Testimony

John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He is the one of whom I said, ‘A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.’ I did not know him, but the reason why I came baptizing with water was that he might be made known to Israel.” John testified further, saying, “I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven and remain upon him. I did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain, he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.” (John 1.29-34)

On this Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, our selection is taken from the Gospel of John, a peculiar pick considering we are in the year of Matthew. When the readings for the Roman Lectionary were selected in 1970, the work done by an international group of scholars, they decided on a “more robust” picking of scripture, resulting in the present three-year format, each year given to a particular synoptic writer. 

All of which does not explain why John is inserted here at the start of Year A when we should be hearing from Matthew as we did last Sunday on the First Sunday in Ordinary Time. It is the same in Years B and C on this Second Sunday with a text taken from John. The only explanation offered by the collaborators was that they wanted “the Gospel to continue to center on the manifestation of the Lord, which is celebrated on the Solemnity of the Epiphany through the traditional passage about the wedding feast at Cana and two other passages from the Gospel of John.” No worries. We will return to Matthew next Sunday.

So what we find today is a continuation of the story of the baptism of Jesus that we studied last Sunday and that was provided by Matthew. Of course, as mentioned then, John provides no specific story about the baptism in his gospel, but only makes an allusion to it which we find in the selection today when John says, “I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven and remain upon him.” That is as good as it gets in regard to Jesus’ baptism in John’s gospel.

For our purposes, it is important to know that the writer of the fourth gospel is intent on making a clear distinction between the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, apparently in response to the historical fact that the disciples of John were still around at the time of the writing of this gospel, resulting in a continued dialogue about whom–John or Jesus–was “the real thing.” It is for this same reason that these two are the only figures in this early episode and no one else. 

If there is any question remaining about John’s role vis-a-vis Jesus, it is firmly answered in this gospel. As we can see, Jesus says nothing, but John says a lot. John the Baptist, seeing Jesus approach him, points to him and says, “A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.” If that were not clear enough as to who was the greater and who was the lesser, John admits he has been baptizing with water while Jesus “is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”

So, John’s role is differentiated and defined in this text. The Baptist’s job is to point to Jesus, proclaiming him as the Son of God, and then stepping away, his role in the story of salvation done, allowing Jesus’ story to unfold. Two key words are attached to John’s part in this story. They are “see” and “testify.” The evangelist says “John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him” and later says, “John testified further.”

These words convey the truth that John knows that Jesus is “the Lamb of God” and “the Son of God,” the two titles he gives Jesus, and now he testifies or serves as a witness to that fact. It is interesting to see that the Baptist says twice in this episode that he did not know Jesus, leaving unexplained why Luke will say John was Jesus’ cousin. Perhaps it is as simple as he didn’t yet see Jesus was the Son of God.

No matter. We’ll stay out of the weeds. His main point here is that while he did not know Jesus, he came to know who he was at his baptism because he had been told that “On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain, he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” It is interesting that John does not say he actually baptized Jesus, the suggestion left to be read into his words.

What John does make clear is that he had received a prior message from God that the identity of the promised Messiah would be revealed to him, not by name and not by his face, hence the word “whomever,” but at the moment that he sees the Spirit descend upon one certain person. That person, of course, was Jesus. 

Having seen the Spirit come down upon Jesus, John can now testify to others as to the fullness of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, a major theme that will be carried through the remainder of the gospel, serving as a contrast to those who have seen but who do not believe, such as Jesus’ fellow Jews. It is for this same reason that the evangelist wants to close the crucifixion scene with these words, “An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth, so that you may come to believe.” 

In effect, then, we have two witnesses, one at the start with John the Baptist, the other at the end with this unnamed person, but both testifying to the same truth. As someone who has seen–the meaning of the word witness–they can testify to what they have seen and what they know with certainty. And why do they testify? So that others might come to believe the truth, the truth that Jesus is the Lamb of God and the Son of God.

The evangelist could not make it clearer to his readers. If we may have somehow missed it, the gospel proper ends with the evangelist spelling it out for us, “These are written that you come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.”

For us who wish to follow the way of Jesus, the imperative is obvious. Like John, we must see and testify to what we have seen, namely that Jesus is the Son of God. The role of witnessing did not end with John, but only began. The duty is passed on to us who stand now where John stood, with Jesus standing before us, calling us to see him as the Son of God and to testify to that same truth.

