I have never taken John the Baptist as seriously as the Bible takes him. He was “the not Jesus” in the story, so he vanished in my imagination. This is odd since everyone else in the New Testament is the “not Jesus,” but even a fairly minor figure like Nicodemus played a bigger role in the Sunday School stories of my childhood.
The Gospels do not agree with my Sunday School. To give just one example: the first part of the Gospel of John keeps placing John the Baptist in the pivot role between God’s work before Jesus and God’s work after Jesus. If “in the beginning was the Word” and that “Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” then right in the midst of all this Big Theological Stuff “there was a man sent from God whose name was John.”
The Nicodemus story has a leader of Israel come at night and leave at night. He gets “it” later, but in this story, Nicodemus came in the dark and he leaves there . . . spiritually and physically. The verse that keeps showing up at football games, John 3:16, may not be the most quoted verse in the Bible (who can be sure?), but it must be close. This is Important Stuff: “God so loved the world . . . He gave His Son. . . ”
If the story of Nick at Night is not the most preached on story in John’s gospel, then the Woman at the Well may be. She is a she, and not just a she, but a Samaritan she. Safe to say her social status was nothing like Nicodemus in the Jewish community, but she came in the noon light and left in the light, spiritually and otherwise, bringing people to Jesus.
She surpassed he.
But in the middle (again!) is that John the Baptist in a section of John’s gospel I have never heard preached bearing witness to Jesus.
My downgrade of John the Baptist in my attention is not acceptable if I read the text carefully. John the Baptist acts as a hinge between the image of God as Creator and Redeemer of Israel (“In the beginning. . .” and Nicodemus) and God as Incarnate Son, the begotten for the salvation of the Earth. If the Bible were two images of God (one in the first Covenant and the other the second Covenant), then John the Baptist is the hinge between the two. He lived at the end of one era and pointed to the start of the next.
Later . . . the unnamed disciple (John!) will take on the role of the Baptist after Herod has him killed. John the Baptist points the way for us by honoring what God has done while looking forward to what God will do. John the Baptist spoke truth to Herod, he did not endorse him as better than Roman rule under a procurator. John the Baptist said: “Repent”, but the message was not limited to obvious sinners (as I have been), but to those that seem holy.
Yet his most consistent message, the best thing he ever said, was that he, John the Baptist, was not Jesus, not the Messiah. Oh, God, help me, but I need to remember this fact. God doesn’t need me to clean up the church, educate, or do anything. God may let me participate in what He does, but in the beginning and the end it is the Word and I had best hope to be enfolded in His creative and incarnate power: grace and truth.
There is no doubt about it: John the Baptist is the most effective not-Jesus in history. May we, like John the Baptist, grow less so Jesus Christ may increase.
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