Considering What John Claimed in His Obedience to Jesus and How It Might Provoke American Sensibilities

John 1: 26-27                                      February 18, 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.

            So the challenge was, John the baptizer, you are NOT the Messiah nor Elijah nor the prophet (by John’s own admission), why do you baptize?  John’s response seems a little odd on the face of it.  “I baptize with water.”  This seems to be his rationale for why it is okay for him to baptize at all, not being one of the ‘big 3’.  If baptizing with water is okay, is there a baptism of some other form that is not okay?

            So it is something to watch for, to consider.  Where else does John the gospel writer, or the New Testament for that matter, talk about baptism that is not directly in regards to water baptism.  There is discussion of baptism of the Spirit.  But the Spirit has not been introduced to this narrative as yet.

            And, as we noted yesterday, the focus here is not on John the baptizer’s ministry except where it points to Christ.  So his answer is focused on Jesus.  He talks about the water, but then goes into far more depth about the one they do not yet know.  He returns to the refrain that this is the one who is coming after him.  I feels to me like John is saying that these discussions about the Messiah, about Elijah, about the prophet, will be far more fruitful with the ‘one who is coming after him’. 

            Now it is one thing to read John, separated so far from us in time and distance, when he says “I am unworthy to tie the thong of his sandal.”  

            For example, in “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon”, a martial arts flick set in the US, an indulgence from my youth, there was a scene where the young hero is in his karate school surrounded by his students.  In walks the bad guy with his goons.  The bad guy shames the young hero by telling him to ‘kiss his Converse’ (his fancy sneakers) or, the implication was, his goons would hurt the students.  The hero bowed down before the bad guy, but got kicked in the face before he actually came in voluntary contact with the Converse.  Putting your face by someone's shoes is shaming behavior

            When we talk about being unworthy, it is in a satirical environment, as in the SNL sketch and movies about “Wayne’s World”, where Wayne and Garth would proclaim “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy” when they met a rock star.

            John is embracing what we, in America, would consider to be shameful behavior between people as here, ‘all people are created equal’.  But on a superficial consideration, we can let this comment pass because it is not between people created equal, but a person and the Son of God.  I do not know about you, but this kind of obeisance, obedience shown to a superior through bows and kneeling and so on, is one of the things that I reject, as an American, as a vestige of a corrupt monarchical system.  But while I do not reject what John the baptizer is saying, because he is talking about Jesus, that kind of behavior is WAY out of my comfort zone. 

            When Jesus comes back, I feel like I will certainly be obedient in whatever way is appropriate because I will be so overjoyed, but, frankly, John’s comment about being unworthy to tie the thong of Jesus’ sandal, that’s not my favorite.

            And yet it foreshadows one of the most well-known episodes in the Gospel of John.  At the moment of the Last Supper, faithfully recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John does not speak to that.  Rather, he tells us about an episode leading up to that meal, how Jesus washed the feet of the disciples, taking on the role of a slave in that moment.  Does John the gospel writer include this piece of John the baptizer’s speech to deliberate connect to what Jesus will do?  I cannot say with absolute certainty, but it is a powerful reminder of what Jesus was willing and what Jesus did do for each of us.      

It Seems that the Ministry of John is Tied to Who John is, According to the Pharisees

 

John 1: 25                                           February 17, 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.

            So the Pharisees are not questioning who John is, but what John is doing.  Implicit in their question is that if John were one of these aforementioned prophesied individuals, it would be appropriate for him to be baptizing. 

            This is interesting.  It is not only the Gospel of John that records the ministry of baptism that John the baptizer was engaged in at the Jordan River.  But here, in the Gospel of John, the Pharisees are challenging him on this practice, because of, pardon the inverse, who he’s NOT.  But what is not explained is why John is here baptizing in the first place.  In the other accounts, we know that John is calling on the people to repent, and baptism is a sign of that repentance.  It is so powerful, that even Pharisees and other leaders of the Jews were coming down to John to be baptized.  But that information is not shared in this gospel.

            It is not the focus of John the gospel writer to lay down those details.  John the baptizer’s testimony is all about Jesus, the ministry of baptism as well, is all about Jesus.  So this background of John’s ministry loads the question that the Pharisees are asking with more weight.  The Messiah, Elijah, or the Prophet, those figures, when they come, will come also, apparently, with a call to repent.  A call to return to right relationship with God.  This seems to be in the minds of the priests and Levites as well, as they ran down their list.  Something from God is going to occur.  That is their presupposition.  Is John the one to do that something?

