The American novelist, Anne Rice, is currently writing a series of novels based on the life of Jesus Christ.  More renowned for novels about vampires, she has turned her talent towards an interpretation of the Gospel which, whilst sticking closely to the New Testament we know, seeks to fill in the gaps in our Lord’s life.

She is not the first novelist to try and turn the Gospel into a continuous story nor is she the only writer to try and give us more detail than the Gospel writers do.  The Italian novelist, Luigi  Santucci, wrote a remarkable book of meditations – Wrestling with Christ – which is amongst the best of its kind.  Reading his interpretation of the Gospel incidents is both refreshing and thought-provoking.  Such writings are rather like word paintings about Christ – as valid as the great works of art which hang in our galleries and which present the viewer with an insight into Old and New Testament stories.

In her 2^nd novel of the series – Christ the Lord­-Anne Rice writes of the coming of John the Baptist and the subsequent baptism by him of Jesus.  There is a beautifully descriptive section of the scene where John is baptizing and calling forth the people to repentance.

Everywhere around us were the secretive whispers of those confessing their sins, begging for forgiveness from the Lord, murmuring just loud enough for a voice to be heard but no real words, as eyes were closed and garments dropped in the reeds, and people wandered on into the marsh and then into the river.  The disciples of John were to the left and to the right of him.  And he himself was unmistakeable.  Tall, with this shaggy black hair streaming over his shoulders and down his back, he received one pilgrim after another, his dark eyes shining in the grey morning light, his voice low and carrying over the rumble of voices around him.

“Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” he declared, each time as though it were the first, and those around him took up the saying until...it was chanting that mingled in timbre and pitch from time to time with the random and ceaseless confessions…

St Mark’s version of the same event is characteristically brief and stark.  Mark is the breathless Gospel, always hurrying on, refusing to linger long on any event in our Lord’s life as he rushes headlong towards the Passion and the Death of Jesus, before which everything else in his Gospel is extended introduction.  But we get the picture, added to by the other Gospels, of a wild and earnest figure who rushes from the desert crying loudly his words of repentance and of dire warning to those who would oppose the movement of the Spirit that was about to be unleashed on the world in the figure of Jesus.

In God’s scheme of things, John the Baptist stands on the threshold of two very different worlds – the world of the Old and New Testaments.  He is an Old Testament figure, compared to Elijah the great prophet and yet he is also the instrument through which the New Testament of Jesus Christ begins.  Our Advent theme for today is the message of the prophets about the coming of Jesus which we are bidden to contemplate and John the Baptist sums up all those prophesies.   His appearing in the wilderness seems to be a journey from some anonymous place.  He just arrived and began his work for God. Later historical and archaeological evidence suggests that John has been waiting in the wings for years – waiting for this one moment when the new age was about to dawn – the age of Jesus – the age of the New Testament.  Evidence suggests he waited in the company of an austere religious community – possibly the Essenes where he was prepared spiritually for his short but effective mission.

Symbolically, his rushing from the wilderness is not a physical journey but a representative one.  As he bursts forth with his cry of Repentance he is carrying all the prophecies of the Old Testament with him.  He is the voice of Elijah, of Jeremiah, of Isaiah, of Amos, of Hosea, of Elisha, of Ezekiel, Zechariah and all that great band of earnest Prophets who contended with rulers and religious and who spoke of God’s fulfilment in One who was to Come – who would be greater than they and who would sweep away all that was not of God in peoples’ lives and who would fulfil all the hopes, the dreams, the promises – because, unlike all of them, he was God incarnate – God in our midst – God who was born as one of us in order that we could become like him, and be reflections of the Holiness, Love and Beauty of God.

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thongs of his sandals is how John the Baptist speaks of his relationship to Jesus – one who, if Luke is right, was Cousin, family which in Jewish circles is the highest form of relationship. But Mark knew nothing of Luke’s Gospel still to be written.  For him it was important to draw the distinction between the Prophet and the One about whom the Prophecy was made.  That contrast is found in all 4 Gospel accounts.  There is an argument that as all 4 were written from the Christian standpoint of the Early Church it was inevitable that Jesus would be written up and John written down. Indeed the Evangelists even put the words into John’s mouth, I must decrease and he must increase  - speaking of his relationship with Jesus.

Other contrasts were painted too – John’s austerity compared to Jesus’s love of fun and life. John’s sobriety against Jesus’s partying spirit. John’s severity against our Lord’s gentleness. John’s judgement contrasts with our Lord’s mercy.  Chalk and Cheese comes to mind.

The evangelists did their job well. John the Baptist is firmly in his place – the bridge, the threshold between the old way and the New.  Jesus, on hearing of John’s imprisonment which would lead to his untimely death spoke his epitaph and Luke records it.  He was a prophet but more than a prophet – among those born of women no one is greater than John  but then something very strange – yet the least in the kingdom is greater than he.  John the Baptist is the Herald of the Kingdom but his place in it was to be less than any other.  It seems a bit harsh but Jesus is keeping John where he belongs – like Moses who saw the Promised Land but did not enter it, so John saw the promised fulfilment of the Old Testament in the New but did not, seemingly share in it.  Or did he?

There is something very important which links the two of them.

John the Baptist’s message that all should repent is not so strange if we think of repentance as a turning back of one’s life to God, with sorrow for the things that have turned us away.  The fact that he was eager for all to accept this need for repentance and his severity on those who refused to do so is not just the rantings of a hell-fire preacher as may at first seem.  Here is one whose desire was to get people ready for the blazing advent of Jesus who came for one purpose -to redeem God’s people and turn them away from the snares of the evil one who would destroy their souls – our souls even.  Jesus would burst upon the world with the power of God to love us into His Kingdom.

John the Baptist had the same aim.

The harshness comes out of his anxiety that people should not be lost and so miss out on the Kingdom of Love that Jesus proclaimed.

His shouting is not unlike the parent who, having lost a child, finds them safe after all.

Some of you will recognize that relief is often first expressed in anger – Why did you stray away?  Where have you been!  Why did you not do what I told you and so cause me so much anxiety.  John desperately wanted to deliver God’s children intact to Jesus who would take them on to the Promised land of His Father’s Kingdom.  They must be ready.  They must be there for Jesus to act upon their lives.  What John the Baptist was really demonstrating is that they were a Much Loved People – all his action was for their salvation.  In this he wasn’t all that different from Jesus himself whose aim was to show that they were indeed much loved people too.  All were precious to God.  In that John and Jesus were united – in intent, if not in method.

But I have spoken as if this is some past event. I have placed it firmly in history.  I have stood at that intersection of Old and New Testaments were Prophet and the fulfilment of prophecy meet.  However, the Gospel is not history – it is certainly not a story of the past.  It is about here and about now.  It is about us.

John the Baptist still speaks to us and his call to repentance is as real today as it was on Jordan’s river bank.  He is still anxious that we are ready for Jesus to come and claim our hearts, our lives anew.  Austere, Severe, Unyielding - his message is without compromise – Repent and believe the Gospel.  Turn back to God and really, really believe that Jesus is the Good News who will transform our lives and who will love us into His Father’s Kingdom – if we will let Him.

Both John the Baptist and Jesus express the same longing for us – that we may know that we are indeed Much Loved People – so much so, in fact that both of them are working for our Salvation.  There is not that much difference between them after all.  Both want us to know the power of God to change and hold us in an embrace of Love so wonderful that we are secure and held both now and for all Eternity.

That is not a Prophecy – it is a Gospel truth. It is a stupendous truth.  Accept it –accept Jesus - with all your heart for we are, indeed, a Much Loved People precious to God.