Skin and water, flesh and blood

The story of the Forerunner

Photo by Phil Botha on Unsplash

“Why is he wearing those strange things?”

It’s a question that probably crosses the minds of those who see me cassock-clad in the local Tobu Store supermarket or dropping my daughter off at nursery, though the Japanese are too polite to ask out loud. I was asked a few times and rather more bluntly, shall we say, back in England.

But the people who ask why I wear what I wear seldom ask why they wear what they wear. Why the tube of coloured silk or polyester that sticks out from your collar when you go to work or school? Why the soldier’s varieties of kit for drill square, manoeuvres or mess hall? Why a football shirt in the pub? There are more than just practical considerations afoot. Everything we wear says something. Even those who default to t-shirt and jeans are saying something by their choice between Uniqlo or Levis.

Our clothes are symbolic. If this is true of a cassock or a pair of Levis, it’s got to be true of a camel hair garment nattily accessorised by a belt of leather, or to translate the Greek more literally, of “skin:” the instantly recognisable fashion ensemble of St John the Baptist, on whom two of the four gospel passages read at Sunday Mass in Advent focus.

St John’s choice of garb was evidently meaningful to St Mark, the first of the Gospel writers. It appears in the sixth verse of the very first chapter of his Gospel and takes up almost as much space as the description of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. So today, I want to ask why.

Why are St John’s clothes and eating habits so important? What do they symbolize? Why did he live in the wilderness and baptize with water? And why is he so important that he appears first, in the first Gospel written?

Garments of skin

Let’s take the sartorial question first. Now, you could just say that St Mark reports St John wearing these strange things because that’s what he wore. St Mark is just reporting the facts. Be that as it may, you are then faced with another question: why report these facts and not others? I don’t see St Mark or any of the other evangelists routinely introducing other people in the Gospels by reference to their clothes. St John’s must have stuck out. There must be some reason for reporting them. And he must have had some reason for wearing them.

First, we will see how St John’s clothes situate him in the overall narrative arc of the Christian story, going right back to Genesis. Later on, we will see how they specifically align him in that story with the person of the prophet Elijah.

One word which links St John to Genesis is “skin:” the “skin” his belt was made of. St Mark uses the same Greek word as you find in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, in Genesis 3:21, when God makes “garments of skin” for Adam and Eve before they are cast out of Paradise. This serves as humanity’s first introduction to death, because if you are going to take something’s skin and make clothes out of it, it’s generally more humane to kill it first (practical, too: it wriggles less). God did not weave a tunic of hemp or cotton to replace the fig leaves. He stripped off the skin which had protected an animal and made it into something to protect Adam and Eve.

So, the garment of skin suggests the newfound fragility that man faces outside Eden: their own skin is no longer enough to keep them from harm. They are setting out into a world of danger, cut off from the Tree of Life by a cherub wielding a flaming sword. They leave a garden verdant with life, the lofty source of four flowing rivers, and find themselves in a wilderness where death is the dominant and unprecedented reality.

We don’t have to say that Genesis 1-3 is purely metaphorical, and I would not go as far as some Church Fathers have to suggest that the garments of skin represent corporeality, as though Adam and Eve were incorporeal before they left Eden: I’d say that the visceral fleshiness of the Genesis account alone is enough to preclude this interpretation. But we can surely say that Adam and Eve’s deathless bodily existence was different before than after, and was different from ours now: as different as St Paul says the Resurrection body will be.

The story of Christianity – both in the Bible and in the Church, where that story continues now – is the story of God calling and helping us back to Paradise, and indeed to something better still, to a degree that exceeds our understanding. God does this through the Incarnation of His Son and the transformation, through of His precious Blood, of the dead, death-dealing wood of the Cross into the Tree of Life.

So: where is St John in all this? In the wilderness, and by the water. It is still a dangerous place, haunted by wild beasts and devils, including Satan, as Jesus will find (Mk 1:13). So, St John needs his garment of skin to protect him. He is still one of us, a mortal human wandering in the desert. And yet, he is something else as well: indeed, Jesus says, there is nobody greater born of woman (Lk 7:28).

Living off the wilderness

We get a sense of why this might be if we consider his food. “You are what you eat,” after all.

St John’s famously balanced and nutritious diet consisted of locusts and honey.

Locusts feature in the Bible primarily as agents of death and blight, sent in army-like droves by God to defeat his enemies: think of the eighth plague on the Egyptians in Exodus 10. By eating these, it is as though St John has something of the power to overcome and even consume the agents of death.

Incidentally, locusts are kosher (Lev 11:22).

