"Prepare the way of the Lord!"
      This was the task of John the Baptist, son of Zacharias and Elisabeth.  He was a powerful preacher in the Judean desert who wore camel skin clothes and ate a diet of locusts and wild honey.  People came to John in great numbers and he admonished them to repent and confess their sins, whereupon he baptized them in the River Jordan.  Was he the Messiah? they asked.  No, he replied.  But soon the Messiah would appear and would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit.
      One day John's cousin Jesus came to be baptized.  This, John knew, was the man whose arrival he had predicted. "You should baptize me instead," John protested.
      But Jesus reassured him. "This is the way God wants us to do it."
      So John baptized Jesus in the river.  When the Lord emerged from the water, the Holy Spirit came down from the sky and descended upon Jesus like a dove.  A voice from heaven proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son.  I am well pleased with Him." Thus began Jesus' ministry.
      Shortly afterward John was thrown into prison by King Herod.  This occurred because Herodias, Herod's wife, was angry that John had denounced their marriage.  She had previously been Herod's brother's wife and John told Herod that he was wrong to take his brother's wife.  Herodias wanted John killed but Herod, who feared John's popularity,  preserved the prophet's life and merely imprisoned him.
      John was unsettled by doubt while in prison and sent this message to Jesus, "Are You really the Messiah?"
     "Tell John what you are seeing and hearing," Jesus told John's disciples. "The blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor receive the news of salvation.  God will bless those who do not reject Me."
      This reassurance came at a critical time because Herodias soon found a way to end John's life.  Herodias's daughter danced for Herod and his guests at a birthday celebration.  The king was so captivated by this that in a moment of weakness he promised her anything she desired.  Prompted by her mother, the girl demanded, "Bring me the head of John the Baptist."
      Herod was shocked and distraught but he could not go back on his promise.  So the great John the Baptist, forerunner of Jesus Christ, was beheaded to appease a sinful queen.
      John's epitaph is Jesus' own words: "What did you go out into the desert to see? . . . A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings' palaces.  Then what did you go out to see? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet . . . Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist."