Who are you? What do you say about yourself? Some questions never change.

John 1: 21                                           February 12, 2021

¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ ²¹And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ ²²Then they said to him, ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ ²³He said,
‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord” ’,
as the prophet Isaiah said.

24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. ²⁵They asked him, ‘Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?’ ²⁶John answered them, ‘I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, ²⁷the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’ ²⁸This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

            The priests and Levites are stumped.  This blue ribbon panel is not able to carry out its assignment.  They have run through the categories they know about Godly predicted leaders coming along.  John has admitted to being none of these.  They need an answer for the Jewish leadership, the ones who sent them.  It has been my experience from years of church leadership that when somebody says “they”, it is a cover in large part for what they want to know themselves.

            This verse speaks to the skeptic, the one who does not know, the one who wants to know about Jesus and what John is even talking about.  When I read this exchange, I believe I am reading about something that really happened.  This is not a news report where the anchorman can say something like “Roll the tape” to show us what happened.  But this is John the narrator, the Gospel Writer, inspired by God to set down from his own experience that which is about Jesus.

            And if I believe that, then arguments that say “No no no no”, obviously John is much later, the last of the gospels written…not even by John…the point of the gospel has shifted.  No longer is the gospel an accurate accounting of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but it is a contentious document whose origins need to be debated and argued over so that the content can be set aside as suspicious. 

            What brought that to the surface was the very questioning nature of the priests and Levites.  “Who are you?”  “What do you have to say for yourself?”  When scholarship makes pronouncements about the Bible, about who wrote what when because they have applied the very best of human scholarship to it, to take it seriously asks these same questions.  Who is John?  What does John really have to say about Jesus?

            On the one hand, the church accepts, on faith, the contents of the Gospel of John.  On the other, academia has come to the conclusion that the Gospel of John is not an accurate representation of what happened at that time and we can learn nothing about Jesus as a figure of history from it.  At best, Jesus is a figure of legend, a figure who has been twisted to fit John’s desire to create Jesus into a divine figure.  Whoever “John” really is.

            Essentially, a ‘take it or leave it’ duality is thrust upon the text.  Accept it in faith because human study does not accept its possibilities.

            Here is the difference in how one comes to the Bible.  Do we accept that the Bible is a gift given from above?  That God, through the work of these authors and those who gathered these books together, is laying down for us the Word of God in all its messy glory?  Or do we approach it from down on earth, looking up?  Do we decide that ‘this is a book’, therefore we will subject it to all the literary analysis and skepticism that the sciences would demand of us?  Yes, we see what the book has to say, but, what is unsaid?  “You”, meaning believers, take this book on faith, how about taking it on reality? 

            This is not all scholarship, not by a long shot.  But this is the scholarship that comes from the ‘unbiased’ secular academic world.  Some incredible research and analysis of the Bible is done in the Seminary, but we come to that faith issue again. 

            I believe that Jesus as presented to us in the gospel is who he was in history, the Messiah and the Lord of my faith.  This is what Jesus came to do.  Academic research that “undercuts” the validity of the written Word is going to shake that faith, but ultimately make it stronger.  Because I am not in a ‘faith neutral’ position when I come to analyzing this kind of academic work.  But it is an easy rabbit hole to fall into.  It is really easy to let go of the faith that binds me to accepting the Words of Scripture when the ‘smart research’ says something else.      

            Who are you?  What do you have to say for yourself?  These questions do not go away.  There is always a challenge going on to what we believe as Christians.  It is why the study of Scripture is SO critical to us.