And he came into all the country about Jordan. The reputation of John probably preceded the Divine summons. His family—the son of a well-known priestly family—the marvellous circumstances attendant on his birth, his ascetic manner of life from the beginning,—all this had contributed to make him a marked personage; so, when he left his solitude, we read in the other evangelists how multitudes came forth to hear the strange burning words, the Divine eloquence of one long looked upon by the people as set apart for a great work.
He seems to have principally preached and taught in the Jordan valley—no doubt for the convenience of his candidates for baptism. But he evidently did not confine his preaching to one spot or even to one neighborhood.
The district here alluded to was about a hundred and fifty miles in length. The expectation of Messiah for centuries had been the root of all true life in Israel; gradually, as the clouds of evil fortune gathered thick over the people, the figure of the coming Messiah assumed a different aspect.
At first a holier Monarch than their loved David, a grander Sovereign and a mightier than the Solomon of whom they were so proud, a King whose dominions should be broader far than even the wide realm ruled over by the son of Jesse and his greater son, was the ideal dreamed of by the Hebrew.
In the long period of misfortune which succeeded the golden days of the monarchy, the people at first longed for a deliverer, and then—as never a ray of sunlight pierced the clouds which surrounded them—an avenger took the place of a deliverer.
The Messiah of the future must be One who should restore his people certainly, but in the restoration must exact a sharp and severe reckoning from those who had so long oppressed his Israel. They had no conception of their true state,—their hypocrisy, their formalism, their total ignorance of all true spiritual religion.
Their higher and cultured classes were selfish, grasping, impure, untrue. The mass of the people were ignorant and degraded, cruel fanatics, excited and untutored, zealots. From this mistaken notion of Messiah and his work it was necessary that a prophet, eminent and gifted like those mighty men who had wrought great things in times past among the people, should arise among them, and with strong, powerful, inspired words convince them of their fatal error—one who, in the language of the greatest of the order, should prepare the way of the Lord.
How imperatively necessary, for the work of the Redeemer, this work of the pioneer was, is seen from the extreme difficulty which Jesus Christ himself found in persuading even his own little faithful band to realize anything of the nature of his work; in good truth they never, not even the noblest spirits among them, really grasped the secret of their Master's mission till the cross and the Passion belonged to history, and the Crucified had become the Risen, and the Risen the ascended God.
The baptism of repentance. What, first, did John mean by repentance? The word translates the Greek μετάοεῖτε, which signifies "change of mind." In the Gospel of St. Matthew, where John's work is told in slightly different language, he is represented as saying, "Repent ye" ( μετανοεῖτε).
There his words might be paraphrased, "Turn ye from your old thoughts, from your state of self-content, self-satisfaction; mend your ways; reform." Here, then, the baptism (what that signified we shall discuss presently) which he preached and summoned men to, must be accompanied with a change of mind; the baptized must be no longer content with their present state or conduct; they must change their ways and reform their lives.
Let them, those who were convinced that he was indeed a man of God, that his words were right and true—let them come to him, determined to change their conduct in life, and receive from his hands a baptism, a washing—the symbol of the means of purification; for John's baptism was nothing more.
Now, baptism, it is clear, was not at this time practiced among the Jews. It was not, as far as we can trace, even used in the case of pagan proselytes to Judaism. This apparently only became a national custom after the fall of Jerusalem, a.
d. 70, forty years later. His very title, "the Baptist," in some way shows us that he practiced an unusual, if not a novel, rite in the course of his preaching and teaching. John's baptism (to use Dr.
Morrison's vivid expressions, Commentary on Matthew 3:6) was just the embodiment, in significant optical symbolism, of the significant audible symbolism of the Old Testament prophets, when they cried aloud and said, "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes" (Isaiah 1:16); "In float day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness" (Zechariah 13:1-9 :l); "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you.
and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you" (Ezekiel 36:25, Ezekiel 36:26).
This view of John's baptism, viz. that it was a symbol, and nothing more, was suggested by Josephus writing for the Jews. "John," he says, "enjoined upon the Jews first to cultivate virtue and to put in practice righteousness toward one another, and piety toward God, and then to come to his baptism, for thus only would the baptism be acceptable to God" ('Ant.