Salome Read Free Page B

been born for—to draw the people back to the Lord.
    In a corner of his mind, John was aware of the Roman soldier standing above the crowd, his crested helmet silhouetted against the sky. Elias, one of John’s disciples, kept casting him wary glances. But the soldier wasn’t listening to the preacher, John knew; he probably didn’t even understand the Aramaic John spoke. The soldier’s job was to watch the audience. If the crowd got unruly, he’d signal for backup troops.
    The first time John’s voice had boomed out over a crowd like this, he’d been startled. In the wilderness with the lizards and ravens, he’d gone for weeks without speaking at all. But now, letting his voice resound felt as natural as breathing. It was the Lord’s message, not John’s. It was the Lord’s power.
    “The Lord loves righteousness and justice!” John told his listeners. That was a quotation from a psalm written generations ago, but it was still true. It would always be true.
    “Yes!” shouted a man in the crowd. “Give us justice!” Hundreds of hopeful faces looked up to John.
    “In our land,” John went on, “there is a ruler who calls himself a Jew but lives like a Roman. He presumes to rule the Lord’s people—but he defiles the Law. He builds his city of marble and gold—on a Jewish graveyard. The Jews of Galilee can hardly find a place to live, but Antipas peoples his new city with foreigners. He raises graven images in the public square.”
    “Unclean,” muttered John’s audience. “Filthy pagan.” They knew exactly what kind of “graven images” John was talking about. The worst was the statue of the previous Roman emperor, the “divine” Augustus Caesar.
    The same man who’d spoken up before shouted, “Herod Antipas eats swine flesh!”
    “The Herods have Jewish blood on their hands,” John went on. “Antipas’s father called himself Herod the Great. Great—yes, at squeezing taxes from the farmers and fishermen in order to clothe himself in gold. Great at hunting down and butchering the righteous Jews who rose against him. Every luxurious palace of his, like the one at Macherus”—he waved a hand eastward—“squats on top of dungeons and torture chambers.”
    John’s audience knew the grisly stories about Herod the Great, and most of them had some personal connection with them. One of John’s own cousins had barely escaped being slaughtered at birth by Herod’s soldiers. Alarmed by a rumor that the new king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem, King Herod ordered all the male babies in that town to be killed. To be on the safe side, his soldiers had massacred all the boys under two years of age.
    “Woe to the tyrants!” shouted the man who’d spoken before. Judging by his rough clothing and weathered face, he was probably a shepherd. It wasn’t surprising that most of the crowd were humble folk—shepherds, farmers, poor craftsmen. It was the ordinary people who were crushed by injustice.
    What was surprising was the number of well-dressed people among the peasants. John noticed two men in scribes’ robes in a comfortable spot under an oak tree. And there, at the edge of the pool formed by the creek, a wealthy woman leaned out of a litter. The scribes must be keeping an eye on John for the High Priest in Jerusalem. The woman was curious, no doubt. Well, he had a message for all of them.
    “Brothers and sisters,” cried John. “This is what the Lord commanded me:
Call the people to repent. Tell them the kingdom of heaven is at hand. When they repent, baptize them.
” His voice rang over the water like a trumpet. “Do you want to be right with the Lord? Hear what he asks of you. Repent! Turn from your sins! As the psalm says, ‘It is time for the Lord to act, for your law has been broken.’”
    “I repent!” responded a chorus of voices. “Lord, save us!”
    When John had finished preaching, he felt shaky and spent. He climbed down from the boulder to get out of the sun. As he