A voice of one crying in the wilderness. John the Baptist is a hard character for us to understand. Everything in our culture and the world around us wants to make Christmas cute and cuddly. We want a Christmas that is nice and neat, tied up in a bow. Everything in its place, and everything must be sweet like syrup. But this John the Baptist character just doesn’t fit, does he? You don’t see many Precious Moments or David and Jonathan characters of John the Baptist, do you? Camel’s hair, eating locusts and honey, and preaching in the wilderness of the kingdom of God. No, he doesn’t exactly fit the commercialized conception of the Christmas season. And try as we might to make him into a little lullaby, his message of repentance simply won’t go away.

And so it was in Jesus’ time, as well. The priests and the Levites come out to the wilderness east of the Jordan river to ask him a simple question: “Who are you?” They don’t want to know about his teaching, they don’t ask about his message, or of this One to come he was preaching about. They want to know, “Who are you?