The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  Enoch reveals what had formerly been kept secret: that behind the sin of humankind is a cosmic drama, played out between the Lord of Spirits and rebel angels who have possessed much of humankind and played them like sleeping puppets. According to Enoch, the “evil spirits on earth” derive from the evil Watchers. Understanding this background helps us to grasp the significance of Jesus’s exorcism operation, his casting out of devils. Jesus knows whom they serve and he knows he has authority, and therefore power, to banish them. We may recall the case of the famous lunatic of Gadara, whose disgruntled devils hop into the Gadarene swine only to hurl themselves suicidally from a cliff like so many fanatics. In John’s Gospel, “Satan” is the “prince of this world” whose legion of spirits the Natzarim will cast out (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). The enemies of God are spiritual enemies. Swords will not destroy them. The world needs the divine power of messianic exorcism: “deliver us from evil,” not phalanxes of self-righteous “holy warriors” breaking the commandment not to kill.

  STANDING THE TRIAL

  Along with the esoteric judgment comes an esoteric salvation, for how else could the “Son of man” himself, whoever he may be, withstand the spiritual tremor of divine judgment?

  The Son of man is the one to whom God has revealed his glory. What is within the divine glory? Answer: the divine image: Man, the first idea of Adam, Man as he reflects the mind of God. This heavenly figure—the Coming One on the brink of actualization—John has, I venture, seen. And insofar as Jesus has seen it, he too is a Son of man who reflects the divine Adam in the image of God. And he knows how the blind eyes of the world will treat the Son of man: he must undergo the trial, the test, the cutting, the threshing, the winnowing.

  What is he made of?

  What will stand the trial? We may recall the “tried wall,” the “precious cornerstone” of the New Covenanter’s “Community Rule.” We may reflect that Jesus gave a new name to “son of John” Simon. Jesus called him cephas, a stone. After the crucifixion, James, the brother of Jesus, was called a “bulwark” or wall, a protector of the righteous. And Jesus was of course familiar with Isaiah 28: “I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation. . . . And when the waters shall overflow the hiding place” the foundation will remain.

  Foundation, cornerstone, stone, wall, bulwark, pillar: all images of standing, of permanence, of certain protection. We find an analogous confidence in God’s power in Qumran Thanksgiving Hymn No 11:

  I thank thee, O Lord,

  For Thou art as a fortified wall to me,

  And as an iron bar against all destroyers.

  Thou hast set my foot upon rock. . . .

  That I may walk in the way of eternity

  And in the paths, which Thou hast chosen. . . .

  So when the awful day came when John was removed from his comrades and followers, how were they to understand the calamity? In Mark’s telling of the Transfiguration and Jesus’s subsequent reflections on John, Elijah, and the suffering and rising from the dead of the Son of man (9:9–13), Jesus appears to go deeply into himself to consider his own destiny. He sees John’s death, I think, as a sign. He tells his incredulous followers that the Son of man must die and be raised on the third day; they do not understand him.

  Had they not listened to the voice of the prophets? There was a whole world of prophecy for comfort and guidance in the wilderness, such as had sustained John in his own trials with the will of Herod Antipas, and the powers visible and invisible behind that high personage who would die uncelebrated, unnoticed, and unrecorded, in Gaul. John knew the prophesied fate of the righteous, he who stood, who endured to the end, who stayed awake, who kept faith. It was written in the prophet Isaiah 26:1–4:

  In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation, which keepeth the truth, may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JAHVEH is everlasting strength: For he bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, he layeth it low; even to the ground; he bringeth it even to the dust.

  As for John’s enemies: “They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish” (Isaiah 26:14).

  We now come close to the heart of the mystery of righteous suffering: the good death of the zaddik, the pious, the righteous. The whole point about being a “Watcher-keeper,” a Guardian of the Vineyard, centers on the absolute conviction that the prophets foretold the very time the Watchers would be watching. Now is the time for the fulfillment of the words of Isaiah, Daniel, Enoch, Zechariah, Malachi, Joel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Moses, and Elijah. The word was being made flesh. What had been visionary was becoming reality. The hour had come; very little time remained to accomplish the work of the hour in the watch of the night.

  Isaiah had spoken of those who had been, and who would be, struck down by the wicked. They would emerge victorious from the alembic of judgment and trial, not only unharmed, but remade:

  Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead. (Isaiah 26:19; my italics)

  The Earth itself will not hold the righteous, and when the Day of the Lord comes, the Earth herself will live again: “He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit” (27:6).

