(The Nationalist, 26 Nov. 2004)
Before Jesus began his public life, his cousin John, who had baptized him, had already begun his, and his message was, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand’. To repent means to stop sinning, to change our ways, to clean up our act and become a new person. John the Baptist spoke discomfiting truths to people who might have preferred comforting lies. Despite that – or maybe because of it – people came to him in droves.
John wasn’t politically correct. He didn’t speak in soothing sound bites. He called the religious leaders of his time a ‘brood of vipers’ that is, a bunch of snakes. He wasn’t into religion-as-therapy. The “feel-good factor” wasn’t any part of his frame of reference. He called on people to change, and that’s something everyone finds difficult, even when it’s a change for the better.
What is repentance? It’s a call to freedom through recognizing the truth about ourselves. When we know ourselves as we are, recognize our failings, call them by name and take responsibility for them, that is an act of freedom. It is living the truth. Jesus said, ‘The truth shall make you free’. (John 8.32) Truth frees us from self-deception, from pretending that the assertion of an egotistical self-will is an act of conscience. ‘Conscience is a stern monitor, but… it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will’. (Cardinal John Henry Newman.)
No matter how bad we may be, we never manage to still the voice of conscience within us. Our minds were custom-built for the truth, and we recognize it when we hear it, even if we’d rather not. We respect those who tell us the truth, even if we sometimes wish they’d shut up.
People are tired of PR and spin and lies. We want to be told the truth. We look to our leaders in all branches of society and we know we’re not getting it, even among the “professional” seekers of truth.
John spoke the truth, and it cost him his head. If he had suppressed it, he might have found a comfortable place at the court of the king who killed him. But he would never have been revered in Christian memory as a man ‘wholly dedicated to the truth’, to quote a writer of his time.
John was ‘the archetype of humility, the shining light, the forerunner of Christ, the foetal prophet, the angelic messenger, the dawn before the sun, the first monk, the martyr for justice and truth’. (Melanie McDonagh, “Bonfire for the Baptist”, in The Tablet, 21 August 2004, p.2)