The Way, Expanded Paperback Edition: Walking in the Footsteps of Jesus

Prologue

John the Baptist and Jesus

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.

Mark 1:1-7 NRSV

BEFORE WE TURN TO THE STORY of Jesus, we begin where the Gospels begin, with John the Baptist and with a bit of speculation about his relationship with Jesus before the day when Jesus came to be baptized. The story begins when Jesus and John were just boys.

Jesus went with his parents to Jerusalem every year for the festival of the Passover. We know about these trips to Jerusalem because of the only story in the Bible that recounts any event from Jesus’ childhood after his infancy.¹ It is found in Luke 2:39-52.

It seems that on one of these yearly trips, Jesus’ parents likely joined a caravan of friends and family to return to Nazareth, nine or ten days’ journey to the north. A day into the trip, Mary and Joseph realized they had inadvertently left Jesus back in Jerusalem. They journeyed another day back and searched for him. Finally, on the third day, they found the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple courts. We can feel their agitation with him as we read the story. What parents can’t identify with them and take a bit of comfort from the fact that the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph had misplaced the Son of God?

The yearly Passover festival was a joyous occasion and lasted for a week, with some Jews arriving early or staying late. Where would Mary, Joseph, and Jesus have stayed each year as they visited Jerusalem? It is likely they would have stayed with their closest of kin.

Just outside Jerusalem was a town called Ein Karem. Tradition says it was the hometown of Elizabeth, Zechariah, and their son John, the second boy in our story, whom we know today as The Baptizer, or John the Baptist.

You may recall that when Mary discovered she was pregnant, she immediately left Nazareth and traveled for nine days to the home of Elizabeth to tell her the news. Clearly Elizabeth was an important person in Mary’s life. The Gospel of Luke calls her simply a relative, perhaps an aunt or older cousin. Mary went on to spend the first three months of her pregnancy helping her kinswoman Elizabeth, who was in her final three months preparing to give birth to John.

John and Jesus were cousins, born six months apart, with mothers who were very close. It seems plausible that the two boys spent at least a week together each year during the Passover festival when they were small children. They no doubt played together, laughed together, and dreamed together.

Luke tells us that John went on to live in the wilderness or desert of Judea. We don’t know how old he was when this happened. Some have presumed that he left when his parents died, others that Elizabeth dedicated her son to God and left him to be raised among the monks in the monastery at Qumran. How old was John when this occurred? In the absence of information, and in light of the close connection between Jesus and John the Baptist, I suggest this may have occurred when John was around the age of fourteen, when it would have been time to consider marriage.

John the Baptist and the Essenes

Luke tells us that John was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel (Luke 1:80 NRSV). Many have speculated that he went to live in a monastic community along the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea called Qumran. We believe the monks who lived there were part of a sect called Essenes. This is the community believed to have produced and hidden the Dead Sea Scrolls.

At Qumran, John would have devoted himself to God, committed to celibacy, perhaps worked in the community garden or prepared pottery, and studied and copied the Scriptures. Among the practices of this community was ritual bathing for purification. This was a common practice among Jews in the first century, but for the Essenes it was a daily practice that served as a sign of their desire for purification and grace, and of God’s offering it to them. The Essenes hoped that by their pursuit of holy living, they could usher in the coming of the Messiah.

Qumran and the surrounding region is a dry, desolate area, flat as you approach the Dead Sea and in other areas marked by dry creek beds called wadis and amazing ravines and valleys carved into the mountains. Visiting the ruins of Qumran, you can see multiple baptistries called mikva’ot (singular: mikveh, or mikvah) that were used for rites of purification. There is the kiln where pottery was made, as well as the treasury and the room where it is believed the scrolls were copied. As you walk among the ruins, it is possible that you are walking where John walked, through the community where he lived for more than ten years.

To the west of the community, in the mountains, you can see caves, dozens of them. Around A.D. 68, almost forty years after the death of John, the Romans sent troops to the region around the Dead Sea. During this time, the monks at Qumran hid hundreds of scrolls—copies of the various books of the Bible and other important works—in jars and then placed them in these caves. Two years later, Rome destroyed Jerusalem. None of the monks, who likely had fled to Masada during this time, lived to return and retrieve their scrolls. The scrolls were rediscovered by a shepherd boy, whose goat ran into one of the caves 1,878 years later! I’ve seen some of the Dead Sea Scrolls on exhibit, and I can’t help but wonder if any of the scrolls were copied by John the Baptist.

I’d like to suggest that after John went to live in the wilderness, he and Jesus continued to be companions. Each shared in common a miraculous birth, a sacred mission from God, and a desire to call people to be part of God’s kingdom. They were six months apart in age. There was no one who would have shared more in common with Jesus than John, and likewise John with Jesus. It seems likely to me that they would have continued to meet annually in Jerusalem for the Passover (there was an Essene community there) and perhaps at Qumran.

There is a strong connection between the message of Jesus and the teachings of the Essenes. One source has documented sixty-one parallels and commonalities between Jesus’ teachings and those of the Essenes.² When we see the connections between John and Jesus, the obvious awareness of each other’s ministry, the way they spoke of one another, the message they shared, and the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth to be baptized by John, it seems likely that throughout their twenties these two men spent time, as they had as boys, dreaming about and discussing together the kingdom of God.

