Decisions, Decisions

Sam was confused. He had been following John for - how long had it been? Almost a year, he thought, it was just before the grape harvest and his parents had been really upset that he hadn’t stayed until the work was finished. But Sam just had to go. The Messiah was due soon, everybody knew it, and maybe John was the one! And the more he followed John, and the more he listened to him, the more sure he became that this was a man sent from God. Why, some even thought he was Elijah returned! And people were coming from all over Judea, even from Galilee and Decapolis!

But now there was someone else going around preaching and baptizing - a Galilean, no less, named Yeshua. And some people were even leaving John and going off to follow him. But everyone knew that no prophet worth listening to had ever come out of Galilee, they were yokels, country bumpkins. John was from the priestly line of Zechariah, and besides, he looked like a prophet.

Yes, something unusual had happened when this Yeshua had come down to the Jordan a few weeks ago. And it had been pretty impressive, come to think of it. The ones who left, Philip and Nathaniel and the others, said they had seen a dove and heard a voice from heaven. Well, Sam hadn’t seen or heard anything, but he had to admit that it hadn’t been your usual slam dunk. John had seemed - well, almost reluctant to baptize him, they argued for a moment and John had bowed his head and, well, it looked like John was doing what Yeshua had told him to do. John never followed orders! And there had been a weird kind of hush, the usual crowd of spectators had been oddly silent, and the light had been - well, just odd. And John did say that he had seen the dove and heard the voice, too. But there was a rumor around that Yeshua was John’s cousin, and John hadn’t said a word about it from that day to this, and Sam just didn’t know what to think. But for him the bottom line was, if Yeshua came to John to be baptized, didn’t that mean that Yeshua was acknowledging John’s authority?

Sam was really confused.

What made it worse was that John’s disciples had started debating the meaning of baptism. Someone had come up from Jerusalem and challenged John about what he was doing was really proper. That is, what business did Jews have getting baptized anyway? That was just for Gentiles who had made the commitment to come under the law and needed to be cleansed from top to bottom. It was kind of a symbol of rebirth, in a way, Sam thought.

Anyway, this fellow from Jerusalem was arguing that you didn’t need to be baptized if you were already a Jew, if you had Jewish parents and were circumcised that was all it took. Of course, you had to wash your hands before meals, and before offering sacrifices, and who knows what the priests did if you went to them for purification after touching a dead person. Sam rather thought it involved incense, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never had to do such a thing, blessed be the name, and he hoped he never would. Laying out the dead was woman’s work. And of course they had to go to the mikvah every month as it was.

Sam’s friend Eli said that the Essenes made everyone who came to join their community get baptized before they joined, because, they said, everyone who lived in the world was too stained with sin to participate in a truly sanctified life. Which made John’s baptism totally useless, of course, because people usually just went back home again when they were done. Well, Sam wasn’t an Essene and he certainly didn’t plan on becoming one. He’d actually heard that Essenes couldn’t marry! He wasn’t about to give up the chance of getting a wife and raising children to carry on the family name some day, although Sam did rather think he’d wait for another few years. At least until he found out whether or not the Messiah really was on the way. When the time came to run the Romans out of Judea he didn’t want anything to keep him out of the fight.

But what was it about this Yeshua that made people leave John and go after him? So maybe he was a prophet, too. What difference did it make who baptized you, anyway? Wasn’t what really mattered whether or not you were really repenting? Not just going along so that your neighbors would approve of you?

And besides, John was so eloquent! You really knew you’d heard a prophet when he preached hellfire and brimstone. Sam loved it when he lambasted the Pharisees: "You brood of vipers,” John would thunder, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance, and 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." [Mt 3:7-10] And John told the rich people to give half their money to the poor, and half their clothes and food, as well!. That would serve them right, the way they looked down their noses at everyone who didn’t wear fine linen and gold chains around their necks. They’d get theirs when the revolution came, that’s for sure. Most of them were half Roman anyway.