John wore a camel hair garmet with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey  Matthew 1:6

Wow, why such a vivid discription?  I see so much more than even is stated.  I see a wild man with long tangled hair and a dusty cloak blowing in the wind at the shore of the river.  A man tantalizing and terrifying all at the same time.  Who wouldn't be fascinated by his rugged independence, yet wonder what a man who asks so much of himself might possibly ask of me.   

I wonder what they thought, those people who flocked out to see him.  They left the city, their homes, modern civilization as they knew it, to hearken back to the days of the prophets.  It's easy to think of them as so long ago to us that we lump them together with all Old Testament stories as if they all happened at once.  But it had been four hundred since the prophets last spoke.  A history of twice the span of a our own country, time as far removed from them as the 1600s are from us. 

Did this sense of an ancient throwback shock the author into such a detailed memory of the man?  Did it capture the imagination of a people beaten down by oppression and craving the words of God? For all his fire, for all his drama, what was it he really asked? 

Repent,

prepare,

listen;

for God is coming.