  Isaiah seems to speak of John and those responsible for his death. Those bereft now will have the comfort of knowing in the future that they will be able to look back and see how God has stayed his hand from hurting the righteous, even when it looked as though the good had been slain. God smites only those who have smitten “him”: the righteous servant. The slaughter that men do, impressive though it is, may be overturned by God; indeed, the slaughter of the wicked is as nothing to the absolute slaughter God reserves for those who kill his own:

  Hath he [the Lord] smitten him, as he smote those that smote him? Or is he slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him? (Isaiah 27:7)

  Jesus doubtless understood this prophecy as a clear message for the ultimate vindication of the zaddik. Before his death, John doubtless knew it too; he was ready for the trial. And Jesus knew that those who slew John, and who slew the prophets, and who, holding fast to evil, would soon slay him, were already, dead men.

  But John . . . John would rise again!

  Chapter Nine

  THE THIRD DAY

  And suddenly, when they had looked round about, they saw no man any more, save Jesus only with themselves. And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were risen from the dead.

  (MARK 9:8–9)

  WE HAVE SEEN that John and Jesus enjoyed intimacy with the spirit of the great prophets. They had fully absorbed the spiritual promise and transformative message of God’s transcendent care for those who looked beyond appearances to heavenly things. The righteous man would be raised from among the dead; though he appeared fallen, God’s Holy Spirit, his living breath of life, would ensure that he would stand, vindicated in the ultimate fulfillment of God’s purposes for creation.

  First, the warning had to be given. As the prophet Ezekiel knew in the sixth century BCE, standing amid the “alien corn” of Babylon, this necessitated the Son of man being separated from his fellows as well as his carnal self, and being entrusted with the awesome responsibility of warning the people of what was to come, the unwanted herald of reality:

  Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me. (Ezekiel 3:17)

  There was a price to be paid, both for th
e “Watchmen” who gave the warning (the Natzarim) and those who heeded it. Those who heed the warning do not receive an “automatic pass,” any more than an insurance scheme can prevent the damage. Indeed, the penitent might suddenly find the world a distinctly less comfortable place than hitherto; they might be called to witness, summoned to the test and slain for righteousness’s sake. The forgiven are not to complain that they “did the right thing” and “all they got for it” was misery and degradation: the perennial cry of self-loving depression. They must bear the brunt because they can. The same is so for the “Son of man.” The world may judge them dead and finished. They may appear forgotten. Their flesh may rot, their bones dry out, but the terrible love of God would be vindicated, and the Son of man who knows, with it. John and Jesus knew Ezekiel’s stunning vision of how the “hand of the Lord” took “Son of man” Ezekiel, the most eloquent prophet, to the valley of dry bones, a wilderness of the forlorn remains of the faithful:

  The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.

  And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

  So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.

  Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

  Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD. (Ezekiel 37:1–14)

  The miraculous “raising from the dead” was not an invention or discovery of the Christian Church. It was foretold by the Hebrew prophets as a symbol (the raising from the grave of hopelessness), and it was, if we are to believe the accounts of Elijah in 1 Kings, and of Jesus in the Gospels, performed, as the most sublime gift of divine compassion: the widow’s son, Jairus’s daughter, Lazarus. Raising the dead was always understood as an absolutely divine sign, calling on the hidden powers of life, unseen, secreted in the creation (the four winds). God is the life in the life of creation. As John the Baptist declared, God can raise men from stones:

  The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day. (Mark 9:31)

  I have always wondered what the “third day” could possibly refer to. It cannot, to my mind, have been so banal an idea as that suggested in the “Sunday school” picture of the Son of man’s body being tucked up in the tomb on Friday night, to rise before dawn on Sunday morning (Matthew 21:1). That is not three days by any clear computation.

  Or is it? Those keen to find the Bible literally “true” (accurate) on this point argue for a Thursday morning Passover crucifixion (14 Nisan), taken as a “Preparation Day” for the next day’s Friday “Sabbath” or special holy rest day for the Feast of Unleavened Bread (15 Nisan), followed by the “ordinary” end-of-Jewish-week Sabbath (Saturday), followed by the first day of the week (Sunday) and the Feast of First Fruits at the Temple (first Sunday after Passover). Bearing in mind the old Hebrew system of beginning the new day from sunset, rather than midnight (as we do), you could then conceivably arrive at three nights and three days: Thursday, Friday (starting at sunset Thursday), and Saturday, so long as the first day is counted from the time of Jesus’s death. This interpretation, while possible, does not accord with a straightforward reading of the gospel record, where there is no mention of two consecutive Sabbaths. Furthermore, it is based on astronomical lunar observations made on the assumption that Jesus was crucified in 33 CE, which is not our information. It is, above all, an interpretation designed to fulfill to the letter Matthew 12:40, which, at first sight, appears, with hindsight and the weight of two thousand years of tradition, to refer to Jesus being dead and in the tomb:

