Wandering around a church in Venice, many years ago, I came across a side chapel containing a small statue carved in wood and painted, standing some four and a half feet high. It represents John the Baptist as a gaunt, bearded figure, robed in a ragged camel skin. In his left hand he clutches a piece of parchment on which is written the words attributed to him in St John’s gospel ‘Ecce Agnus Dei,’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’ His right hand is raised as though he is about to extend the index finger to point to something or someone. What most captures your attention, however, are the Baptist’s eyes. They are like eyes that have spent a long time gazing into the empty horizon of a desert landscape. The left eye seems almost to droop, looking perhaps reluctantly or wearily downwards, while the right eye under its thick arching brow shows something of a wild apprehension, a glimpse of something the eye cannot behold, or the ear hear, or the heart conceive. What the sculptor, Donatello, has extraordinarily portrayed is a moment of rare consciousness, an arrested stillness full of energy and tension. The moment before a cry, ‘A voice says cry out,’ and I said ‘What shall I cry?’
John the Baptist stands last in a long line of biblical prophets. The prophetic voice knows that words are precious, but meaning is fragile. People do not understand, they are easily distracted, they forget. The mind is inconstant and like the flowers of the field its attention fades. What is the prophet to do? How is he to command attention? How is he to prepare the people to hear, how is he to set them on the right path, the straight path? How is to he to open in their hearts a high way for God? For that is what the prophet does.
We know very little about the background of any of the prophets – they emerge as if from nowhere and often they seem reluctant to speak. John emerges from the wilderness and from a prolonged period of not speaking, a period perhaps of acute listening to the silence of the desert. Desert places place you. You become acutely aware of your own existence in these vastnesses of time and space. To exist in a desert place requires a profound affirmation of your own being in a setting that does nothing but emphasise your infinite littleness and insignificance. Either you will be crushed by the desert or you will learn how to have trust in yourself, because even in such a place trust is available to you. You will learn to occupy your place, because even in the desert there can be a place for you to inhabit, to be somehow at home.
And having found such a trust and such a home even in the desert you can then trust in any place even, as John had to discover, in Herod’s prison. In the desert the prophet discovers the highway of God whose starting point is everywhere. The prophet comes out of the desert knowing that there is a trust, a home, a truth which stands forever, wherever he is. But how is that truth to be found by those who have not themselves stood in the desert place?
John appeared proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. True repentance also places you. It is not simply listing the things you can remember that you’ve done wrong. True repentance involves our attending closely to who and how we are – it means looking at ourselves in the light of God’s holiness. In Greek the word for repentance means a change of heart. But to change my heart I have to looking steadily at my daily life and discover my inattentiveness to other people and to myself and to God. Is this person at work or behind the counter simply someone I have to deal with? Is this morning simply something I have to get through? Do these few free moments have to be filled? Am I someone who is to be defined simply by my job, my marital status, my address, my interests, my education? Do I ever sit still to listen to the silence of God? I, myself and God.
Thirty years ago or so a religious community began in Paris dedicated to living the life of the desert in the city. Deserts and cities have a lot in common. They both have the capacity to crush you, to make you feel intensely alone. They both fill you with the noise of your own thoughts. And if you can find yourself in the desert or in the city then you have begun to trust God, you have begun to see what John points to – the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the baptism which presents you to God as simply and utterly yourself and able to lead a life of holiness and godliness, striving to be found by God at peace. Amen
Stephen Tucker