            It is not a question of skepticism.  Their presupposition is not that this guy out in the desert is a fraud, and it must be proven.  Rather, that there is something divine in the ministry, and we have to figure out what it is.

            Why baptism?  In the bible, it is mentioned here and then it goes on to become the sacrament of ‘initiation’ into the Christian faith.  But it seems that this was a more common practice in the days of Jesus.  An interesting explanation was given while I was there soooo long ago.

            Israel is basically a desert.  Water is either scarce or violent.  In the dry season, it is scarce.  In the rainy season, the wadis and gullies that cut through the landscape can flood to drowning strength in what seems like the blink of an eye.  The bodies of water that they are familiar with in Jerusalem are the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean.  The Mediterranean is a violent body of water for someone who has no experience with it.  The Dead Sea is rather self explanatory.  To be dipped into water in baptism is to be dipped into death.  To be brought back to the surface is to be returned to life.  This is why baptism is described in parallel to Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But, more generally, it seems to be a widely used ritual in this time period to mark repentance, old life to new life, separated by the death of going under the water.

            It is not a ritual described in direct terms in the Law of Moses (although there are hints of it as in the story of Naaman being cured of leprosy). 

            What I am getting at is there is a background to baptism.  It seems as though John the gospel writer is taking it for granted that his readers will have some sense of what that background is.  They may not have the lengthy explanation that I have been given, but they do know what John the baptizer was seeking to accomplish in this ministry. 

            Thus, we have an explanation, in part, for why there are four gospels.  Their writers have different experiences with Jesus, they are inspired to bring forward similar and different details of Jesus’ life and ministry.  Taken together, they provide for a richer understanding of our Lord and Savior.

Pastor Peter

Next Up to Question John, The Pharisees, the Teachers of the Law.

John 1: 22                                           February 16, 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 Pharisees, next round of experts come to see John to get some answers.  These folks need to be distinguished from the priests and Levites.  Those guys were from the establishment leadership, from the temple in Jerusalem.  Politically, the High Priest was the most powerful ‘accepted’ position among the Jewish people.  The king was viewed as an outsider imposed upon them.  The High Priest is at the center of the Jewish leadership.

            The Pharisees are a different group.  They are still a part of the ruling elite of the Jews, but not directly involved with the Temple crowd.  Rather, a Pharisee was a teacher of the law, an expert in matters of Moses and the Old Testament.  They seem to have arisen as leaders of the synagogues, the meeting places for Jews on the Sabbath when not in Jerusalem.  Jesus served in this role a number of times when he would go into the synagogue on the Sabbath and interpret the Scriptures. 

            It seems this was a class of leaders seeking to keep the Jewish people informed and living by the Law of Moses.  They had their own ways of doing things.  The gospels will record Jesus clashing with this class a lot because it appears they used the Law to their own advantage, making themselves important in the community around themselves, imposing their interpretation on how people should understand their ‘bible’, the Old Testament.  

            Jesus, identified as a ‘rabbi’, as a ‘teacher’, seems to find his roots in this class.  The way in which Jesus interpreted the whole law, Love God and Love Neighbor, that finds its roots in the teachings of a Pharisee.  While not necessarily political leaders, they were religious and cultural leaders.  This goes into the difference between being Jewish and being Christian.

            Christianity is a religious identity while Judaism is a religious identity, a cultural and political identity as well.  There are secular Jews.  A secular Christian is a non sequitur.  If the temple leadership was concerned that the Jewish population followed the proper rites and ritual of the Jewish faith, the Pharisees were concerned that the Jewish population understood the wider implications of life and living as governed by the Jewish faith.  

            These various leadership castes mark the different groups operating at the time of Jesus.  It is into this diverse ‘marketplace’ of religious ideas that Jesus will be introducing his own, as part of the Plan of God.  As I said, there will be no shortage of conflict that is raised between Jesus and these various groups.

Pastor Peter  

John finally says, "I'll tell you who I am, who I really really am."

John 1: 21                                           February 15, 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.

            So there is a strain of thinking that wants to brand the gospels as fraudulent.  Basically, what this thinking argues is that the writers of the gospels were knowledgeable about the Old Testament, so they took all the prophecies that they found pointing to a Messiah, and they stitched together a ‘fiction’ that accounted for them as they wrote the story of Jesus.  John the baptizer is one of these frauds, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…”  There was no John, there was no voice crying in the wilderness, this is just the biggest fiction written about Jesus since Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. 

            OR this is John.  He is in the wilderness.  Connoisseur of locusts and wild honey.  Scratchy leather fashion statement.  Enjoyed dunking people in the River Jordan for religious reviving reasons.  John tells us, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”

            John is not the Messiah.  John is not Elijah.  John is not THE prophet.  John is the one who makes the way straight for the Lord.  Or this is a pack of lies.  Entertainment wrapped up as religious literature.

