An Enthusiast For Righteousness
"What went ye out for to see? A prophet?" -- Matt. 11:9
Jesus is here speaking of John the Baptist. A little while before John had been preaching in the wilderness and great multitudes had attended his ministry. Many of the same people were now in the audience to which Jesus was speaking. Speaking to them of John, he says, "What went ye out for to see? A prophet?"
The Hebrew word for prophet is derived from a root signifying "to boil, or to bubble over." As a prophet John was boiling and bubbling over with enthusiasm. The burden of his ministry was for the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness. So heavily did this burden weigh upon his soul, he became unconscious of hunger, poverty and the hardships of the wilderness, and conscious only of his great mission to proclaim the divine kingdom of righteousness.
It is not to be wondered at that such an enthusiast for righteousness came into violent collision with the crooked and perverse generation of his day. What else could you expect when a "boiling and bubbling-over" prophet like John confronts an inert and corrupt society? Politeness, moderateness and compromise you may expect from prophets of the mild-tempered and less earnest type, but not from such a prophet as John in whom the passion for righteousness throbbed so violently.
Whenever a prophet of John’s type appears, the smug and complacent at once dub him as "a fanatic." But, as some one has said,
"One must become Fanatic—be a wedge—a thunderbolt
To smite a passage through this close-grained world."
It is only the man with the hardness and temper of the fanatic who can do a great work in the midst of an easy-going and self-indulgent society. The fanatic may be an extremist, he may not be faultless, he may be full of mistakes and blunders; but, as the homely proverb puts it, "It is better that the pot should boil over than that it should not boil at all." If extravagance is bad, apathy is a great deal worse.
If some of us had lived in the days of John the Baptist and had known, as he knew, that Herod was living in adultery with another man’s wife, we would have said, "It’s none of our business; let him alone." But John was such an enthusiast for righteousness he could not be indifferent towards that thing. It would be well for the world to-day, if we had more such men as John.
