Making ready a people prepared for the Lord
How John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, and how Jesus vindicated John
The Lord came to Israel in the way prepared for him by John the Baptist.
John’s mission in his preaching and baptism was “to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:17). In calling Israel to baptism, John proclaimed that God deemed her righteousness not to be righteousness at all, and that she must repent—that is, she must turn her will towards God’s will, as God’s rule was very soon coming to bear on the earth. One concern of John’s preaching that Luke highlights for us is the restoring of the unity of the community of Israel; he exhorted the crowds at the Jordan to share their tunics and food with those in need, and he instructed publicans not to exact more money from their countrymen than is due (Luke 3:10-13). This was more than a call for individual Israelites to be converted, but rather an effort to turn the collective will of the nation away from unrighteousness and towards the will of God.
Jesus’ ministry did not merely follow after John’s ministry in time, but arose out of it organically. In submitting himself to John’s baptism, Jesus affirmed John’s message that Israel needed to repent; more than this, Jesus identified himself with the captive nation that needed repentance and redemption: this was the righteousness required of the Christ (Matt. 3:15). For his part, John identified this Jesus of Nazareth before the nation as the mighty one about whom he had been preaching, and affirmed that Jesus would bring the rule of God to bear on the earth.
Jesus gathered some of his initial disciples from amongst John’s disciples. Perhaps we should see the disciples as a kind of microcosm of the people as a whole: once prepared by John, they are ready to be given to Jesus. John confirmed that this is entirely fitting, and that his own role was to decrease as Christ’s increased.
Jesus’ preaching continued the themes of John’s. For one example, John had proclaimed an opposition between the ingathered wheat of Israel and the burned chaff. Jesus continued and developed this motif: For Jesus as for John, the trees of Israel needed to bear good fruit, or otherwise they would be cut down and thrown into the fire. Jesus used similar imagery of trees and fruit to the same effect in his parable of the wicked tenants, and the sign at the fig tree.
Jesus made clearer than John, however, that the fundamental distinction between the saved and the damned in Israel would be their responses to Jesus himself. So the wise man builds his house on Christ’s words and thus withstands the looming judgement; but the ungodly are not so! Jesus brought a sword to divide the nation, so that even one’s natural allegiances to the members of one’s household would be realigned according to whether they received Jesus or not.
John’s crisis of faith while in prison reveals that he understood that his own ministry would stand or fall with the ministry and identity of Jesus. Had John been incorrect that Jesus was the Christ, that would have cast a shadow of doubt upon his message that the rule of God was “at hand”, and therefore that Israel needed to repent as a matter of urgency. What’s more, Israel could have no certainty that John was a true prophet sent from God. Jesus affirmed to the crowds that John was indeed sent from God, and affirmed to John’s messengers that Jesus’ own deeds were of the kind foretold by the prophets as bringing the rule of God to bear on the earth. John’s preaching at the Jordan had been true.
However, John did not convert the nation as a whole to righteousness. This meant that, by and large, the people had not been prepared for the kingdom of God as he had hoped. John’s own imprisonment and death at the hands of King Herod suggested and foreshadowed Jesus’ own destiny of suffering, being rejected and killed by Israel.
The hard-heartedness of Israel not only guaranteed Jesus’ death, but it also sealed her own fate. Jesus in his words and deeds affirmed John’s message concerning a looming judgement upon the fruitless fig tree of Israel: so he cursed the fig tree on his way from Bethany, and he cleansed the temple at Jerusalem. Jesus was challenged about his authority to do “these things” the chief priests and the scribes and the elders (Mark 11:28). Christ’s authority to proclaim this judgement on Israel, though, was tied up with John’s authority to have proclaimed the baptism of repentance at the Jordan, which the rulers of Israel had rejected.
John’s ministry filled out key passages of Scripture concerning the coming of the Christ; in particular, the prophecy of Isaiah concerning the voice crying in the wilderness (Is. 40:3-4), and the prophecy of Malachi concerning the messenger coming before the great and terrible day of the Lord (Mal. 3-4). Each of these texts highlights some aspect of Jesus’ mission in coming to Israel. In Isaiah 40, the Lord comes to comfort those who mourn in Zion: so blessed were those who mourned, for they would be comforted. In Malachi 3-4, the figure of Elijah comes warning the people to repent before the Lord comes to strike the land: hence, Jesus proclaimed that he would come in judgement against Jerusalem and its temple before his present generation passed away (cf. Mal. 3:5). The fiery judgment against the unbelieving nation would publicly vindicate the preaching of the Lord’s forerunner.
In Luke’s birth narrative, the figure of Elijah is presented as the model for John’s mission (Luke 1:16-17). However, John himself denied, or at least was unaware of, his role as the Elijah to come (John 1:21). Jesus’ own disciples, some of whom had been under John’s tutelage, also seemed uncertain about this; they asked Jesus about the coming of Elijah after the prophet himself had appeared to them on the mount of transfiguration. Jesus confirmed that according to the Scriptures, Elijah would come first: John and the Son of Man would each in their turn suffer at the hands of the people, just as it was written of them (Mark 9:12-13).
So the gospels fill out the scene sketched in Isaiah and Malachi in a most surprising way: the suffering and rejected Elijah would indeed prepare a way for the Lord—and that way would be the way of suffering and rejection by Israel before vindication. In this way, John prepared the way for the Lord, a way which would lead him to the cross.