just at a time when war was lowering on the frontier; war, too, with which, as it proved, this camp-meeting had a very close connection. The attachments of the Bedouin were but fickle at best. They made a sort of screen between the king of Arabia and the Roman Empire. All Syria, as far east as Euphrates, had been fought over back and forth, in that endless contest between West and East. The great Roman Empire of the West and the great Parthian Empire of Asia scowl at each other across this narrow Palestine and Edom.

In the life-time of many of these people, the cities of Judah had entertained now Roman and now Asiatic armies on their campaigns. But now there has been peace, or at the least an armed truce, for years. This truce Herod, like the mad fool he is, has managed to break. His wife was the daughter of the Arab King Aretas, — a political marriage, if you please. It held in check all these wild tribes along the Eastern frontier, good at fighting and hard to hold, as General Miles would tell you to-day, or General Crook. Herod has repudiated this Arab beauty, because he has fallen in love with Ids brother Philip’s wife. He has married his sister-in-law, and has sent the Arab beauty home, disgraced, to her father. Her father does not like this. It is just what Arab kings like least. He has declared war against Herod. And so it is that these soldiers of Herod’s, who come and go in the throng by the Jordan fords, and consult the new Elijah as the others do, are very closely mixed up in the imperial politics of the time. And the politicians on both sides begin to watch this encampment, to know what it is, in the affairs of their time, which the new Elijah seeks. Is the mass-meeting to befriend Herod and the Roman side, or will it work a division ?

Of that matter the end is dramatic indeed, and of the tragic sort. “ When the armies met,” says the historian of that day, “ all Herod’s army was destroyed by the treachery of some deserters, who, though they were of the tetrarchy of Philip, Herodias’s deserted husband, joined with the Arabs. Now some of the Jews thought that destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John that was called the Baptist.” The Jews were quite right in that opinion, and before he had done Herod probably thought so, too. He had time enough to think it over. This dear-bought new wife, the Herodias of all our pictures, persuaded him to sail to Rome to pacify the emperor he had provoked by his folly. But emperors are not fond of tetrarchs who provoke war. Caligula will not let Herod and his handsome wife go back again. He sends them into Western banishment. He takes the kingdom from Herod, and gives it to his cousin Agrippa. And Herod and Herodias, in the beggary of exiles in barbarous Spain, have the satisfaction of thinking, all their lives long, what was the cost of the gift of John Baptist’s head, which the dancing-girl gained the night of the birthday party. Disgrace and exile and beggary are what our handsome queen bought, the night she asked for that head “ in a charger.” That is what happens to the guilty. To the rest of us, who had no hand in the death of John or the war with Aretas, the end of that matter is brighter. It is partial evil working out into universal good. Some five and twenty years after this cruel business, Paul is brought up to his trial before the authorities of his day, — Paul, on whose life, as it proves, the destiny of modern Europe and modern civilization hung. Will Paul fare any better than John Baptist fared? No fear. Twenty-five years have changed all that. When Felix hears him, his Jewish wife, Drusilla, sits by and assists. When Festus hears Paul, King Agrippa comes in to hear Paul plead. Felix trembles. Festus is courteous. Agrippa is almost persuaded. Paul is treated almost as their peer. “ This man might have been set at liberty, had he not appealed unto Cæsar.” Wonderfully civil is the king to the reform preacher. Yes ; for he and his sister here remember the history of their house. But for another reform preacher and what Herod did to him, Agrippa and Drusilla would be the exiles begging bread. Agrippa remembers and Drusilla remembers the folly of their uncle, when, on that drunken night, he sacrificed the prophet’s head and his own throne together. They are sitting on the seat from which he fell. “ The less we have to do with these ‘kingdom of God’ people the better. Our uncle Antipas did not succeed with them Very well.” In that civility of Festus and Agrippa and Drusilla, Paul is sent to tell the truth to Nero, and to write a new chapter in the history of the world.

But in following these soldiers, and what came of them and theirs, I have gone beyond my story. What John Baptist said to them, or rather what got written down thirty or forty years after of what he said to them, was the rather grim direction, “ Do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages,”—no bad direction to be given to any soldiers off duty by any preacher in any time.

War with the Bedouin is no trifle to people who are established in the exquisite country north of John’s encampment, in what they thought the security of the Roman arms. There has lately been published a wonderful book by Waddington, lately the French prime minister, describing and illustrating his wanderings and researches in that region, in days when he had leisure to wander. It is the country just north of John Baptist’s desert, on the east of Jordan. People call it to this hour the most beautiful country in the world. But, since the time of the Saracen invasion it has been good for nothing for living in by quiet people, thanks to just this sort of Bedouin lawlessness, which Herod provoked when he made war with King Aretas. And so in John’s time any of these people living there — say, the young gentleman up above, “ who had great possessions,” whom we hear of afterwards — took the sort of interest in the war questions that the chief of a wheat farm in Dakota would take to-day, if he found there was a prospect of an inroad from Sitting Bull and his seven hundred warriors from the Canada side of the line.

