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The First Sunday after the Epiphany

"Jesus and John the Baptist"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

The relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus is one of the most interesting in all of scripture. Despite each one being a familiar figure to us however, we have heard little about the dynamic between the two cousins; and therefore we have missed significant dimensions of God’s self-revelation to us. If we look closely at the interrelated roles of John and of Jesus, we will find a startling glimpse of the Divine and learn life-giving truth about ourselves.

Let us start with the stories about the conceptions and births of these two related Israelites. The Gospels tell us that the beginnings of each of them were uniquely marked by divine grace and announcements by angels. Their mothers, who were cousins, were specially chosen by God to bring into life these two anointed children of God. When Mary visited Elizabeth when both were pregnant, scripture tells us that John leaped in his mother’s womb at the presence of his divine kinsman, so closely aligned were they. Sight unseen, he responded instantly to the presence of the yet unborn Messiah.

Whether they spent time together as children, we do not know. We are not told, but given the closeness of extended families in that culture, it would seem odd if they did not. What we do know is that by the time Jesus finally accepted his daunting mission at age 30, John no longer recognized him! In next Sunday’s Gospel (John 1:29-42), John admits, “I myself did not know him.” In another passage we heard during Advent (Matthew 11:2-11), John in prison sends some of his followers to ask Jesus, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” How has John gone from instinctively responding joyfully to Jesus’ presence in the womb to not recognizing him?

One key comes from that Advent Gospel passage. John had dutifully embraced his role as the precursor of Jesus. “He who is coming after me is mightier than I,” John correctly proclaimed. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” But then he went on to suggest that Jesus would simply extend his (John’s) prophetic ministry, only with more authority: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Certainly not a very inviting image and one evocative more of John’s prophetic ministry of moral repentance than of Jesus’ baptism as God’s beloved Son and the renewing flames of the Spirit (later seen at Pentecost). These approaches were not completely separate of course, but the second focused more on compassion and forgiveness and new life. Once John the Baptist had re- experienced Jesus and grasped who he really was, his understanding and his description changed. “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” he declared to two of Jesus’ prospective followers, acknowledging again that he had not known him. “The Lamb of God,” who takes on himself the world’s sins, quite a different emphasis from brandishing a winnowing fork and burning chaff with unquenchable fire!

In that Advent Gospel passage when John inquired from prison about Jesus’ identity, Jesus responded that the signs of his messiahship were, not that evildoers were punished, but that “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” And then as if to say, “John, grow beyond your understanding of God’s judgment and even justice to include compassion and forgiveness and new life,” Jesus added, “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” While John’s ministry was from God and necessary to prepare the way for Jesus, the birth of God’s only Son was indeed “a new thing” and an expansion beyond human understanding of God’s reconciling, forgiving mercy and grace. Without dismissing the importance of repentance and of receiving God’s love and forgiveness, Jesus’ emergence as God’s “beloved Son, with whom [he was] well pleased” – and not John the Baptist or any of the rest of us – startlingly reveals to us God’s unfathomable compassion and love and mercy. All human beings – all of us, repentant or not – are beloved by God and are offered mercy and forgiveness and eternal life. As Peter declares in our second reading, finally grasping only after Jesus’ death and resurrection this profound divine self-revelation, “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality.”

Like John, we are also invited by Jesus to open our minds and our hearts to God’s love and forgiveness. If John the Baptist, Jesus’ spiritual and literal cousin, had trouble seeing beyond his own limited notions of God’s all encompassing compassion and love, how much more should we expect that we will! We far too easily project our own narrow judgment of others and even of ourselves onto God and fashion God into our own limited likeness. But first John and then Peter and all of Jesus’ disciples and then the Gentiles and then others through the ages and now we are challenged to let go of those punitive judgments and the need to decide who is “in” and who is “out”, and to embrace the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

John said of himself in relation to Jesus, God’s newly perceived presence in the world, “He must increase and I must decrease.” That is true for us as well. The divine love and compassion and mercy must grow within us, displacing our selfish and mean- spirited treatment of others and even of ourselves. That is the path we begin at baptism (as Meriwether Elizabeth and John Carter will do in a moment) and the path we continue our whole life’s journey. Like John in prison we are to grasp that Jesus is the one who is come. We are not to look for another.

Acts 10:34-43 Matthew 3:13-17

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