When I first started coming to this church, I assumed to was dedicated to St John the Baptist and I was a little disappointed to discover that the dedicatee is actually St John the Evangelist. The chief reason for my disappointment was that even a humble, small scale, celebration in midsummer (something along the lines of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger perhaps) would be more fun that the rather grim themes that pervade of St John the Evangelist’s festival in the graveyard spot just after Christmas.
A comparison of the two saints is instructive, exemplifying two different and even opposed, although ultimately, I think complimentary, strands of Christian thinking which were it seems present right from the start, even before the start, of Christianity.
The principal evidence for John’s life and message comes from the Christian Gospels and Acts. But we can perhaps read beneath the Christian record and find a figure who was possibly more influential than the Gospels suggest. When Paul arrives in Ephesus he is surprised that the “Christians” there know only the baptism of John (which did not mention the Holy Spirit). This rather suggests that John’s disciples were moving through the Jewish communities around the Eastern Mediterranean spreading another, largely compatible, but distinct, gospel in the same way that Paul was himself.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke John is given considerable prominence with stories of his miraculous origin and strange behaviour, but his role is emphatically subsidiary to the main narrative about Jesus. As the forerunner, the preparer for Jesus, any emphasis on John is reflected onto Jesus; John’s conception is miraculous but trumped by Jesus’ who doesn’t have a human father at all. John’s behaviour and lifestyle are extremely odd; Jesus, however, is not particularly ascetic-indeed he’s accused of eating too well; and far from being a Nazarite tee-totaller, he actually turns water into wine and no doubt had wee drop of it himself. Jesus does not withdraw from society to the wilderness (save for an initial 40 days) but spends his time within society, both high and low and chased by crowds in Galilee. There are similarities but also significant contrasts between the two men.
I suggest that part of the reason giving so much space to John the Baptist was to emphasise his importance but only as the foil and as the forerunner of Jesus; this was necessary perhaps because John’s influence and following was, actually, rather greater that the Early Church wanted to admit. Outright rivalry was undesirable not least because much of Jesus’ Gospel adopted John’s radical and revolutionary message. But any rivalry, whether it was actual or only potential, could be absorbed and neutralised by putting John forward as the last and greatest of the prophets and one who ushered in the Messiah. Furthermore, it places Jesus firmly in the prophetic tradition; his message, the Gospel, was not new but was given an original slant and entirely different authority. Jesus spoke directly for God.
John the Baptist is given much less space in St John’s Gospel; he has become just a voice answering anxious enquiries from the Jewish establishment. It’s a self-deferential voice; the Baptist is no longer a threat but a vehicle to introduce the hostility of “the Jews”- that is the religious authorities and more generally, ”the World”. John the Baptist, in St John’s Gospel responds to the Jews’ hostility; in the other Gospels he has taken the initiative, foretelling the one who will come with an axe or a winnowing fork to sort out the virtuous wheat from the unrighteous chaff. There is none of this antagonism in St John’s Gospel; the opposition to Jesus comes from the worldly Jews- that is the Establishment and Jesus himself declares that he is not concerned with this world- “My Kingdom is not of this world” he tells Pilate.
Even his interventions to put right the failings of the physical world whether correcting a miscalculation in the wedding wine order or restoring sight to the born blind, are done primarily as signs of Jesus’ other worldly power; his intimate relationship, indeed identity, with God which will culminate in his paradoxical glorification on the cross.
In the other Gospels Jesus heralds the arrival of the Kingdom of God or of Heaven; it’s not some other place but here and potentially now, where the failings of this world are put right; the blind see and the deaf hear, where the oppressed are relieved and the powerful toppled. These are all ideas which come though Isaiah and other prophets, and finally, Mary in the Magnificat, and John the Baptist. They may have seemed far fetched and we are still far from realising all of them, but they are not impossible. They are set within the potential of the actual physical world.
In contrast Jesus in John’s Gospel offers Eternal Life- a personal salvation. I struggle with idea, but one thing is clear and consistent with the rest of John’s Gospel message, the world of Eternal Life is not this world of darkness and sin and there is little suggestion in John’s Gospel that we should be doing anything about making that world brighter or better. Instead, John envisages and possibly led, an exclusive community, a sheep fold with the saved safely inside governed by a rather patronising and autocratic shepherd. That is all too accurate a picture of the church as it has so often been and often is, but it’s surely not what it should be.
The John the Baptist of Matthew Mark and Luke is a more frightening and more challenging figure. He is not at all the disciple whom Jesus loved; but he is one better grounded in the world in which we live. That world has never been more depressing, in my conscious lifetime, than it is at present; never has the need to realise Isaiah’s vision of freedom from hunger, disease, poverty and oppression been greater. It is Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for which John the Forerunner prepares the way that should inspire us to play our part in bringing in the Kingdom, where God’s will is indeed done in Earth as it is in Heaven.
So I would rather we were dedicated to St John the Baptist, while respecting the more introspective comfort that John the Evangelist and his Gospel and letters may bring. Evelyn Underhill may be right, as is quoted on her new gravestone in the ABG “A Christianity which is only active is not a complete Christianity” but I would add that Christianity which is only mystical or contemplative is equally incomplete. Amen