The Jordan River, the Prophet Elijah, and John

Around the age of thirty, it appears that John decided to leave the monastery.³ He would go to the common people and call them to repent and seek to follow God as their King. He would prepare the way for the Messiah, the promised King who would usher in God’s kingdom on earth. John believed the Messiah to be his younger cousin, Jesus.

The distance from the monastery to Jericho is only about six miles, but it is a two-hour walk, and you’d better bring water because the region is a hot, dry desert. It seems likely that John first began his work in Jericho, calling people to repent. After he had begun to have an impact in Jericho, he moved his ministry to the Jordan River, just a few miles to the east, where he would baptize them. It was in this very place that the children of Israel crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land.

To understand the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus, it is important to pause and recognize their connection with Elijah, Israel’s great prophet of the ninth century B.C. Elijah was known for standing up against the idolatry of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Like Jesus, he fasted forty days and forty nights. Like John, he spent time with God in the desert. Elijah spent his last days in Jericho, then he crossed the Jordan at the place where John would baptize. On the other side, he was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. In the Old Testament period Elijah became the type of an idealized prophet, just as David was the type of an idealized king.

The final two verses of the Old Testament are Malachi 4:5-6: Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse (NRSV). There are several references to this verse in the Gospels as various people clearly were anticipating an Elijah-like figure to preach and prophesy just prior to the coming of the Messiah. John the Baptist was familiar with these verses and the role of the Elijah-figure in announcing the Messiah’s coming.

When John preached and baptized in the Jordan, he came wearing unusual garb. Seldom do we read in the Bible about clothing, but in John’s case Matthew tells us he was wearing camel’s hair and a leather belt. Most people wore cotton or wool, so we know that John didn’t haphazardly clothe himself this way. Rather, he chose to wear these clothes. Why? Because, as we read in 2 Kings 1:8, they were the same clothes Elijah wore. John wanted to make clear that he was playing the role of Elijah, preparing the way for the Messiah, whom he believed was Jesus. John also saw himself as the herald in Isaiah who would shout in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight (Mark 1:3 NRSV).

Elijah left this world at the Jordan River; John began his public ministry there. John was offering a sign, setting in motion the coming of the Messiah. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and even John begin their Gospels with the story of John the Baptist. He was a tremendously important figure whose significance is often lost on modern Christians. He came as the forerunner, preparing the way for Jesus.

Baptism

Why did John ask people to wade into the Jordan River with him to be baptized? What did this act mean to his hearers?

The idea of using water as a sign of one’s desire for cleansing and of God’s work in forgiving was not new to John’s hearers. The Law of Moses prescribed the regular use of water for this purpose—sometimes through immersion in it and sometimes through the sprinkling or pouring of it onto the heads of those being purified. (Today Christians practice these two methods of baptism, immersion and sprinkling, and both are rooted in the Hebrew Bible.)

By the first century, special baths were used by Jews throughout the Holy Land for cleansing after childbirth, menses, or sex, as well as before entering the Temple courts. This washing was not simply a bath to clean the dirt off the body, though it could accomplish this; it was a means of expressing a desire to be clean before God and a way of experiencing the cleansing and wholeness that come from God.

As previously mentioned, the actual bath itself is called, in Hebrew, a mikveh or mikvah (plural: mikva’ot). Such baths have been found all over the Holy Land, many dating back to the time of Christ and before. Washing in these baths is the pre-Christian origin of the Christian baptism. Often the baths have two sets of stairs entering the water: in one set of stairs, unclean; out another set of stairs, ritually clean. This form of baptism was also used when persons converted to Judaism. It was for them a ritual of purification, but also a means of signifying a new birth, drowning to the person they had been and coming out of the water born anew as a Jew. Mikva’ot are still found within strands of Judaism today and are used for the reasons described above.

As time went on, this type of washing took on new meanings, and its symbolism expanded. John adapted Moses’ ritual of bathing and broadened its meaning and application. For his followers it was an expression of their desire to repent, yet also a sign of God’s forgiveness and grace. Early Christians continued to add new layers of meaning and to reinterpret this act for the next few centuries after the time of Christ.

Standing at the Jordan River, in the place where John baptized, it struck me that there was undoubtedly a host of additional interpretations and symbolic meanings of baptism that occurred to people as they came to the river. Allow me briefly to recount a few of the ideas going through my head as I stood in the Jordan, thinking about people who had come to be baptized by John.

When you stand in the Jordan, you can see the water flowing south, and in just a couple of miles it empties into the Dead Sea, where the high mineral content ensures that virtually nothing survives. The imagery is powerful: your sins are being washed away to the Dead Sea, along with your guilt, never to be held against you again and ideally no longer having power over you. Surely some early Christians were thinking this as they stood by, waiting to wade into the water.

It was at or near this spot on the Jordan that the Israelites crossed from the wilderness to the Promised Land, leaving behind their former lives as slaves and emerging as a free people, with a land to call their own. Surely there were some early Christians who, like the Israelites, sensed that they were no longer slaves but free.

And for those whose friends had been baptized upon conversion to Judaism, at least some might have seen in this baptism a new birth and a chance to begin anew. Jesus, having experienced this baptism himself, spoke of the importance of being spiritually reborn—born of water and the Spirit.

Perhaps it was the imagery of death and resurrection that some saw. Paul certainly saw this