John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (Mark 1:4-5)
You may be interested to know that this Sunday on which we remember the Baptism of Jesus is also designated by our lectionary as the ‘first Sunday in Ordinary time’.
I have no idea why the church decided to refer to these days as ‘ordinary time’ though I suppose it does help us differentiate this period from the ‘special time’ that we’ve been having over recent weeks – Christmas and New Year, most obviously.
Those festivals are fading into distant memory now, and the decorations have all been packed away and the sexual misconduct cases that arose in the aftermath of the office Christmas party have all been dealt with, and yet John the Baptist is back!
John is my favourite Yuletide figure, arriving as he does like clockwork in the early weeks of December every year, and bringing with him his own very special sort of Christmas cheer – “You brood of vipers! You warned you to flee from the wrath to come” (Luke 3). We generally focus on John for at least two Sundays in the lead-up to Christmas but we might have expected to see him go back into the Nativity box for another twelve months along with Joseph and the shepherds, but here he is again!
“Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” (Mark 1:6)
John was an eccentric – there’s no doubt about that – and yet I don’t think that’s why he’s treated as such a central character by the authors of each of the Gospels. In truth, I assume that the reason he receives so much attention from the Gospel writers was on account of issues that the church was dealing with at the time the Gospels were written – namely, that there were still communities of disciples of John the Baptist active in ministry at the time.
That was made quite explicit in the reading we had from the book of The Acts of the Apostles this morning, where Paul meets up with some of the disciples of John the Baptist while he was in Ephesus (Acts 19:1-7). Paul tells these people that John had all the time been pointing people to Jesus, at which point these dozen or so men all ask to be re-baptised in the name of Jesus.
I imagine that the Acts story illustrates something that was probably quite common. There may have been a large number of followers of John the Baptist spread around first century Palestine and, personally, I can’t imagine that these people always made the transition from following the Baptist to following Jesus quite as seamlessly as is suggested in the example we are given.
In truth, I think it must have been a significant and time-consuming part of the mission of the early church – to bring the disciples of John the Baptist back into the fold by joining the community of the followers of Jesus, and I assume that that is the reason why the Gospels never seem to mention John without having him voice a disclaimer of some sort, such as we have in Mark chapter one.
“He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:7-8)
This disclaimer – that John was not the one we were waiting for – is spelt out even more explicitly in John’s Gospel: “Now this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”” (John 1:19-20)
We normally assume that John’s Gospel was the last of the four Gospels written, and was probably published early in the second century – a full generation after the death and resurrection of Jesus – and yet the fact that John’s Gospel draws on the most explicit disclaimer of all from the Baptist suggests that his disciples were still alive and well as a distinct group in the second century!
Why would that be the case? Why would it take so long for the disciples of John the Baptist to be absorbed into the Christian community? Why was it all so difficult when John and Jesus worked together so closely and so harmoniously in ministry, like Torvill and Dean – dancing the same dance and preaching the same message?
Given the close working relationship between these two, would we not have expected the followers of John to have immediately migrated over the Jesus just as soon as their dear leader had been executed by Herod?
My guess is that the relationship between the followers of Jesus and the followers of John was never completely without its tensions, as indeed I suspect that the relationship between John and Jesus was never completely without its tensions.
Yes, John spoke adoringly of Jesus – “behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) – just as Jesus spoke glowingly of John – “no man born of woman was greater than John” (Matthew 11:11) – and yet the only times we actually see them directly interact there is tension between them!
The first occasion was that of the baptism. No tension is recorded in the reading from Mark’s Gospel that we had this morning but Matthew’s Gospel picks it up.
“Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”” (Matthew 3:13-14)
It could be debated whether that was really tension between them, but there’s no room for debate regarding the later dialogue that takes place when John is in prison.
John has been arrested by Herod and he’s languishing in prison and it seems that he is plagued by real doubts as to whether he got it right in pointing people to Jesus!
“When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask [Jesus], “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”” (Matthew 11:2-3)
This is a telling passage as it comes right at the end of John and Jesus’ time together. This is not John having doubts about Jesus because he hadn’t really had time to see Jesus in action properly or hear fully what He was on about. This is John at the end of his life, fully cognisant of Jesus’ words and works, yet wondering whether Jesus is really the chosen one of God or whether he got Jesus completely wrong! This reflects that, while John and Jesus had a close working relationship, and one that was mutually supportive, they were also on quite distinct tracks!
John was a fiery old-time-religion-style prophet. He is the bridge between the Old Testament and the New. He preached the law in the traditional style of the great prophets of old (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos and Jeremiah). He called people back to the ways of God and warned them of ruin if they continued in their sinful ways.
That, I hope, is a decent description of John, but it’s a very inadequate description of Jesus, even if this was exactly the sort of thing that people were looking for in God’s Messiah, and even if this was exactly what John was expecting to find in Jesus.