            This is the trouble.  Doubt gets in your head, doubt creeps into your heart.  Read the Bible, be filled with the hope, and then have that hope turned aside.  I do not believe the Gospels are some fiction-writer’s attempt at a giant hoax.  I believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises made across the bible in regards to the Messiah.  What I also believe is that the Messiah is something more than then writers of the Old Testament knew.  Revelation from God is progressive, meaning more is revealed as time goes on.  So when John says he is to make straight the way of the Lord, what that means, in part, is that the plan of God is going to be revealed in a way that the glimpses we have been given to date cannot fully explain.

            He is quoting Isaiah here and this is what a prophet does, he or she prophecies things.  They speak in God’s name about things are going to come to pass, and those things come to pass.  

            Otherwise, the “fiction” approach to the gospels is dependent upon the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Testament being fallacies.  And if the Old Testament prophecies are fallacies, then God did not give those predictions to God’s prophets.  Maybe they were high or something.  But it is a systematic undercutting of the entire Bible. 

            Some people like the ‘ethical’ Jesus that they find in the Bible.  Love neighbors and things like that.  So instead of taking the whole gospel, they need to edit it down to their preferred bits.  President Thomas Jefferson did this.  Did not like ‘the divine’ bits so he cut them out.  But here is the problem.  If you only take the ethical bits as what you believe about Jesus, then Jesus is insane.  Because here it claims that he was at creation, in the beginning, with God.  And now, he’s got his crazy cousin involved, who is now quoting a guy whose been dead for seven hundred years or so, and saying that this connects to Jesus.

            Except that John says he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord, to cut through the ‘selective’ love of Christ to lay out the whole package for us.  Jesus, the Word, the Messiah, the Christ, the whole bowl of salad. 

            Then, as now, there were people trying to figure John out.  The priests and Levites had their categories, “messiah”, “Elijah”, “the prophet”.  We have our categories today, full on dismissal of the gospel truth, picking and choosing what bits of Jesus one likes the best.   Take the gospel of John.  Some like to cut it away from the other gospels because it is the one that refers to Jesus as God.  Well, it is the one that refers to Jesus as God the most, but those references are elsewhere in the gospels.

            These priests and scribes have come to John because they do not know what is going on.  People come to the bible, to the gospels for answers, which means they have questions they cannot answer, which means they do not know what is going on.  And there is a world of sin out there that is going to do whatever it can to pull those who take their bible seriously away from that truth and away from Christ. 

            Far too many people do not even bother with their bibles, do not even bother to explore God’s revelation for themselves and are most easily led astray by the next story or theory or debunkment that comes along.  But that is not going to work.  Because John the baptizer is the voice in the wilderness crying out to make straight the way of the Lord.

Pastor Peter

           

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.

If Not the Messiah, Who Else on the "God Appointed" List could John Be?

John 1: 21                                           February 11, 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.

            So when it came to leaders arising who carried a message of religious and spiritual renewal to a level that the Jewish leadership took notice of, it seems they sent out a blue ribbon panel of priests and Levites to investigate.  It seems that John the baptizer has achieved that status, demanding an investigation.  They have already come to see him and demanded “Who are you?”  If this were an episode of CSI, that would normally entail a murder with The Who providing an overlay to the opening credits.  But this is not CSI. 

            It does seem that this blue ribbon panel came with a list.  It might be something of a checklist to see if an up and coming religious leader did, in fact, have Old Testament, God-approved credit to their ministry.  Because the first thing that came up was the question of Messiah.  A Messiah was promised.  And it is like the Arthur Paradigm, the fulfillment of the promise coming in time of great need.

            The southern Kingdom of the Jews, Judea, returned from the Babylonian Exile in 538 BC (ending an exile that began back in 597 BC).  The Romans became the next in a line of occupiers when they conquered the Greeks in 63 BC.  This passage in  John takes place somewhere around 30 AD.  To make a long story short (too late?), the parameters for a time of great need had existed for a VERY long time.  In that time, the blue ribbon panel for the investigation of suspiciously popular religious leadership types had perfected their investigative techniques.

            So it is not the Messiah, the Holy One of God sent in the popular concept of King David.  That John the baptizer has ruled out.  Now, to be clear, John did not rule out ANYTHING for the one coming after him.  But they were not interested in the one coming after, only the one in front of their faces.  So, if not the Messiah, than whom?

