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Sunday 10th December 2006ADVENT II

Fr Christopher MacKenna, St Marylebone Healing and Counselling Centre

Baruch 5.1-9, Phil.3.1-11, Luke 3.1-6

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11.11).

When this happens, we are like the Wise Men in Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, who returned to their palaces: 'But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.'

John the Baptist plays a pivotal role within the Bible story: dressed like Elijah, and standing firmly within the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament, the Gospels all agree that John was, in some way, associated with the start of Jesus’ ministry.  And yet, confusingly, there is also evidence within the pages of the Bible that the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and, perhaps even more, between John’s disciples and Jesus’ disciples, was neither simple nor straightforward.  The more attentively we read, the more the questions that pile up.  For example,

1.    Were John the Baptist and Jesus related?  According to Saint Luke, they were cousins; John’s mother, Elizabeth, being one of the first to hear of Jesus’ miraculous conception.  And yet, when we read Saint John’s Gospel, we find John saying that he only identified Jesus as the Lamb of God when the Spirit descended on him at his baptism.

2.    Then there is the question of priority.  John the Baptist came first in time, and the conversation which Matthew puts into the mouths of Jesus and John, at the time of Jesus’ baptism, about John needing to be baptised by Jesus, suggests that there were some, in the early days of the Christian church, who were still anxious about this apparent subordination of Jesus to John.

3.    Again, if John Baptist’s teaching, as recorded by Matthew and Luke, is even remotely accurate, it becomes questionable as to whether John ever understood the unique character of Jesus’ mission.  John says:

Does the heartfelt question sent by John to Jesus, when John was entombed in Herod’s prison, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Mt 11.3) betray John’s disillusionment with Jesus?  There was John in prison, in mortal peril for criticising Herod’s morality; and yet Jesus seemed more comfortable wining and dining with sinners.  Jesus himself put the contrast very succinctly: John came neither eating not drinking, and people accused him of being demon possessed.  The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and people called him “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Mt 11.18f). Caricature though it is, it is difficult to reconcile this picture of Jesus with the agent of God’s wrath foretold by John.

4.    And how did Jesus feel about John?  One of the most difficult verses in the whole of the New Testament is the text with which I began: the massively back-handed tribute which Jesus paid to John, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Mt 11.11).  Did Jesus really feel that John was a stranger to the kingdom of heaven?  And if so, why?  

5.    Finally there is evidence that, as late as the reign of the Emperor Claudius (20 years after Jesus’ death), there were Jewish people in the Roman Empire who, although aware of the facts about Jesus, knew only the baptism of John (Acts 18.2, 24f).  Reading between the lines it may well be that, in the middle years of the first century, there was a ‘John the Baptist Movement’ as well as a ‘Jesus movement’; and that it was only gradually that the Jesus Movement won the day.  In which case, we can see the uneasy relationship between the followers of these two men reflected in the uncertainties of scripture, which both affirm the crucial role played by John in nurturing Jesus’ Messianic consciousness; and yet, at the same time, insist that John was very much the junior partner in their transient alliance.

Behind the conflicting references to John Baptist in the New Testament, there lie perhaps several decades of theological and church-political struggle and debate.

But maybe it wasn’t just the early church which found John difficult to assimilate.  Unlike Jesus, John chose not to work in people’s homes, or synagogues, or in the Temple, or on their highways, or even on the Sea of Galilee.  No, instead of mixing with people, instead of going where the people were, John called them out into the wilderness and dunked them in the river Jordan.  Whereas Jesus chose to meet people in their daily comings and goings, John tore them out of their familiar context, and drew them into the wilderness; that elemental place of life and death in which, originally, Israel had become a nation.

John’s gift, John’s power – but perhaps also the greatest danger which John represented – was his ability to lift people out of the domestic surroundings which would, in so many ways, have sustained their sense of identity, and bring them into the stark setting of the wilderness where he could paint a very different picture of their lives: “You brood of vipers,” he said to the crowds who stumbled out to hear him, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath which is to come?”  Say that to a man in his living room, and he might punch you on the nose.  Say that to him in the boiling heat of the Dead Sea valley, though, where life hangs by a thread and, even today, people die of thirst who wander from the road, and the effect might be rather different.  

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself with a group of people, several of whom had attended Billy Graham’s evangelistic crusades in the early 1950’s.  A football stadium is hardly the Judean Wilderness, but the effect of those meetings may not have been so different.  Billy Graham’s crusades drew thousands of people out of the known security of their homes and work places and churches, almost literally into another world, where Billy Graham, with his great vocal gifts, was able to paint a powerful picture of life under the judgement of God.  

In one way, I have no reservation about these events.  In our ordinary, everyday lives, wrapped round, as we are, by the comforts and securities of life; and constantly subject to the opinions of the media and the blandishments of our consumer culture, there may be little opportunity for us to hear the voice of God.  Sometimes we need to be shocked from our security by a prophetic voice which cuts through our self-serving delusions.

Billy Graham and John the Baptist were called to do this.  In the wider purposes of God, each had his place.

But there are also dangers attached to the prophetic voice sounding in the wilderness.  Fine if it shocks us out of our complacency and then returns us to our daily life, but now with a new purpose which has, somehow, to be woven into the texture of our lives.  When this happens, we are like the Wise Men, in Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, who returned to their palaces,   

When this happens to us, and once returned to our domestic setting, we can begin the spiritual and moral struggle through which we learn gradually to sanctify the basic fabric of our lives.

The wilderness and Wembley stadium are fine, if they are but a liminal space through which we pass.  The danger, though, is of getting stuck there; because when we get stuck in that apocalyptic place, the ordinary fabric of human existence begins to seem insignificant, and history gets foreshortened so that the end of the world is now.

I wonder if John Baptist himself had fallen victim to this delusion when he predicted that Jesus would come with His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire (Lk 3.16f).

There is no hint of love in this prediction, no compassion for the lost, not even a suggestion of regret at the fate of so many people.  Quite the opposite, in fact: almost a delight that, at last, sinners will get their due.

As with a retreat, so with the Judean Wilderness or the Billy Graham Crusade: stay too long in them, and the risk is that the complexity and the colour will get drained from life, so that all is seen in black and white.

Jesus went out into the wilderness and was baptised by John.  He, like many others, was indebted to John for that stark moment of clarity which enabled him to redirect his way.  But Jesus did not stay in the wilderness.  He returned to humanise the experience.  Maybe this was something that John would never understand.  If so, could this be why Jesus said,

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11.11) ?