The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

I sometimes wonder whether the Gospels give us the full story of John the Baptist and his followers. When Paul visits Ephesus around 53 AD he meets some “disciples” (it’s not specified whose) and he asks them whether they received the Holy Spirit when they were baptized. They answer that they were only baptized into the baptism of John and they have never even heard of the Holy Spirit. As you can imagine, Paul quickly puts this right and baptizes them “in the name of the Lord Jesus and laying his hands on them to bring the Holy Spirit on them”.
It seems fairly clear from this story that Paul and his colleagues were not the only missionaries at work among the Jewish diaspora; apparently John and his followers also had converts. Our evidence (my evidence, at least) comes entirely from the New Testament and one would not expect it to be completely unbiased; to suggest any rivalry between the John’s mission and Christian missions would give undue prominence to the former; instead there is a continual insistence that John is the forerunner, the preliminary preparation for Jesus’ message; the last of the prophets; all of which emphasizes the greater importance of Jesus. I wonder if it seemed quite like that at the time. It’s telling that despite the stories (like that we have just heard) of John recognizing Jesus for what he was at Jesus’s baptism, John can later send from prison to ask if Jesus really is the he Messiah- evidently it wasn’t entirely clear even to John himself.  I don’t mean to suggest that we may have got it all wrong and that we ought really to be “Johnnians” or “Baptisers”, not Christians, but I think we can learn something about Christianity and the nature of Jesus’ message, if we look at the differences and similarities between these two charismatic leaders and especially the role of the Holy Spirit- which Paul believes makes the crucial difference between the them.
The similarities between Jesus and John are obvious; they were related as Mary is Elizabeth’s kinswoman to whom she is clearly quite close; they both have miraculous conceptions in the prophetic tradition; both preach a message of’ at least personal conversion (I think Jesus goes rather further) and both operate on the edge of society; John literally from the physical margin of the desert and Jesus from the fringes of more and, often less, respectable society. Their messages are unconventional, often the reverse of standard morality and with a strong whiff of doom laden eschatology. And both lose their lives through provoking the established authority.
There are differences too; John’s message is essentially personal. It is a call to repentance and the washing away of sin in order to avoid punishment in the coming judgment (with an implication that Jesus is the bringer of that judgment). But John’s agenda doesn’t go much beyond the individual; he recommends better behaviour to those who have behaved badly- soldiers and tax collectors- and he castigates Herod for his irregular marital arrangements but there is no suggestion of any new order; John is based in his own society and doesn’t look beyond, save to the final judgment of that society.
There is also a call to repentance in Jesus’ gospel, a call to the particular individual although interestingly- given its future importance- Jesus never baptizes anyone. Instead, there are frequent healings of individuals and sin and disability are somehow associated, if only as the things which inhibit full living. But it is that full living, eternal life, that Jesus preaches and repentance, even healing, is not an end in itself, but the door to that new life. Nevertheless, Jesus’ Gospel clearly had enough social comment in it to provoke the religious and secular authorities- enough for them to secure his execution.
Alongside Jesus’ practical and physical mission, there is also the enigmatic promise of the Kingdom of Heaven; I say enigmatic because there is always, and perhaps deliberately, an ambivalence about this kingdom whether it is now or in the future; whether in this world or a different world; whether it is of Heaven or in Heaven. Whatever else it may be, the Kingdom and the eternal life which will be led in it, are spiritual in that that go beyond (without denying) the physicality of the here and now. In contrast, John’s message is urgent and immediate but limited. Jesus on the other hand is bringing in a new order; Matthew has Jesus say that John is the greatest of the prophets but still the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. John completes the Old Covenant; Jesus is bringing something new.
It is perhaps significant that John’s baptism, the baptism of water should culminate the Old Testament; it’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that the most significant event in the history of Israel was the crossing of the Red Sea. As a candidate emerges from the water of baptism with a name to start new life, so the Israelites came through the Red Sea to be a new nation, and their literature refers again and again to the danger of water and the experience of passing through deadly waves or flood. Most notably, of course, at the very beginning as God creates the world out of watery chaos.
St John, at the start of his Gospel in the famous Christmas reading, picks up the idea from the first sentence of Genesis when he talks of the pre-existing Spirit moving over the water, ordering and creating and breathing life into the new creatures. Appropriately, it is the Holy Spirit which, at Pentecost  invigorates the new world that the Resurrection has heralded in and this is I think what the Gospel writers recognize when they speak of Jesus baptizing in the Holy Spirit.
However, this creative role of the Holy Spirit is an essential modifier to any notion that what Jesus is talking about in the Kingdom of Heaven is purely spiritual- in the sense of being divorced from the physical world. The Holy Spirit is active and practical in this world because it is the moving inspiration behind it. It is the force of love behind creation and behind our own actions as we are agents of God in his creative plan.
 In Matthew and Luke John refers to Jesus baptizing with water and fire. Jesus will not only baptize in the Spirit but also fire. And we remember that it was as fire that the Spirit appeared at Pentecost- explicitly as the tongues of flame.
Water and Fire, like water and spirit as breath and breeze, are opposites, but fire shares the ambivalence of water; both are destructive and yet creative and life enhancing. Water can drown  and fire burns; water washes and fire refines; water is essential to life and growth while fire gives us warmth and light and enables us to cook; work metal and fire pottery. But fire, like the Spirit, is even dangerously volatile and unpredictable something removed from our immediate, rational physical experience, just as it is also a present reminder of danger and of John’s warnings of the fire of judgment promised for the unrepentant. While the water of baptism is the means by which we confirm our individual and immediate repentance, the fire takes us into uncharted spiritual realms. So these two apparently opposing elements are also the elements which, symbolically, shape both our physical and spiritual being and bring us eternal life, because the Kingdom of Heaven is both here and now and somehow also beyond our immediate and physical experience, and beyond our control.
Whatever the true relationship really was between John and his followers and those of Jesus, those who will become the Church , the Gospel writers were  surely right to see John’s importance as a forerunner to Jesus; culminating the old order and heralding the new; preparing us for something much more powerful and transforming. And I think Paul was right to emphasise the presence of Holy Spirit as the crucial difference, the extra element behind and driving that transformation. I hope the comparison John and Jesus’ messages will help us to see more clearly the nature of the Gospel message; to see it and to act on it. Amen.