One of the questions people have sometimes is to wonder what exactly is the role of St. John

the Baptist, St. John the foreigner. Why do we need this kind of wily strange character to appear

before the coming of Christ? And so I thought this could be an interesting thing to talk about,

to look at it structurally. There are, of course, many things we could say.

But I really want to look at it in terms of structure, in terms of, you know,

in terms of the symbolic structure that we talk about and what role it is that St. John plays in that.

Yeah. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Now St. John appears, of course, before Christ, as this rather wild-looking character who stands out in the wilderness.

He wears camel hair, he eats grasshoppers and he eats honey. And he stands there at the outside of the city, you know, near the Jordan River, which is the edge,

really. You have to understand the Jordan River as kind of the edge of the of Israel,

in terms of symbolism, we'll see why that's the case.

And he tells people to repent.

And he says, the kingdom of God is near.

Repent.

Turn away from your sins.

And he baptizes people.

Now, again, it's very interesting because, of course, baptism in the text,

it appears as something which is obvious, you know, but there aren't baptism in the Old

Testament. There are things that are akin to baptism, and we'll look at those as well,

but there isn't baptism proper in the Old Testament. So the key to understanding St. John,

the foreigner, and his role is something like the role of destruction, the role of the destruction of the old thing that is not

appropriate. And so we have structure. So, you know, we talk about hierarchy on this channel all

the time. Of course, hierarchies are good, but there are definitely bad hierarchies. You know,

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