I can’t pretend to have any great grasp of the first century Hebrew mindset, of course, and I can’t even pretend to understand the modern Hebrew mindset, as I simply don’t have enough close friends who are Orthodox Jews. I am though, as you know, a little more familiar with the Islamic mindset, and I believe that is quite close.
Some people will think it ridiculous to suggest that the religion of the Old Testament is quite close to Islam, but Prophet Muhammad himself said that his role was to call people back to faith in the God of Abraham (Surat-un Nisaa (4):125).
Regardless of whatever political differences there may be between any number of modern-day Muslims and modern-day Jews, I do believe that at a doctrinal level the understanding of God is very much the same, and I note that when Christians convert to Islam they are not referred to by our local Islamic community as ‘converts’ but as ‘reverts’ – the idea being that these persons have reverted back to the original religion of Abraham, out of which Christianity grew.
I think this is quite a good understanding, as I do believe that the life and teaching of Jesus and the Apostles lead us to an understanding of God and of life that is quite distinct from anything that we can find in either the Old Testament prophets or Islam. And I do think that those points of distinction were probably also the points of tension between Jesus and John the Baptist.
People will tell you that the difference between Christianity and Islam is simply the different status that is applied to the person of Jesus. This, while true enough at one level, I think this runs the risk of trivialising the differences between the faiths.
I would like to suggest that there are three board points of departure between Christianity (as I understand it) and Islam.
The first is a differing understanding of what God’s revelation is, and by this I don’t mean that we simply have competing holy books.
The revelation of God in Islam is indeed the Q’uran. The book is said to have been dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel and is believed to be without corruption.
The revelation of God in Christian understanding is not fundamentally the New Testament as a book. Indeed, it’s not a book at all. It is Jesus.
“In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” (Hebrews 1:1-2)
Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God in the Christian understanding – the visible image of our invisible God (as St Paul calls Him in Colossians 1:15). The ultimate revelation of God is not in words but is the word who became a person – Jesus. This is the first key point of distinction in my view.
The second point of distinction, in my understanding, is that while Islam focuses on communicating the immutable law of God and eternal moral truths, the Christian faith is far more interested in detailing specific points of history!
This is most evident in our creeds. The three creeds of the church are the most concise summaries of what Christians have believed historically, and at the core of each of these creeds is a series of historical statements about Jesus – who was born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried …
The later evolutions of the creed embellish the basic historical facts with greater amounts of theology and doctrine, and yet the Christian faith rests fundamentally not so much on these immutable laws and eternal truths than it does on this series of simple facts about the person and the history of Jesus of Nazareth.
And that leads me to my third point of distinction between Christianity and Islam, as I understand it, and that is that while Islam (and any number of other religions) are designed to be guides for us, showing us how we can reach God, the Christian faith is not fundamentally about us at all! It’s about Jesus, and about what Jesus does for us on the cross, and about the love and forgiveness Jesus brings us. Indeed, it’s not really about us at all. It’s about Him!
This is the Christian faith. It’s not a law-book but a story – a story about one man who brings us to God through His blood and His suffering, and whom we thus come to recognise as being more than just a man.
John the Baptist was a great man (no man born of woman was greater than John) but he maintained very much that old-time ‘turn or burn’ mindset, exemplifying the spirit of Old Testament prophecy. When Jesus came on the scene, eating and drinking and partying with sinners, touching lepers, dialoguing with women, showing hospitality to non-Jews, healing everybody’s diseases, pouring out compassion and offering forgiveness to everyone, John wasn’t quite sure what to do with Him! Jesus was not the Messiah he had expected. This was a different kind of Messiah, preaching a different kind of religion, based on a different understanding of God.
I entitled my sermon today “Was John the Baptist a Muslim?” The obvious answer to that question is ‘no’, of course, as John died some 600 years before Muhammad was born. Even so, I’m sure you see the sense of the question by now.
In case you didn’t know, John the Baptist is recognised as a prophet within Islam, and that makes perfect sense to me for he was a preacher of the law. And even if John wasn’t a Muslim as such, I think the points of tension he experienced with Jesus would have been the same points of tension that his disciples had with the Christian community in the generation that followed, and I suspect that had Prophet Muhammad been a contemporary of Jesus’, he would have experienced the same points of tension though of course, if had they been contemporaries, I can’t imagine that those tensions would have necessarily stopped them loving and respecting each other any more than they did Jesus and John.
For in truth, there have always been plenty of people within the Christian fold too whose understanding of God is far closer to that of John the Baptist and Prophet Muhammad than it is to that of Jesus, but Jesus was still able to dance with John so I guess we’ll cope too. Even so, we never want to lose sight of the fact that when the Heavens opened and the spirit descended like a dove, it was Jesus and not John who received God’s divine seal of approval: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 11th of January, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