If this is the intent of the evangelist, which I believe it is, then the questions become even more challenging as we ask ourselves about our duty as a witness to Jesus, testifying that he is the way, the truth, and the life, as Jesus identifies himself in John 14.6. The first thing to ask ourselves, of course, is if we have responded to that duty. Have we, in fact, become witnesses to the way of life that Jesus lived 

and called his followers to live?  What is the testimony that we give about Jesus whom we call our Savior and Lord?

If there ever was a time that demanded witnesses to the life that the Lord Jesus calls us to live, it is these times, our world darkened with hatred, hostility, and horrific acts of inhumane treatment of others. It seems we awoke one day to find ourselves in the dystopian world portrayed in William Golden’s 1954 classic “The Lord of the Flies,” a nightmarish story about a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island who soon descend into savagery, brutality, and fratricide. 

Everywhere our baser impulses are on full display as we divide ourselves into cliques, clans and clubs, build up walls to separate ourselves from others, and demonize anyone outside our own group. Insults fill the airwaves and inflammatory speech has become the language of the land. It is a land where those whom we don’t agree with are silenced, segregated, or shot. We want to view the world through the lens of winners and losers, not brothers and sisters as Jesus would have us do.

As those of us who still believe we have better angels attempt to find the reasons for our descent into hell on earth, we do not want to overlook the most obvious cause. We have failed horribly to witness to the Lord Jesus, living as he lived, loving as he loved, and welcoming all others as he welcomed them. The darkness that we see destroying the last bit of light is because of a colossal failure of Christians to testify to the truths of Jesus, a testimony done more in works than in words. We do not need to look into the dark world for the answer; we need only look into our darkened hearts. 

Somehow, we have been able to convince ourselves that being a Christian requires little more than a name tag, giving us a free pass to despise, denigrate and destroy the lives of others all the while we call ourselves followers of Jesus, the one who welcomed the foreigner, fed the hungry, and sat down at table with sinners. Truly, it is a wholesale mockery of the Crucified Lord, no different than the taunts and curses that the soldiers and crowds hurled upon him as he suffered on the cross.

Our mind split is mind boggling, requiring the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast as we twist the teachings of Jesus to suit our own fancy, finding all manner of ways to rationalize and to departmentalize our actions that are so clearly opposite those of Jesus. How else can we explain the brutal statistic that shows churchgoers are regularly more prejudiced than non-churchgoers?

Obviously, we have found ways to convince ourselves that we are followers of Jesus when we are not, using measures and means such as church attendance or cherry-picked morals that do not necessarily translate into true discipleship. By our failure to testify to Jesus, we continue to prove right the harsh criticism of the Indian peace activist Mahatma Gandhi who observed the Christians of his time and said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.” Or, on another occasion, he stated the same sentiment in this way, “I’d be a Christian if it weren’t for the Christians.”

Without an ability to see our own complicity in the chaos and the conflict, we will never right the ship, finding ourselves in ever more choppy waters that may, if we are not careful, capsize the ship. If we truly want to take ownership of the catastrophic world in which we find ourselves, we might look at some of the core indicators that will tell us if we do or do not testify to Jesus’ ways, such as our checkbook that proves our priorities, or the clan that forms and informs us, or the candidates for whom we cast our civic vote. If these in any way do not show we are testifying to Jesus, then the real question is to whom we are, in fact, testifying. Perhaps we have built a golden calf like the Hebrew slaves in the desert, worshipping a false deity of our own making, rather than the One we should be witnessing to, Jesus, the Son of God.

Yet another voice from the past may help us in this matter. Dr. Martin Luther King in his work for the equality of all peoples called upon the nation to create “a beloved community” that has at its heart love. “Love,” he said, “builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy,” he stated, “but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that.” To get anywhere close to that beloved community, he said, would require “a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

As a prophet, John the Baptist did as every prophet does. He gets under our skin. As a whole, they have the ability to rip away the masks, the deceit, and the duplicity in which we clothe ourselves. So it is no surprise that John the Baptist does much the same today when he puts before us his testifying to Jesus,  forcing us to look at our own witness to the Christ. In the end, we’re left with the uncomfortable truth that if we don’t like what we see outside in the world, then we may need to look inside ourselves for some solution to the problems.

–Jeremy Myers