            Elijah?  The prophet who did not die?  Elijah is perhaps the best known of the prophets of the Old Testament.  He certainly takes up a lot of space in the book of Kings.  If you did Sunday School like I did, the contest, Elijah versus the 400 of Baal’s best and brightest, was always a popular story of his strength in the Lord.  He is the prophet who did not die because, at the end of his life, there is an involved chase scene where Elisha (his chosen successor), chases after him to the end of Elijah’s time here on earth.

            And it is not described as Elijah dying, but rather, Elijah being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot.  So Elijah probably has more of the Arthurian ‘return’ magic surrounding him.  And the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, makes prophetic reference to Elijah returning “before the great and terrible day of the Lord” according to the header on Google.  So, there is the Messiah, and a forerunner to the great and terrible day of the Lord, usually understood as great for Jews, terrible for their enemies.  This is point two on the checklist.  Are you, John the baptizer, perhaps, this Elijah…?

            Again, he replies, “I am not.”

            Which leads to the third inquiry, “Are you the prophet?”  This is in opposition to “a” prophet.  In Deuteronomy 18, a prophet “like Moses” (actually “like me”, but Moses is talking) will be raised up by the Lord.  It is more generic than the prophecy about Elijah, but there it is.  I have seen this passage used to predict Islam, that Muhammed is the prophet spoken of here.  But that is another debate.

            For the purposes of our interpretation, the blue ribbon panel of priests and scribes are looking for a sign of divine enabling in John the baptizer.  What I am not sure of is whether this is to rule John out or if they are seeking in some kind of desperate hope for someone to be sent to them from God.  But again, John’s answer is “No”. 

            From here, the blue ribbon panel, having checked off their list, will ask John for his self-identification.  That is for tomorrow.

So When They Asked, "Who Are You?" John Replied Who He Was NOT.

John 1: 20                                           February 10, 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.

            John the baptizer knew who these priests and Levites from Jerusalem were looking for.  If you know the story of King Arthur and the Britons, you know, Merlin, Sword in the Stone, Excaliber, Britain when Britain was both tough and cool, you probably know the end of the story.  He is mortally wounded in battle and his body is taken off to Avalon on a magically powered raft/funeral barge.  The promise is made that Arthur will return again at the hour of Britain’s greatest need.  Which apparently has not happened yet.

            What Britain has is a Savior that is going to return in time of greatest need.  Sound familiar?  You are probably thinking about Jesus, and you would be right, but that is not what I am going for.  I am going for ‘the Messiah’.  Now you might tell me to wait because Jesus is the Messiah, and I would agree, but before Jesus was the Messiah, the Messiah was Legend.

            The Messiah is built into the Old Testament, a champion to be sent by God in the time of Israel’s greatest need.  See the parallels to Arthur?  But there is far more.  There is an expectation of this Messiah that lives in the hearts and the minds of the people.  I am not an Englishman, more of a hybridized North American, but I cannot imagine that there is a feeling in the hearts and minds of the Brits that pines for the return of Arthur.  Because the Brits are VERY proud of the fact that their island has not been successfully invaded since 1066. 

            But what if they had been?  What if Hitler had conquered Britain in World War 2?  What if they were not a free and democratic people struggling with the economics of the present time, but a conquered and subjugated people?  The idea of Arthur, the idea of the deliverer, the idea of liberation at their moment of greatest need, I could see that in the hearts and minds of the UK.

            Which is very much the expectation of the Messiah in the time of John the baptizer.  The people are oppressed, they are conquered.  But in the Old Testament narrative there is a Messianic promise, one who will rise up in the mantle of King David, the Warrior King, to liberate them.  Which provided an opportunity for any number of religious ‘fanatics’ to rise up, justify their terrorism by claiming the title of Messiah, thus gaining God’s justification for what they were doing, and starting trouble.

            So it does not surprise me that a blue ribbon panel of religious leaders were dispatched by the Jewish leadership to investigate these claims of ‘Messiah’ being propagated by John.  I wonder if there were any long-timers in the Temple who remembered back some thirty years, when some strange “magi” suddenly showed up in Jerusalem one day, looking for the King of the Jews.  Maybe their mysterious disappearance after headed to Bethlehem had put the leadership on high alert for anything that might smack of supernaturally “sanctioned” liberation figures.

            All they had to ask was “Who are you?” and John knew what question they were really asking.  He confessed, did not deny what he had already said, about the one coming after him who was before him and greater then him.  He went straight to the heart of the matter, “I am not the Messiah.”  He is not seeking the sanction of the Old Testament’s expectation of a Messiah.  That role did not belong to him.  It belonged to Jesus.