For clothes he's wearing the skin of a camel. To be sure, people like this are either crazy or have gained some sort of insight from their time away from people and culture and roofs-over-your-head and well-trodden ways. In other words, they're either crazy or they're prophets. Or both.
It turns out a lot of people think this guy is a prophet. They come to him out by the river, out to the borderland where civilization peters out and the wild begins. He's saying the way to get ready for this Kingdom that's coming is to repent. He's standing up to his waist in the Jordan and shouting. His voice is hoarse and people are gathered on the shore listening and then one of them wades out to him, crying, confessing all his sins, and the wildman grabs him and plunges him under the water. Then another wades out, and another. All of them crying.
So this is big. It's a social movement, it's a phenomenon. It's like the world is being turned upside down and shaken. But this is also what John calls making the paths straight, clearing the way for the coming one.
The coming one! Well, if there's a kingdom coming, it must have a king! There's a strong implication of revolution here, at least to some. A few Pharisees arrive at the riverbank, not to confess their sins and be plunged in the water, but to observe, take notes, report back to their bosses in the city. What's going on down there? Is this something we should worry about? What will the Romans think?
See, things are getting serious for the wildman from the wilderness. But he's not moderating his words. To these Pharisees he says, "You brood of vipers!" Nobody talks that way to those folks. This dirty guy in a camel skin rug calling the Pharisees a nest of snakes! "Even now the ax is laid at the root of the tree," he says. You boys better start bearing fruit, because judgment is coming!
Well this guy, John, has a cousin in Nazareth, Jesus. Mary's boy. Like his father a woodworker by trade. He too comes down to the water, wading out to see John, and John looks him in the eye and something clicks into place. "It's you," he says. "I need to be baptized by you, not you by me!"
This is all very strange, what happens next, but I suppose when the world gets turned upside down strange things happen. Reluctantly, crying himself now, John reaches out his arms and Jesus leans back slowly and trustingly into them, John letting him down ever-so slowly into the water, then with one arm under his back and one arm pushing his chest down, John forces Jesus under . . . one, two, three . . . and up again.
And at that point something like a dove, if a dove were made of light, flutters down and comes to rest on Jesus, right there on his shoulder, and a voice from the sky speaks, just like in the days of old: "This is my beloved Son!"
And that's it. The dove of light disappears. Jesus walks slowly back up out of the water. As one the crowd of people on the shore parts, forming a corridor for Jesus. No one says a thing. Did they see what John saw, hear what John heard? Jesus walks on, silent and thoughtful.
Then, not shouting any more but in a hoarse whisper John says, "I baptize with water, but he with Spirit and with fire." And then he says, "Prepare!"
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