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| Essential 100 -- J the B, social activist | | Date Created: Mar 24, 2005, 01:33 PM |
54 — Thursday March 24 — Luke 3
John the Baptist would have made a good Messiah for a lot of people. He's outspoken against injustice, he's totally independent of and antigonistic toward the compromised government, he's full of ethical teaching and full of the way forward as well as repentence. He's what some Christians and Jews really want Jesus to be like -- all about teaching and primarily social/ethical material.
When you consider J the B's obvious significance to the whole Christian story, chronicled in the opening of the gospels, it's interesting that his submissive and relatively innocent death for what was right bears no martyriological (is that a word?) nor soteriological significance for the gospel writers at all. There's a clue there to what's important about Jesus' death. It can't be "the refusal to answer violence with violence" -- for that certainly was true of both of their deaths. But one is significant and the other is not. |
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