West of Jordan, in more closely settled regions, there was, at the same time, social ferment down to the very dregs of things. The poor were desperate, and the rich were angry. The taxes which were imposed upon them seemed to wring the last penny from the poor, and the rich saw with disgust how the farmers of the revenue, with their vulgar new wealth, grew every day richer and richer. As to intrigue of politics, I think there is not in all history such a calendar of murders as those by which the throne of Herod had been established, now split up into these quarter thrones, or “ tetrarchies.” And the hatred which the gentry and the common people had for the Herods was in proportion to the cruelty with which, through blood, they had waded to their thrones. Then, for reformers, you had a reformer at every corner. You had pensive brooders and dreamers. You had sticklers for the old forms, even to the letter. You had ascetics, who left the abodes of men, and went into the wilderness. You had other ascetics, who showed off their fastings and their washings in the cities. You had philosophers, who could refine down the old faith to mean anything or everything in their subtleties. You had, as we have to-day, men hanging round the government, without any real religion but the worship of themselves or of their liege lords. Such men worshiped Herod or Tiberius, and for the rest maintained religion as a good thing for the people.

It is fair to say that all these classes were represented in the throng, larger every day, which camped around John, on the eastern side of Jordan. To such a throng as this it is that Elijah, if he be Elijah, proclaims the good old Hebrew war cry, “ No king but God ! ” For that is their interpretation of “ The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

We look back on all this with eager interest, because we know what came of it. We squeeze dry, very dry indeed, every scrap of record there is left. But, alas, there is very little record. History is pitiless in such matters. The thing which was to be done was not to be done in the way that camp-meeting expected. Therefore the camp-meeting has left very little record of itself. So there was an immense parade in this dear Boston of ours fifty years ago, when we celebrated our second centennial. But nothing particular came of the parade, and so, after only fifty years, it is hard to make old people remember that there was any such display. Still we hunt for the record of the camp-meeting now, and clothe the whole scene with what Mr. Choate once called “ a reflex and peculiar glory,” when he spoke of the glamour which we throw on the rather unpicturesque environments of Plymouth Bay. This glamour of the “ peculiar glory ” has the more sway, because in modern times we separate so sharply the times and the methods of studying the camp-meeting, and the rest which follows, from all other study. There is a classical atlas and a Bible atlas. A bright boy or girl studies the classical atlas at the public school, and the Bible atlas at the Sunday school. They read about Cleopatra in Shakespeare, on Saturday. But on Sunday, when they must not read Shakespeare, they read about Herod, Cleopatra’s lover, in the Bible.

In that way there grows up a superstition about profane history and sacred history. A dull boy might be excused if he thought Caligula and Tiberius were always swearing, because they come into profane history, and that Pilate and Caiaphas should have glories round their heads, because they appear in sacred history.

Out of all this ridiculous superstition has grown what Mr. Tiffany has called the “ isolation theory of Scripture,” a phrase admirably chosen. And people who are not dull boys really imagine, without much thought, that these New Testament affairs passed on a stage as much separated from the ordinary life of that century as is the valley of the Ober-Ammergau from Wall Street or Threadneedle Street. But there never was a greater mistake. Not simply in the tides of war, but in the affairs of commerce, the people who lived in Judea were then mingling with all the rest of the world. It seems as if even then Jews were the bankers of the world. They had the aptitude for trade which their father Jacob had, and which makes their descendants to be the tradesmen in New Mexico to-day. They touched with a thousand nerves, both of motion and of feeling, all parts of all continents excepting Australia and America. Neither the Scotchman of to-day nor the New Englander of to-day, though these are the typical wanderers of our time, have penetrated into places distant from their homes with more pertinacity than was shown by those Jewish bankers and merchants who were Christ’s contemporaries. And, on the other hand, not London, nor Vienna, nor New York, those Babels of all nationalities, could make out a larger catalogue of races or of languages jostling together, now kindly and now morosely, than we could find in these little cities of Judea arid Galilee. A letter from Britain, a carved ivory fly-flap from the cataracts of the Nile, and a tassel of silk from China might be lying together on the divan on the side of a parlor in Tiberias, when a Roman officer should come in from parade, fling off sword and gorget, and throw himself on the couch, while he ordered wines from Greece and perfumes from India for his refreshment. So cosmopolitan was the country that it is an undecided question what was the language which men spoke most commonly in the streets. And it is probably certain that people with as much knowledge of men and as much in society as Jesus, John Baptist, Simon Peter, and the apostle John spoke indifferently in one of two languages. They either spoke in Greek to people not to the manner born, — and these were perhaps half the persons around them, — or they spoke in the Aramaic, which was the proper language of their country, to persons whom they knew to be natives, to Syrians or Arabs. It is an open question whether such an address as the Sermon on the Mount, to such an audience as heard it, was not delivered in the Greek language, in almost the words, indeed, in which we read of it to-day.