Honey is associated throughout Scripture with the fullness and plenty of the promised land. This is especially so in the wilderness wanderings of Exodus. The Israelites received a honey-flavoured foretaste of promise in the manna bread (Exodus 16:31). Elsewhere, the manna is described not only as miraculous but even heavenly, the “food of angels” (2 Esdras 1:19). In general, the ancients saw honey as something verging on the supernatural. It has curative properties when eaten or applied to wounds. Its byproduct, wax, produces the heavenly element of fire.

This is why the Western Church exults the “work of the bees” in its ancient hymn of praise to the Paschal candle on Easter Eve. There is something semi-divine about what the bees do, taking dust-like nectar and making something that yields heat, light, healing and sweetness. It’s certainly a fitting food for a prophet whose fiery words contain the hidden sweetness of the kingdom.

Locusts and honey are, respectively, symbols of swarming death and sweetness of heaven. John is nourished by both of these gifts of the land he lives in. He is a liminal figure, standing between death and life, earth and heaven, dust and spirit. His home, too, shares that ambiguity: the wilderness is not exclusively given over to the beasts and demons, the powers of death, but there is also something heavenly about it. After Jesus was tempted by the Devil, He found angels there, too (Mk 1:13). Nor was St John a stranger to them.

Dwelling among angels

Have you ever seen icons or images of St John the Baptist with wings?

There is a reason for it. Scripture tells us little of his upbringing, but we do know that his father, the priest Zecharias, was visited by an angel (Lk 1:11). Ancient Christian tradition tells us that Zecharias was martyred in the Temple, and unless for some reason we assume that early Christians were a pack of congenital liars or fantasists, I see little reason to doubt them, especially since Jesus Himself speaks of a Zechariah dying near the altar in Luke 11:51.

In any case, scripture itself assures us that from his youngest days, right after his naming, he was raised in the desert (Luke 1:80): the dwelling place, as we have already established, of demons and angels, spiritual powers, and so the perfect place for him to “grow in spirit,” as St Luke reports. There, he could wrestle with demons and be ministered to by angels. There, he could become an “angel” in the literal sense of messenger, joining the ranks of the great prophets of old, and perhaps half-angel even in the spiritual sense, too.

Again, he stands at a halfway point, not just between the Old and New Testaments, but even between angels and humanity: hence the wings. A man born of dust, he may wear clothes of hair and skin, and he may threaten fire, but he is half a creature of the air.

Water and the crossing of chaos

Earth, fire, and air: three of the four elements are accounted for. Only one remains, and given St John’s most famous epithet, it should be the most obvious. Why was he baptizing, in the water of the Jordan?

Again, let’s start with the bigger picture and go back to the beginning, to Genesis 1:2, when “darkness was over the deep” and “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.” From the start, water represents darkness and chaos. Yet it too is a source of life and livelihoods. We drink water, wash with it and fish in it, and yet it comes with the threat of drowning, flood and shipwreck.

The oceans are fearsome places, and both the waters and the monsters within them can be conquered only by God. Only by God’s help could Noah escape the flood; human efforts thereafter to build a tower so high that might it withstand future floods, the Tower of Babel, were quickly confounded. Only God could crush the snaky heads of deep-dwelling Leviathan (Ps 74:14). Only God can part the oceans and rivers for safe passage or bring water from a rock. Only God’s power allows Jesus to calm the storms, to command the fish to leap into the disciples’ nets, and to walk on water. All of these events show God’s ordering and calming power over chaos and death, yielding from them instead safety, peace and plenty.

Waters also symbolise passage. Whether it’s the Styx, the Rubicon or the Delaware, water crossings herald momentous events, and biblical waters are no exception to this general human rule. Moses led the Israelites through the Red Sea before they reached the promised land. And St Elijah led Elisha through the Jordan before he was lifted into heaven.

Before we come back to the Jordan, let’s think a little more about him.

Battling demons with fire and water

Although he lived about 8 centuries earlier, St Elijah’s fashion sense was eerily close to St John’s: King Ahaziah’s messengers described him as “a hairy man wearing a leather belt about his waist” (2 Kings 1:8). That was enough for the king to know who he was immediately. His style, like St John’s, was evidently distinctive.

It should be obvious by St Mark’s deliberate description of St John’s clothes that the two are connected. Other people clearly thought so: they even asked if he was St Elijah. St John firmly answered that he was not (John 1:21); but Jesus later said that he was (Mk 9:13, Mt 17:12). Can we make some sense of this contradiction? Let’s digress into St Elijah’s story and see what we can find.

Elijah the Tishbite was a prophet mostly active in the reign of bad King Ahab, a puppet manipulated by his Baal-worshipping wife Jezebel. The last syllable of her name shows that she was even named after her god, and she proved to be fervent in her devotion to him. Through Ahab, she had hundreds of Israelite prophets executed and replaced their worship with the Baal cult, which included the child-sacrificing subsect of Molech.

