Anti-white, anti-male, a woke voice in the Anglican wilderness
by Tom Goodfellow, TCW:
OF the many lives recorded in Biblical stories, that of John the Baptist stands out. He was six months older than his cousin Jesus of Nazareth, but other than the events around his birth, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, we are told nothing of his early life. His father, Zechariah, was a priest of the division of Abijah, so John would have been instructed in the Hebrew scriptures from childhood. By birthright he too would have been destined for the priesthood and would have acquired a good social standing, priestly garb and the right to participate in the Temple feasts and rituals in Jerusalem. However things turned out very differently: it was prophesied before his birth that he would go ‘in the spirit and power of (the prophet) Elijah . . . to make ready a people prepared for the Lord’.
His ministry began probably in his early thirties. Eschewing the comforts of city life and his priestly destiny, he went into the desert clad in the most basic clothing, and eating only locusts and wild honey. He preached only two sermons that we know of: a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; and that he was only the forerunner of one who was to come after who was of far greater power and significance. He was literally no more than ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’. But despite this inauspicious start the biblical record states that thousands from the whole region of Judea, and from the capital Jerusalem, went out to hear him, multitudes being baptised in the river Jordan.
The religious elites of his day also came, but he was vitriolic in his denunciation of their hypocrisy. ‘You brood of vipers’, he railed, but fortunately for him there were no Hate Speech laws in those days otherwise he would undoubtedly have been prosecuted. Nevertheless he spoke fearlessly against King Herod, and this led to his downfall. Herod had him arrested and although he was clearly challenged by John’s preaching the king was tricked during a drunken party by his wife and Salome, his stepdaughter, into having him beheaded, a story depicted by many artists.
The question arises as to why the rather basic preaching of this hairy, unkempt man, his leathery skin burned brown in the sun, caused such an outpouring of religious fervour in the Jewish population at that time? The answer surely is that the people recognised an authentic prophetic voice coupled with an authentic lifestyle. He was very definitely not one of the religious elites. Also there had been no prophetic voice in the land for four centuries, the last being Malachi, and there was literally a ‘famine of hearing the word of the Lord’, words spoken by the prophet Amos three centuries before Malachi. Under the Roman occupation the religious festivals and rituals of the temple continued, but God seemed to be silent and the people were spiritually hungry for reality.
Which brings me to the present, and to the Venerable Doctor Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, the newly appointed Anglican Archdeacon of Liverpool.
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