The Baptist—From First to Last

St. John the Baptist had more than his share of firsts in a short and tempestuous life. This desert denizen, skin-clad and dining on sweet insects found himself in the midst of events that would significantly change history, while more or less leaving him shrinking while the star Messianic player grew.

The Baptizer had a pre-natal start to his career as a follower of Jesus. Dr. Luke the evangelist relates that the yet-to-be-born son of the angelically muted Zechariah did a little charismatic capering in his mama’s belly when the Blessed Mother came to visit cousin Elizabeth with the embryonic Jesus along for the ride¹. That makes St. John the B. the first Son worshiper—if you don’t count Mary, who has been more profoundly portrayed as the sacred container of her son as in the hymn:
Mary the temple,
Christ the temple’s Lord;
Mary the shrine,
Christ the God adored!²

At the peak of his career of preaching, dunking, and calling into question the tetrarch’s marital choice, John found our Lord in the baptismal line. Jesus, poo-pooing his cousin’s hesitancy, took the plunge, and awed John with the first trinitarian witness to His identity³. And still I am left wondering if the Baptizer baptized God in the person of the Second Person, who baptized the Baptizer? Could the immerser himself have been the first in line for a little self-dunking?

We can also declare that John was the first devotee of Christ who was martyred. Ironically, the imprisoned Baptist was executed by the son of “The Great Herod” who a few decades previously ordered the mass murder of male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem, in an unsuccessful attempt to snuff out the newly minted divine treasure: the baby son of the couple from Nazareth, and of the Creator⁴.

Here are a few of the facts concerning our holy man, John, son of Zechariah:

• Related to Jesus by blood
• Declared Jesus as messiah from womb to tomb
• Was asked by Jesus for baptism
• Supplied followers for Jesus, some who became apostles
• Mourned by Jesus⁵

Regardless of all of the Baptist’s involvement in the firsts of Christianity and his commitment to preparing the way for the coming Messiah, Jesus states the following: “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.⁶” So is the Master building up his kinsman only to cast him down, or did John finally reach his goal of minimalization (aka “He must increase; I must decrease.⁷”)?

I’d like to speculate that Christ was using John as a subtle teaching on purgatory. For surely if the greatest of humankind on earth doesn’t make the bottom rung of the ladder in heaven, how can anybody get in by being a “good person” as so many of my acquaintances are counting on? Purgatory seems to be to be the best answer, and maybe we can posit from Jesus’ commentary on his cousin, that no matter how good you are, be prepared for an unpleasant sin-ectomy prior to casting your gaze on the beatific vision. Of course, this is assuming that you have no unabsolved mortal sins laying on your soul that would send you in a different direction, in spite of “niceness.”

Our precursor to Christ, a descendant of the high priest Aaron through both his father and mother, and a kind of link between the Old Covenant and the New gives me food for thought when I start to fall into the trap of thinking that I am earning my salvation through my good works. At best, whatever virtuous deeds I perform are more or less equivalent to covering the gaping wounds that my sin has inflicted on me with spiritual band-aids. Having not demonstrated even a fraction of the dedication to my mission that John the Baptist did to his, if I, by chance, slip past the “resurrection of judgement” into the “resurrection of life⁸”, I hope that an emergency response team will be on hand to do a major purgatory patch-up, thus enabling me to be fitter for heaven than when I left this beleaguered ball of clay. Though, I imagine, even after the massive “souling-up” required, I will be well behind John the Baptist in the Kingdom of Heaven charts.