The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist

Bruegel painted this in 1566, and that year matters. Across the Netherlands people were slipping out past the city walls to hear Calvinist and other Protestant preachers in open fields, illegal gatherings the Dutch called hedge sermons, held safely beyond the reach of the Spanish king's men who had banned such worship. So when Bruegel shows John the Baptist preaching to a dense crowd at the edge of a wood, his listeners are not ancient Judeans but ordinary sixteenth-century Netherlanders in contemporary dress, pressed together and leaning in. John points across to the small figure of Christ. Look into the crowd and you find people barely listening, a fortune-teller reading a palm, faces turned every way. Bruegel sets the eternal Gospel down in his own dangerous present and lets the ordinary distraction of the audience stand for how imperfectly any of us receives it.