A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. And this is the testimony of John. When the Jews from Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to him to ask him, “Who are you?” he admitted and did not deny it, but admitted, “I am not the Christ.” . . . They asked him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ or Elijah or the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water; but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.” (John 1.6-8, 19-20, 25-27)
Interestingly, John XXIII, elected to the papacy in October 1958, would soon enough earn for himself the title, “The Good Pope,” quite an accomplishment considering he had 260 predecessors. The fourth child of thirteen children born to Giovanni and Marianna Roncalli, poor sharecroppers in a village in Bergamo, he never forgot his humble origins.
When he left Venice for the papal election in 1958, he had purchased a return train ticket, although there was already speculation of his possible election. When elected at the conclave and asked by which name he would be called, he answered, “I will be called John, a name sweet to me because it is the name of my father, dear to me because it is the name of the humble parish where I was baptized, and the solemn name of numberless cathedrals scattered throughout the world.”
He then added, “Twenty-two Johns have been Pope and almost all had a brief pontificate. I have preferred to hide the smallness of my name behind this magnificent succession of Roman pontiffs.” Soon enough, he would show the same humility when he put aside the long-practiced papal use of the formal “we” when referring to himself, surprising the media when he visited a school for juvenile delinquents in Rome and saying to them, “I have wanted to come here for some time.”
Carrying a sense of humor as well as a sense of humility, he liked to share the story of how, within weeks of his election, he was walking by when he heard a woman exclaim in a loud voice, “My God, he’s so fat!” He turned to the woman, smiled, and said, “The holy conclave isn’t exactly a beauty contest!” His reply showed that while his girth may have been large, his ego was small. When he died in 1963, his papacy only five years long, the world wept at the news of the death of “the good pope.”
In a real sense, John XXIII was following in the footsteps of another John, this one known to history as John the Baptist, a prophet in the Judean wilderness and a preacher alongside the banks of the Jordan River where he fulfilled his self-described mission as “the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘make straight the way of the Lord.’”
Our reading today presents John the Baptist to us for the second time during this season of preparation known to us as Advent. As we saw the first time, John is again quick to point out that he is not the messiah and he is not Elijah. In fact, as we hear today, he tells his listeners that “there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”
For the evangelist John who introduces us to John the Baptist today in that opening chapter of his gospel–much the same as the evangelist Mark did last week–the preacher at the River Jordan has a singular purpose: “to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.” In other words, John points to another, the Christ, who waits in the wings until his baptism confirms his status when a voice from the heavens declares, “Here is my beloved Son.”
Soon after, Jesus of Nazareth, claimed by the Most High God as his Son, begins his mission throughout Galilee, his light breaking through the darkness of the world as John the Baptist had, even if “the world preferred the darkness to the light.” And in a short while, John will tell the crowds, “He must increase, but I must decrease,” once again making clear his role is “to testify to the light,” his part in the drama of salvation small in comparison to the one who was coming after him.
Perhaps that is a lesson we may want to take from the scriptures today, learning from John that, as followers of the Galilean Teacher called Jesus, we also share in that same mission as the prophet of the Jordan–to point to the light. In the same way that the evangelist tells us that “a man named John was sent from God,” we might see ourselves–whatever our name–as sent from God for testimony, specifically to testify to the light that came into the world on that first Christmas, crashing through the darkness, and bringing light into all the dark corners where he would walk.
If we are to get it right, it is important that we use John as a model. As the Baptist makes clear, he understood that he was the lesser and that the Christ was the greater. He never misappropriated his mission to have the spotlight shine on him, but instead used his words and his testimony to point the light on the one whose sandal he was not worthy to untie.
That then becomes a litmus test for the authenticity of our faithfulness as a follower of the Messiah–our ability to let go of our ego and to not draw attention to ourselves, rightly understanding that we are not the light, but only carriers of the light, much the same as someone who holds a lantern in his hand. If we bring the lantern close to our own faces, then we have misconstrued our mission as the greater, not as the lesser.
Another valuable lesson that we can learn from John is that the smallness of our persons does not imply a smallness of our purpose. Whatever the task we do when pointing to the light of the world, it is significant. Just as the tiniest light in the night sky can be seen from a great distance, so the little bit of light that we carry on behalf of the Christ will be important, stealing from the darkness at least a small sliver of its power.
One of the surest models of this invaluable “smallness” was Terese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun that died at the age of twenty-four in 1897. Often called “The Little Flower of Jesus,” Terese found that she could give glory to God by just “being her beautiful little self among all the other flowers in God’s garden.” Her short life in the cloister convinced her that she could bring light, not so much by heroic acts or great deeds, but by small measures of love.
In her autobiography, she wrote, “I applied myself especially to practice little virtues, not having the facility to perform great ones.” This became known as her “little way,” based on her often referring to her littleness, describing herself as a grain of sand, “always littler, lighter, in order to be lifted more easily by the breeze of love.”
She explained, “Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden to me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.” So, for example, she intentionally sought out the company of those nuns whose personalities she found hardest to tolerate. She went out of her way to spend time with the people she would, given a choice, have avoided, in this way extending love to the unlovable.
Often, Terese spoke of the “subtraction” that she desired in her life, explaining that “I must remain little, I must become still less,” her words echoing those of John the Baptist. She later wrote, “Leaving to great souls, to great minds, the beautiful books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because only children and those who are like them will be admitted to the heavenly banquet.” Hers was a spirituality of subtraction, not addition.
Ironically, a century after her death, John Paul II would describe her as “the greatest saint in modern times,” and would declare her a Doctor of the Church, an honor given to only thirty-seven people throughout the ages in recognition of their contribution to theology and to the spiritual life. She, for her part, surely would have fled from the attention, wanting obscurity instead of recognition.
However, her life and her writing remind us that our lives do not have to achieve great things in order for us to point to the light that is Christ. Our names do not have to be recognizable for us to witness to the One sent into the world to cast out the darkness. As we see today, John the Baptist regularly disavowed any claim to fame, telling the religious leaders of Jerusalem that he was not the Christ, nor was he Elijah, nor was he the prophet.
In fact, the only thing John claimed for himself was that he was “the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘make straight the way of the Lord.’” In this way, he again pointed to the one who would come after him, the one whose path he had prepared for by his unworthiness, seeing himself as no more than a slave who unties the sandals off the feet of his master.
As we approach Christmas, we surely can find something worthy of imitation in the man named John who was sent from God to give witness. His decreasing so that the Messiah might increase is an apt precursor to the birth of the Christ in a crib in Bethlehem, who also chose the little way, rather than the way of pomp and ceremony, the way of kings and titans.
Paul of Tarsus would later describe that birth in Bethlehem in his letter to the people of Philippi in these beautiful words, “Have among yourselves the same attitude as Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
So, it is enough, then, if we find ourselves testifying to the light away from the crowds and in the lost corners of the world, our names never on marquees or on letterheads, witnessing to the love of God in the small ways that have been put before us, bringing into the ordinary the extraordinary gift of God’s light in a world heavily overshadowed by darkness. It is the way of subtraction, not addition, becoming lesser, not greater.
–Jeremy Myers
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