The Year of Obscurity
The Year of Obscurity
All four Gospels tell something of the ministry of John the Baptist. He was an ascetic, wearing nothing but a camel’s hair cloak with a leather girdle, and eating an austerity diet of locusts and wild honey. Through his lips, after a silence of several centuries, the authentic voice of prophecy was again heard, as he summoned the people to repentance and to his baptism of repentance in preparation for the coming of the Messiah. Large crowds flocked to the River Jordan to listen to his preaching and to be baptized.
When Jesus presented himself for baptism John protested, for he had pronounced himself unworthy even to stoop down and undo the sandal strap of the one coming after him. But Jesus was resolved to fulfill all righteousness and, though he had no sins of his own to confess, to identify himself with the sins of others. So he persuaded John to baptize him. At that moment the Holy Spirit came upon him like a dove, and the Father’s voice was heard proclaiming him, in words of Old Testament Scripture, both his beloved Son and his suffering servant (Matt. 3; cf. Ps. 2:7 and Isa. 42:1).
Immediately after his baptism, the same Spirit who descended upon him “drove” him into the Judean desert. There he fasted for forty days in order no doubt to seek strength through prayer for the ministry to which he had just been commissioned. During this period he was also savagely tempted to compromise with the devil by trying to attain right ends by wrong means. But the Lord’s hidden years of Scripture meditation stood him in good stead. He was able to counter every diabolical suggestion with an apt biblical rejoinder. For he was determined to live according to Scripture and so obey his Father’s will.
It appears that after the temptation Jesus returned to the River Jordan and gave the two brothers Andrew and Simon Peter a kind of preliminary call to his service. They left John the Baptist and began to follow Jesus.
Returning north to Galilee, Jesus performed his first miracle, changing water into wine at a wedding in Cana. It symbolized his claim to introduce a new order, and by it he revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him (John 2:1–11).
Next he went up to Jerusalem for the Passover and boldly ejected from the temple courts the merchants and money changers who had profaned it. When challenged about his action, he replied enigmatically:
Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days. (John 2:19)
It was another dramatic claim about the new order. For he was alluding not only to his physical body which would be raised from death in three days, but to his spiritual body, the church, which would live in the power of the resurrection. His church would also be a new and spiritual temple, God’s dwelling place, to replace Herod’s material temple which would be destroyed.
One man who was deeply impressed by the early teaching and miracles of Jesus was a leading Jewish rabbi called Nicodemus. He came under cover of dark for a private interview, to be told by Jesus that the indispensable condition for seeing and entering God’s kingdom was a new birth from above by the power of the Holy Spirit. Some time later, on his way north again into Galilee, Jesus repeated this message or something very similar, though not now to a Jewish man, but to a Samaritan woman. She needed “living water,” he said, an inner “spring of water welling up to eternal life,” which would quench her thirst and which only he could supply.4
Other details of the first year of Jesus’ ministry are not recorded. Most of it seems to have been spent in Judea. It was a transition period, during which his ministry overlapped with the ministry of his forerunner, John the Baptist. The disciples of Jesus were also baptizing. And gradually those following Jesus came to outnumber those following John, which John accepted with beautiful humility, saying: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).
But this situation was the signal for Jesus to leave Judea for Galilee. Soon afterward, John was arrested and imprisoned, and the Galilean ministry, the year of popularity, began (John 3:24; 4:1–3; Mark 1:14).