Being born in a stable allows the lowliest of people to know that Jesus understands their hut or dirt floor or jungle situation. And Jesus was rumored to be a bastard child—a heavy burden in most cultures.
But Jesus was from a good family. Mary was a descendant of David’s son Solomon, and Joseph was a descendant of David’s son Nathan. Jesus had an uncle, Zechariah, who was acting in his role as priest when an angel appeared to him and told him his wife would bear a son, John.
And when Mary came to visit her aunt Elizabeth, both women being pregnant—though Elizabeth did not yet know about Mary—the unborn John leaped for joy in his mother’s womb, because he was already filled with the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit gets excited about anything that gives GLORY TO JESUS!
And it gets interesting. For a short few years, John was “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3 and John 1:23). He was the prophet preparing Israel for the Messiah. And his life’s work would be fulfilled quickly. (When Herod had John beheaded, his ministry would be cut short just as Jesus’s would two years later.)
Surely John had no memory of leaping in his mother’s womb. Nor, I believe, did his mother tell him. Because though the Messiah was his own first cousin, John did not know it. Anne Rice wrote a novel about the boy Jesus called JESUS THE CHRIST, in which John spends a lot of time staring quietly at his cousin Jesus, saying very little. It makes the reader wonder.
But I suspect John and Jesus were like any cousins—playing, wrestling, doing what cousins do. Years later, when both of them were 30, their paths crossed, Jesus asked John to baptize him, and John fell to his knees, realizing for the first time who this cousin of his really was.
“John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!… I DIDN’T KNOW HIM, but I came baptizing with water so He might be revealed. I watched the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He rested on Him. I DIDN’T KNOW HIM, but … I have seen, and tell you He is the Son of God!’” John 1:29-31.
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