The unarmed throng of people, sincere and insincere, curious and determined, Jew and Gentile, Westerner and Easterner, who came down to the campmeeting by Jordan, would all be forgotten this day, but for one arrival. There is one among these unnamed converts whose name will not be forgotten. In the carpenter’s shop of Nazareth, Jesus hears of John’s baptism, and he suspects that the Time has come. In what agony of waiting he has lived through thirty years we may guess, but we cannot tell. The early writers battled it a great deal, stating it in this mechanical phrase : “ Did the Holy Spirit come on him at his baptism for the first time?” We ought to be free from such wooden habit of limiting the work of God, — of Infinite Unlimited Spirit. Enough for us to know that when Jesus went to John his life for us begins. From that moment the duties of a carpenter of Nazareth, careful for his mother, watchful of his brothers and sisters, give way to the infinite duty of a Saviour of the world. By going down to the wilderness, Jesus shows his estimate of John’s work, and he shows also that he is not outside or above John’s work. He virtually says, when he goes down there, that he comes in the order of Providence, not outside of it. Centuries have been seething in the great cauldron of history; conquerors have risen and fallen ; armies have rallied, fought, and passed away ; and now a whole people has waked to the only voice that would wake it, — all, that Christ might come and see and conquer. It is wretched superstition which supposes that this mission was all outside the world, that it was foreign to the world’s own strivings and hopes for salvation. It is, on the other hand, all wrought in with the world’s own effort. All history since has flowed from it and is tinged by it. At the moment the world needed him, at the moment he could serve it, its Saviour came. Nay, for that moment he even waited, an obedient son, caring for his widowed mother in her home in Nazareth.

“ How does the baptizer look upon him ? With a quiet countenance, as he would regard an ordinary person. Had he not already conceived for Jesus an unspeakable reverence? He has just now refused to baptize him, before whom he felt himself as nothing. Again and again he has said that he was not worthy to unloose the latchets of Jesus’ shoes. To John’s mind the moment was one of breathless excitement.” These words are Dr. Furness’s, and he goes on to say, “ To Jesus as well the occasion is of untold interest. Whatever it was to others, the rite was no formality to him. We can scarcely conceive what were his feelings. Binding himself irrevocably, and in spotless pureness of spirit, to the work he undertakes for the world ; giving himself up [how much that means!] —giving himself up to the perfect will of God, he has now, if he never had it before, a complete certainty of his own life and destiny. He makes real before the world the wish, the purpose, the eager desire, which has before existed in the depth of his own bosom.” God knows now that he is willing. Men know now that he is devoted. And in that hour of self-consecration he knows that God is with him. The spirit of God is with him, is upon him, and from that moment he has no fear that he is left to human mistake or human failure.

This certainty in his own heart, this consecration before men, this surrender to the will of God, all show themselves in the illumination and glory of face and bearing, as John leads him to the sacrament, and as the solemn service passes. It is expressed in language not unworthy in the gospels, when they write, a generation after, that, “ coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens open. He saw that the spirit of God descended upon him, and lo, a voice from heaven : ‘ This is my beloved son. In him I am well pleased.’ ”

What if that voice from heaven was heard by himself alone? He heard it, and from that moment it was the key to his life. “ Thou art my son, and I am thy Father.” And if John Baptist did not hear the voice, he knew the truth. He knew that the very spirit of God was shed, then and there, on him whom he baptized. “Why, I saw it,” he says,— “ I saw the spirit descend, as a dove descends.” Poetry and art have caught up the word not unfitly, and the gentleness, the purity, — shall I say silence ? — of the swooping dove have been from that moment the types of the gentleness, the purity, the silence, and the certainty of the work of God’s own spirit upon his child.

Silent, pure, loving, gentle, and sure. And therefore it is not in the noise and bluster of John’s great camp meeting that the Saviour stays. He has been willing to show that he is of the world, and not above the world. He is son of man, though he be son of God. But his kingdom is not of observation. His reign is not to be marked by camps, or the gathering of armies. Let John Baptist complete his work of preparation. Not till preparation is over will the Nazarene begin. So is it, — very likely to John’s disappointment, perhaps to the surprise of Mary Mother and of the others who knew that his leaving Nazareth meant something for mankind,

— so is it that, all willed with God’s own spirit, Jesus leaves the camp, leaves the throng of men, and goes alone into the wilderness. It is not in camps, it is not in throngs, it is in the lonely life of the obedient son, that the rescue of the world is to begin.

Edward E. Hale.