The “John the Baptist” Parable (Matthew 11:16-19)

You have to be pretty special to warrant your own parable. The Lord clearly thought John the Baptist was in a class by himself (see Matthew 11:11,14), and did not mind saying so. When John was beheaded by the tyrant Herod, the Lord seemed to have grieved as much or more than when Lazarus died.

They were as different as they could be, Jesus and His distant cousin John. (Luke 1 simply calls Elizabeth the relative of Mary, so there’s no way of knowing how closely they were related. We get the impression they weren’t close or they would surely have known one another growing up. After all, there was only a few months difference in their ages. When I was growing up on the farm, my cousins who were similar to my age became some of my best friends. Yet, it seems that Jesus and John were strangers when the Lord walked out into the Jordan to be baptized. That’s Matthew 3:13ff)

John was a loner, living in the desert, wearing home-made clothes of camelskins and eating a diet of locusts and wild honey. He must have looked scraggly. When he preached, he spared no one’s feelings. When a delegation of religious leaders showed up to “honor him” by allowing him to baptize them, he rebuked them: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Show some evidence of your repentance, then we’ll talk about baptism!!” (my paraphrase of Matthew 3:7-8).

Jesus, on the other hand, seemed to have been a people-person. He lived in town, wore regular clothes (since no mention is made of his attire and no one called attention to it) and ate normally. When He preached, He too could be pointed and plain-spoken, but not to the extent of John.

In this 11th chapter of Matthew, Jesus is struck by how people not only rejected John for his ascetic ways, but are now rejecting Him for being the opposite.

“When John came, neither eating nor drinking, people said, ‘He’s crazy.’ Then, I came both eating normally and drinking normally and what do they say? ‘He is a glutton and a drunkard! A companion of the worst kind of sinners!'”

The people wanted it both ways.

In truth, they wanted it neither way.

Jesus put it in a form they could understand and would never forget.

“This generation is like children playing in the marketplace.”


That was a familiar scene. Parents made almost daily trips to the open-air markets where they bought the groceries the family would be consuming in the next day or two. With no refrigeration, animals were slain in the morning, sold in the daytime, and consumed that evening and the next day. The children tagged along with the parents, met up with their friends, and played. It was fine with the parents. Socializing was (and is) an important part of a child’s growing up.

“The children call out to each other: We played the flute for you but you didn’t want to dance. And we played a dirge, but you didn’t want to mourn.”

“Make up your minds,” the children called out to their friends. “You didn’t want to play dance and you don’t want to play funeral. So what’s it going to be?”

The tag line the Lord put on this–“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds”–is a puzzle. We can wish that in relating it, Matthew had given us his paraphrase so we’d know what the Lord meant by it. But, we’re left with it as it is. The scholars have a dozen possible interpretations of what the Lord was saying by it, and we’ll leave it there. Personally, I have no idea how it applies to the parable.

If we wish to get off the subject, we could detour into an analysis of the Lord’s eating and drinking habits. Since our generation has an insatiable curiosity concerning the personal routines of celebrities–witness the popularity of gossip magazines–no doubt a lot of us are curious about those things. We’ll make two points…

Jesus was no ascetic as many of His followers became in later centuries. I recall one–Bernard of Clairvaux? Origen? I forget who–who stuck to his diet of beans and nothing else because he discovered that if he ate other vegetables, each one seemed to create an appetite for that particular dish. Better to stay with one and not give in to sinful appetites, he felt. No wonder these guys died so early, given such restricted diets.

Jesus drank wine. Get over it, He did. When Paul tells Timothy to “take a little wine for your stomach’s sake” (I Tim. 5:23), all us teetotalers went ballistic. Some scholars tell us the wine was healthier than the water, and that’s easy to believe, so we’ll leave it there.

Back to the main subject: the rejection of both John and Jesus by critics who were never satisfied.

Remember the old story of the fellow who asked his next door neighbor to borrow his lawn mower? “Sorry,” he said, “but my wife is baking a chocolate cake.” The first fellow said, “What’s that got to do with me borrowing your mower?” “Nothing,” he said, “but when you don’t want to lend your mower, one excuse is as good as another.”

And that’s the point Jesus is making. These people were making up excuses for rejecting both men of God, and their reasons were not to be taken seriously. If it weren’t for this reason, it would be something else.

When Billy Graham was in his most effective period, he was shot at by both sides of the religous spectrum. Liberals castigated him for his “Johnny one-note” emphasis on “getting saved,” while fundamentalists like John R. Rice lambasted him for associating with liberals. The poor man couldn’t do anything right.

As a rule, Graham ignored the sniper fire from both camps, but I seem to recall on at least one occasion his pointing out that Jesus was shot at from both groups, the liberals and the conservatives, in His day. “So I’m in good company.”

The wonderful and curmudgeonly evangelist of the past generation Vance Havner had a line that fits here. “An excuse,” he liked to say, “is the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.”

In teaching this parable, we must not fail to connect it with the dire warning that follows:

“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” (Two cities of the region where, Matthew says, “most of His miracles were done.”)

“For if the miracles that were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon…” (two ancient pagan cities on the edge of the Mediterranean, just north of Galilee)

“…they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes long ago.” The ultimate condemnation of a hard, rebellious heart.

Jesus continued, “But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgement than for you.”

That amazing statement has given rise to two fascinating truths of doctrine:

a) each person is responsible for what he does with the light given him.

b) judgement will be based on just that, what he did with the light he had. In other words, there will be degrees of punishment in the same way there are degrees of reward (See I Corinthians 3:11ff).

Following up on that, Jesus continued:

“And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to Heaven? you will go down to Hades. For if the miracles that were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until today. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”

This may not have been as brutal as John the Baptist’s look-em-in-the-eye-and-tell-em-how-it-is style, but it was far stronger in its own way.

Sodom was the ultimate in evil, to the mind of the faithful Jew. Even today, that has not changed. The wicked city gave the name “sodomy” to one of its practices.

Even to suggest that Jews–respectable, church-going, praying, tithing, people of God–were going to have it rougher at judgement than the obviously wicked, well sir, that was hard to take.

But, there it was.

Time to get off the fence and make a decision. As the Lord pointed out to the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3, better to be hot or cold–to get in or out–than to try to have it both ways and end up only lukewarm.

I was about to leave the home of Jim and Marian. They had indicated last Sunday they were looking for a church home, I’d made an appointment to visit them, and we’d enjoyed a nice session in their living room. Looking around in the foyer of their house, I said, “You have rhinoceros figurines everywhere.” They had paintings also, including one of rhinos in the African bush that almost filled the wall.”

I said, “What is it about a rhinoceros that intrigues you?”

Jim said, “A rhino will either charge or back up. But there’s no in-between.”

I turned to Marian and said, “I think your husband has just told us something about himself.” She agreed.

Over the next few weeks, as this couple continued worshiping with us, I told them once or twice we would be happy to have them join our church. Finally, I dropped them a note that said:

“A rhino either charges or backs up. There is no in-between. Time to make a decision.”

They were down the aisle the next Sunday, joining the church.

Time to get off the fence, said Elijah on Mount Carmel. You can’t have it both ways. (See I Kings 18:21)

Decision time.

2 thoughts on “The “John the Baptist” Parable (Matthew 11:16-19)

  1. most churches today are burger king churches. people will have it their way no matter what. Thank God some are Holy Sppirit governed, Christ exalting churches, under authority to God’s Word and God’s man.

  2. most churches today are burger king churches. people will have it their way no matter what. Thank God some are Holy Spirit governed, Christ exalting churches, under authority to God’s Word and God’s man.

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