God’s response through St Elijah is well known: he sent a drought. This was resolved only when Elijah persuaded the king to summon eight-hundred and fifty of Jezebel’s pagan prophets to Mount Carmel, where they competed against him, the last remaining prophet of the true God, to call down fire on sacrifical offerings (1 Kings 18). To make his point, Elijah even had buckets of water poured over the offerings before he called on God to set them alight (note again that motif of control over water). Elijah’s prayers succeeded where the Baal priests’ failed.

The people turned against the prophets of the demon, and Elijah killed them in recompense for the prophets of God whom Jezebel had killed. And lo, the drought was ended, and rain began to fall. Elijah fled from the inevitable wrath of Jezebel, who promised to kill him, and aided by an angel, he went to spend forty days and nights in the wilderness (1 Kings 19). As he sat in a cave on Mount Horeb, the Word and Voice of God commanded him to lead the remnant of 7000 Israelites who had not bowed to Baal.

That vital mission of Elijah – to lead the remnant – did not end with him. At the end of his mortal life, he miraculously crossed the Jordan with Elisha, then handed his mantle (literally) over to the younger prophet, before being lifted up into heaven by an angelic chariot of fire. Elijah’s spirit continued to rest on Elisha, enabling him also to part the waters and to prophesy. An angelic army of chariots of fire also invisibly surrounded Elisha, as he at one point asks God to reveal by opening the spiritual eyes of his servant (2 Kings 6:17).

It may not seem so at first, but this has very much to do with St John. It isn’t just the clothes. Like Elijah, St John is a lone voice in the wilderness. He too is the enemy of a powerful king and that king’s wife. He too leads a remnant of Israelites, including St Andrew, who are faithful to God in a time of laxity and worship of foreign demons. He too lives and serves among angels. He too will encounter the Word of God, this time made flesh.

So, is St John Elijah, or is he not? Scripture says both: and both are true. He both is and is not Elijah, in the same way as Elisha both is and is not Elijah. This is possible because Elijah, like Enoch before him and, tradition maintains, the Blessed Virgin Mary after him, did not die, but was assumed straight into the heavenly host. So when Elisha is surrounded by the angelic armies, Elijah is present, too. He is like a patron saint to Elisha. If anything, he is more intimately present to Elisha after his Ascension than he was before: Elisha receives “double” Elijah’s spirit. We can say something similar of St John’s relationship to Elijah. He was raised from childhood in close proximity to those spiritual realities, with one foot in the camp of the angels. St Elijah continues his work through St John, and it is all part of the greater work of God.

Let’s come back now to the Jordan. As St Elijah took Elisha through that river, so St John does to the remnant in his day, leading them in their crossing over from one state to another: from sinfulness to purity. As we stand at the Jordan’s banks, the Baptist is going to plunge us right into the watery chaos, into the risk of death by drowning, and so guide us from sinful disorder, towards a life of concord, ordered by fidelity to God’s Law. This is St John’s fulfilment of St Elijah’s mission.

But St John cannot complete the bigger mission, even with the aid of Elijah, Elisha and all the angels. He can wash us from sin, but he cannot free us from death. The garment of skin remains. However angelic St John may be, he is still a creature, and he is going to need the power of the Uncreated, the Word of God Himself, to hallow the waters, so that our journey from sin to virtue can become something more: a journey from death to eternal life in union with God.

From the House of Bread to the Tree of Life

And so, a new arrival comes to the banks of the Jordan for baptism.

He hails from Nazareth, but was born in Bethlehem, “the house of bread.” And He will give His flesh to the remnant as food infinitely more potent than the manna bread, as the truly supernatural bread of angels. With the flesh of the God-man to sustain us, we need no longer cower in garments of skin. He spares us from being food for demons and invites us into the feast of heaven.

He will enter the wilderness and lead the angels in battle, routing even the chief of demons, the old Tempter who routed Adam and Eve from Eden. And having routed their chief, He will go out and exorcise his servants who have possessed and sickened the sons and daughters of Adam, healing with a power of God that exceeds even that of Elijah: a power which will ultimately raise all the dead for the judgment which the Forerunner, St John, prophesied.

He enters the waters not to be purified, but to purify the waters. He is the one who will calm the waves and rout all the forces of chaos and destruction from this world. Though baptized in water, He will baptize in the fire of the Holy Spirit. And He will turn water into wine, a sign of the precious Blood by which He will water the dead wood of the Cross and make it flower into the Tree of Life.

So, by taking and giving His body of flesh, Our Lord transforms the garment of skin into the armour of light.