Summary: John the Baptist's idea of success was different from ours. So was Jesus'.
Some folks figured John the Baptist was the biggest thing to hit Israel since - well, since the greatest of the prophets.
There he was: straight out of the desert, clothed in a camel's hair robe, living off locusts and wild honey, preaching a seething message of repentance - all the right credentials, in other words, to break into the prophetic major leagues as rookie of the year.
Did he offend King Herod? Of course! The Romans? You bet! John didn't care. He leveled his righteous rage against anyone he considered unjust, immoral or just plain lazy. With his wild eyes and his unkempt hair, he eagerly played the part. John seemed always to walk a thin line between prophetic authority and sheer-and-utter madness.
It made for great theater - and John the Baptist could always be counted upon to draw a crowd.
And what a crowd it was! Hundreds, some said thousands, of people - even soldiers and tax collectors, no less! - all wending their way down to the River Jordan to be baptized.
"The people were filled with expectation," Luke tells us. "All were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether or not he might be the Messiah."
Then John lets loose the mic drop of all mic drops: "I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." Cue the CGI special effects - you know, when the hero strolls away from the exploding building without so much as looking back. John has just blown it all up, and he's so casual about it, he doesn't seem to care. (Is that what he means by baptizing with fire?)
Say it ain't so, John!
You can't be saying you're fixing to step down and give up the Messianic crown? Why, you're the hottest thing in prophecy since, well, since anyone can remember! Walk away? It's just not done!
And who is this one who's coming after you, anyway - this mysterious newcomer, whose shoelaces you aren't worthy to untie?
But walk away John does. He never looks back at the fire of his abandoned career.
It's not the first time he'd stepped aside, as it were, for this other man. When he was an unborn child, Luke tells us, John had leapt in his mother's womb when she encountered her cousin Mary, who was bearing the baby Jesus. And now it's John's own heart that leaps with joy, at the prospect of tossing the keys to the Batmobile to the true Messiah.
Another gospel-writer - who's also named John (no relation) - tells it even more bluntly. Some of John the Baptist's disciples ask him about Jesus. John responds with marvelous humility: "I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him. ... my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease."1
For all we hear about John the Baptist in the scriptures, there's not a lot of evidence we can find to construct a psychological profile. John's a raw, uncut original, always pushing the boundaries. Does it matter to Mr. Locusts-and-Wild-Honey whether he's a success in the prophecy trade? Does he even care?
John's decision to walk away from it all, to hand off his wildly successful Messiah franchise to cousin Jesus, is baffling to our minds.
It's baffling to us because walking away from success is just not on the radar screen for most people in our go-go entrepreneurial culture.
For John the Baptist, success isn't found in the size of the crowd or the adulation of the multitude or in how much he can rile up King Herod and the high priests. Success is found in serving the one who's always been slated to come after him: the Messiah, the Lord.
For us, defining the nature of success isn't so easy. Back in our senior year of high school, there's a fair likelihood the members of our graduating class elected someone - or maybe two people, one male and one female - as Most Likely To Succeed. The winners received a special yearbook photo and everything.
If you're enough years out from high school and have been able to get back for a reunion or two, how did that Most Likely to Succeed prediction work out? What happened to that person (or those people)? Did they get elected to Congress? Did they invent a killer app? Did they start up their own hedge fund?
For all we Americans love the idea of success, we have a terribly hard time recognizing it when we see it in the wild, don't we?
Part of our problem, as Americans, is our national predisposition to portray success as anything with a dollar sign ahead of it. Back in the last century, the philosopher William James criticized his fellow Americans for that very thing. In a letter to H.G. Wells, the science-fiction novelist, James complained about "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the ... goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease."2
Disease it may well be - but many, many people today spend their lives energetically trying to catch that particular ailment. Sadly, most of them fail to achieve the lofty financial goals they've set for themselves. Although we dwell in the land of "the pursuit of happiness," for all too many of us it's just that: a pursuit. Like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit around the track, happiness always seems to be just out of reach - that just around the corner is the next promotion, the next business deal. Even - sadly - the next marriage.
If we stop our striving long enough to really think about it, we'd realize there could easily be no end, really, to the chase of the almighty dollar. Someone once asked John D. Rockefeller, "Mr. Rockefeller, how much money is enough?"
"Just a little bit more," he's said to have replied, with a twinkle in his eye.
One of the sharpest minds reflecting, these days, on the subject of human happiness is the Harvard social scientist Arthur C. Brooks. Professor Brooks has come up with a concept he calls "the arrival fallacy."
People often struggle to find happiness, says Brooks, because they insist on seeing it as a destination. It's a quintessentially American concept, if you think about it. A great many of us in this country are proud of our frontier heritage - of ancestors, real or metaphorical, who came to this country by means of an arduous journey - whether crossing the ocean by steamship or the prairies in a covered wagon. They were intrepid travelers, those ancestors of ours. Doggedly, and often at considerable risk to themselves, they pressed onwards to their destination. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the vaunted success they yearned to achieve, was the one thing they believed would finally make them happy.
Don't we set up our own personal life-quests with similar destinations in mind? What does success - that carrot hanging from a stick, just out of reach - mean for us? Is it graduating cum laude? Finding and marrying the perfect spouse? Having perfect kids? Landing that big promotion? Surely, once we arrive at that dreamed-of place, we'll finally be happy! Won't we? Won't we?
Professor Brooks calls this the arrival fallacy. "Happiness isn't a destination," he told CNBC in a 2023 interview. "It's a direction. The way that we get happier has somewhat to do with the things going on outside of us, but it has more to do with our inner lives."3
At whatever stage in life you presently find yourself - from a young person mapping out your career, to a retired person looking back to assess the many careers you've had - there's some value in contemplating the nature of this thing called success.
John the Baptist said, of Jesus, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Does that make John a success?
Not in any universe you or I live in. But John - and Jesus as well - belongs to a different universe.
Nowhere is this clearer than in something Jesus himself said: in words he uttered once, but which have been repeated millions of times, all over the world, for over 20 centuries. Words that, in fact, just may have been repeated more often than any other, as they are used in Holy Communion: "This is my body," says the Lord, "which will be given up for you. This is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins."
That's an awfully strange way for a successful man to talk. His body broken, his blood poured out? Why, this man sounds like a pathetic, miserable failure!
But only by the ordinary standards of the world.
"Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani," he cries out upon the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The crowd, hearing him wrongly, jeers, "Listen, he is calling for Elijah." And they hold up a vinegar-soaked sponge on a stick, and taunt him, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down."4
Some success he is - this one whose sandals John the Baptist is not worthy to untie!
But that, my friends, is the very heart of the matter. This Christian gospel of ours turns the world's notion of success upside down. John the Baptist gives up his place to the one who comes after him. And the one who comes after him gives up his very life. He doesn't do it lightly. He does it so the sins of the world may be forgiven.
The next time you find yourself wondering about success - whether you'll one day be a success, whether you are a success or whether you've ever truly been one - contemplate, for a moment, this image of the crucified God.
John the Baptist was right about him. He comes to baptize us with the Holy Spirit and with fire.