  For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

  This saying announces what Jesus calls the “sign of Jonas,” which is the bitter fruit he offers the unrepentant. He refers to Jonah being swallowed by the whale as a prelude to Jonah’s finally accepting he must declare God’s judgment to the sinners of Nineveh. Jesus says that the men of Nineveh would “rise in judgment with this generation” and condemn it, because they, the men of Nineveh, repented when Jonah warned them, while the wicked of “this generation” do not. The wicked have ignored the appeal of John the Baptist. They ignored the Son of man. They strove to silence the voice of judgment crying in the wilderness.

  The verb used by Matthew for the men of Nineveh rising in judgment is precisely that used for rising from the dead, for resurrection (anastēsontai). Jesus presents the startling image of the penitent rising from the dead to condemn the unrepentant of Jesus’s generation.

  What Jesus actually meant by being in the “heart of the earth” for three days and three nights is not as obvious as one might think, any more than his referring to the “third day.” What would we put in the “heart of the earth?”

  A seed.

  Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb was carved into rock; the Greek gēs for “earth” would tend to mean soil. The idea of planting is there. The Son of man will, apparently, be planted, as a prelude to the resurrection of the martyrs and the judgment of the sinners. Or has he been “planted”—a reed shaken in the wind—already?

  As regards that overfamiliar explanation of the “third day” referring to “Easter Sunday,” we may naturally ask, “The third day of what?” Being in the tomb? That does not necessarily work and is banal. Why should the Friday crucifixion be counted as a “first day,” anyhow? “First day” of what? The Gospels indicate the day before the Sabbath as the day of “Preparation” (14 Nisan) when the lambs were slaughtered for Passover: the day of offering. But, it must be said, this is all after-the-horse-has-bolted interpretation. Moreover, what was significant about the “second day,” the Sabbath, according to the Gospels? Nothing, apparently. Are we to think the third day meant the “third day in the tomb?” We are now going round in circles. Jesus’s body was not in the tomb, according to the gospel story, for three days. According to Matthew, the women arrived at the tomb before the dawning of the first day of the week (Sunday) to be told by a fabulous angel that Jesus had already risen. Matthew does not follow the idea of the “Sunday” having begun at the sunset of Saturday: “In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other women to see the sepulchre” (28:1).

  How could Jesus know the precise circumstances of what would happen when he was arrested? And if, providentially, he did, well, what
can you say? If he was that confident, that well informed of revival after the nightmare of crucifixion, there would be only process: no self-offering in faith, no agony in the garden, no “take this cup away from me,” no “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—the cry that made onlookers believe he was calling for Elijah (John?) to come and save him. If Jesus was authoritatively certain of rising from the dead three days after death, he would have entered the Passover events with the conceit of a mentally prepared radical with a bomb strapped to his chest, or the obliviousness to doom of the Gadarene swine, possessed. If rising from the dead was, as it were, automatic, or even, as an extreme possibility “preplanned” (that is, he was not actually dead), such an event would carry very little meaning, except to the theological system-maker.

  For a real man, or woman, for a truly loving, good person, the final step of such a journey as the Gospels describe would be simply terrible: letting go forever, not of a bad dream that one wished was over, an act of despair, but the willing offering of all that one had, all that one loved, all that one was. It meant being judged as a condemned sinner when one knew one was innocent, spotless. All that a man hath will he give for his life (Job 2:4). Death is the King of Terrors when fully contemplated. Some have looked to death itself to remove the fear: “let it all be over, then the pain will end and the fear cease.” But death is death, and the tomb slams shut.

  Whatever we may believe happened to Jesus’s body after crucifixion, we are still left with the question of what he meant by “the third day.”

  I think there is more to this “third day” idea than arithmetic. I do not think the expression originally referred to the “Easter itinerary.” The disciples “understood not that saying [about the third day], and were afraid to ask him” (Mark 9:32). Only with hindsight perhaps, and poor arithmetic, could they say afterward, “Oh, that’s what the third day meant!” They were not privy to the meaning of the “third day.”