Ep. 41: He is the Elijah

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MATTHEW 11:2-14, LUKE 7:18-25

John would have been held in a tiny keep in a citadel. Let’s let Edersheim paint a picture of the scene:

‘This terrible keep had for ten months been the prison of that son of the free ‘wilderness,’ the bold herald of the coming Kingdom, the humble, earnest, self-denying John the Baptist. And now with this deep dungeon in the citadel on the one side, and, on the other, the luxurious palace of Herod and his adulterous, murderous wife. He could hear the shouts of wild revelry and drunken merriment and must have, in darker moments, thought, was this the Kingdom he had come to announce as near at hand? For which he had longed, prayed, toiled, suffered, utterly denied himself and all that made life pleasant and the rosy morning of which he had hailed with hymns of praise?’

Where was the Christ? Was he the Christ? What was he doing? Was Jesus eating and drinking all this time with publicans and sinners, while John was suffering for him? Was Jesus in his person and work so quite different from himself? And why was he so?

This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)