Sermons
14th December 2008 - Advent 3
We celebrate and ponder today the strange heraldic figure of John the Baptist, the virtually disembodied voice crying out in the wilderness. We ponder as did the members of that delegation of suspiciously religious priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem to quiz the voice... we ponder their question to John the Baptist ‘who are you? And what do you say about yourself?’.
Identity is a crucial concept in St John’s gospel but identity is established in his gospel in ways that may seem alien to us. Think for a moment how you would answer the question, ‘who are you?’. In this country it is common first to define ourselves by what we do, our identity almost gets bound up with that. So asking the question in church today one might hear as an answer ‘I am Trevor I play the organ here’, or ‘I am Chrissy, I do Children’s Church’ or, ‘I am Peter, and actually I run virtually everything’. These tags are shorthand of course, they tell us something about the person involved but not very much. As we get to know people better, the information about them in a sense
becomes less important, what they do becomes a lesser concern than who they are. Acquiring information about people isn’t at all the same as knowing who they are; after all we find out a great deal about people through the media and we build up some sort of picture of their identity but we wouldn’t characteristically say that we know them because in the flesh, they might be a great disappointment or indeed a great surprise. The character you have grown to hate may prove to be bewitchingly charming face to face or the person upon whom you placed so much of your hope may turn out to be shallow and self-seeking. There really is no substitute for meeting someone face to face.
I am a fan, as perhaps you know, of the social networking system called Facebook – through this you can meet people you haven’t actually met and you can re-meet people you haven’t seen for years. It can be great fun and it is fraught with potential dangers. I suspect the popularity of Facebook is partly due to the illusion that meeting people and relating with them in this way somehow cuts down the level at which you have to remember your manners. There are perhaps
many conversations that take place through the veil of Facebook, Friends Reunited, and similar sites, that could not happen in one-to-one conversations with their requirement of reacting immediately to the other. A semi-distant conversation with someone many miles away removes the massively central feature in human identity and interaction of how we actually appear to one another in real time and real space. It is no surprise therefore that there have been various relationship disasters brought about through these sites. If you really need to know about someone, who they really are, you need to meet them and listen to them, in person.
So in today’s gospel reading the delegation is sent out to ask John in person who he is and what he is up to. And what an unsatisfactory response the delegation seems to get. The Baptist will only describe himself negatively, he is not the Messiah, he is not Elijah returned from the dead to announce the imminent appearance of the Messiah, he is not the prophet promised in Deuteronomy. These vigourous denials certainly suggest that the gospel writer wants to make clear to his own audience who John is not, he needs perhaps to make clear in his own Christian community that any cult of the Baptist has to be put very firmly in place, he is not the Messiah, not even a prophetic forerunner of him. But pity the Jerusalem delegation, they can hardly return to their religious overseers saying ; ’well he said he wasn’t the Messiah, or Elijah’ so in desperation they ask for some sort of mark of identity, some sort of description that they can take back with them; ‘What do you say about yourself?’. The Baptist’s account of himself is a remarkable singularity of description, a definition of an identity so focussed that it becomes true for him to say of himself ‘I am the voice’. John the Baptist is the voice that witnesses to Jesus, only. It is his function and virtually his identity. He is nothing more than the voice of one crying that the way needs to be prepared, his identity is all about someone else, not about himself, he proclaims the coming of one whose very sandal he would be unworthy to remove. In this dramatic scene in the wilderness set up by the gospel writer, this encounter between the forces that will ultimately oppose the mission of the coming Messiah and this lone voice heralding his imminent arrival, in this dramatic scene the main character is actually off stage, John points only away from himself to Jesus. The Baptist’s emphatic denials...’I am not Elijah, I am not the prophet I am not the Messiah’ prepare us for the one who will declare his own identity with those affirmations that echo down the centuries, ‘I am the true vine, I am the light of the world, I am the way, the truth and the life’.
John the Baptist identifies himself entirely in relation to Jesus. What might it be like if we could answer questions of identity from the same perspective. What if our first response to the question ‘Who are you’ was ‘I am a Christian’. What if instead of describing our job, or where we live, or what our pastimes are we answered the ‘What do you say about yourself?’ by talking about our identity as it is revealed in relation to Jesus? We would no doubt appear to most people to be rather odd, people might think we took religion a bit too seriously, but then they thought John the Baptist was odd and they thought he took religion a bit too seriously. So in this run up towards Christmas take a moment to ponder, who are you? and what do you say about yourself?