This is one of the places where the gospel of Mark and that of Luke veer away from each other. Luke has John the Baptist very much alive as Jesus becomes famous for his healing and preaching. Mark has John baptize Jesus in chapter one, and then in chapter six, tells us that Herod had ordered the prophet’s execution some time before Jesus began his ministry. While it’s not hard to harmonize the four gospels around the same set of facts concerning John the Baptist, the role he plays in our faith and understanding of Jesus is clarified by contrasting Mark and Luke.
In Luke, Jesus and John are cousins, separated by six months in age, and day’s walk in the location of their ministries. For Luke, John gives the story of Jesus some context. They share the same holy genealogy and each have miraculous births. Zechariah is ministering in the temple, when an angel tells him that his elderly, barren, wife will conceive a child. John’s birth frees Zechariah’s tongue to proclaim — one can assume in the temple, again — the role this child will play in preparing people for the Messiah. So John begins within the circle of organized religion. He may have grown up in the monastery of Qumran. His ministry in the Jordan River is on the border of what is “acceptable religion” and the wilderness full of demons and angels beyond Judaism’s institutional walls. He is eventually beheaded following Herod’s drunken party at a wilderness fortress on the wrong side of the Dead Sea.
Jesus, by way of contrast, starts outside the religious box and never gets invited in. The Messiah is conceived in scandal, born in a cave, and worshiped by shepherds, whose very occupation requires them to be outsiders. Mark doesn’t mention any family ties between Jesus and John. Yet when Herod— note: a half-Jew who wasn’t accepted by the religious elite but knew John well — heard what Jesus was doing, he wailed and said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised from the dead.” Mark has already shown us that the demons accepted Jesus as Lord before the religious people did (Mark 1:24).
Luke takes a different tack. He shows us ordinary people embracing Jesus freely, while the upper class stumbles, either sadly failing to accept his invitation that they become disciples, or rejecting him entirely. In Luke, Herod interviews Jesus on Good Friday morning. He is curious about Jesus’ celebrity status and the reports of his miracles. In Mark, this same Herod thought Jesus was the ghost of John the Baptist, and felt guilty about executing John. Luke gives us a Herod without a conscience. Either way, John the Baptist and Jesus share the same fate, execution. They are linked by holy sacrifice. They each call their followers and us to turn away from worldly riches and fame, and receive the Kingdom of God. Two voices with one message that is too often ignored.