John 1. 6 – 8, 19 – 28
Advent 3 2020
The stories of John the Baptist in the Gospels are full of questions, both asked of him and asked by him. In them are question and answers for us too, as we might ask why a person who is not the Son of God, is not the Saviour, is so revered and hallowed in the Christian tradition.
The simplest and most profound question is asked of John in our Gospel reading this morning. It is asked by people who have a genuine reason to ask, and who have been tasked to do so by the religious authorities of their day. “Who are you?” It may have been that they had some research under their belts. A previous generation had asked “What then will this child become” when some decades before, his unlikely conception and birth into a priestly family had been revealed. These memories remain powerful. Who are you?
On the feast day of St John the Baptist, June 24 2012, I was in John’s wilderness, in the Negev. It is not necessarily hostile – water is there to be found – but survival is not easy, and it exposes the truth about people. Later that week we went to Ein Kerem, John’s birthplace, and sat at the well where it’s held that Elizabeth, John’s mother, and Mary, Jesus’s mother, compared bumps and Mary sang a song steeped in the traditions of the women of the people of God, rejoicing in how God turns the world upside down. Then we went to the Jordan. We had watched the sun rise over Moab, walked for seven miles down the Wadi Qelt following the course of an ancient spring into Jericho, and then gone to the site held to be from ancient times where John baptised Jesus. John the Baptist is everywhere you look in the land we call Holy.
“Who are you?” The answer is in the geography, in the actions of John, in the wilderness, the well and the water of the Jordan. He is the uncompromising speaker of truth to all who would hear it, and especially to power. The crowds flocked in the Judean wilderness because his message was so uncompromising, so challenging, that he had to be heard. Like the wilderness which was his home John was both enfolding and exposing. You had to be there, but it was not a comfortable place to be. He was the one who looked at the world as it was, and got angry.
So the crowds, and the soldiers and the tax collectors came to him and asked their question: “What then should we do?” It is asked three times in quick succession in Luke chapter 3, by people who have realised that his ministry has exposed their need. And he gives them answers: about the reform of conduct, of ethics, of action. He told them to be generous and sacrificial. He told them not to take bribes or extort people. The Lord knows what he would have said to those who give contracts to their friends and mismanage billions.
It was not just the words. A mark of people’s response was this new thing, this outward sign, this water drowning. Another question: “Why are you baptising?” he is asked, and in our passage, there is no direct answer. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be. It is enough to see that his words cause action and response, a recognition of the need for change. He is baptising because he looked into his traditions, like the prophecies of Isaiah, and got angry at injustice, at oppression, at the soldiers occupying his land, at the collaboration of his people in corruption and oppression. This needs overwhelming, with something.
It is so powerful that when the people come to him and ask “Who are you”, they must have wondered if John was the Messiah, and John must have known and wondered himself because they don’t even have to ask it. He tells it straight that he is not the Messiah. They need something they can understand, and go though all the other possibilities of the figures who might come again, and, in the wonderful words of previous translations “he answered ‘no’”.
John spends his ministry drawing people to himself only to send them away. In John chapter 3 he is asked: “Do you not care that people are now flocking to Jesus?” You know, he says, that I have always said that I was the best man, not the Bridegroom. John might have used all sorts of distinctive methods to get his message across, but the whole point of it has not been to draw attention to himself, but to point somewhere else. His greatest joy is to recognise that Jesus is what he was looking for, preparing for, and talking about. And then come the words which really bite in a self obsessed generation. ‘He must increase, and I must decrease’. Archbishop William Temple, commenting on this passage asks “is not this near to the perfection of humility and self abnegation?” It may well be so.
The Church has to walk the way of the Baptist. We have the greatest message, the richest treasure, the finest beauty, the deepest love, the most profound healing to share. So, like the Baptist, we must point to that with everything that we have, use every skill and gift we have been given, draw attention to the message in new and exciting ways. Why else would we embrace the technology on display today? If, through this, Christians and the Christian Churches are asked “who are you” we can follow the Baptiser and say “we are those who follow the one whose shoelaces we are not worthy to untie, the one who brings life and healing and hope”.
Like the Baptist we must answer question of truth and justice with honesty and power that leads to action. And like the Baptist we will say that this will only lead to a changed world when we embrace the good news of the death and resurrection of the Son of God. “He must increase” does not mean that we will disappear, but it is for us to be found newly made in Christ. “Who are we?” Followers of Christ. Seekers for truth. Campaigners for justice. We are the redeemed, the humble, the children of God. To rejoice in that – to decrease ourselves – is to find true fulfilment. Then we can be as loud as we like about the God who has given us voice, though camel hair coats and strange diets are not, always required. Amen.