Third Sunday of Advent; 17 December 2023; Advent 3B (RCL); Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8; 19-28.
Before John’s Gospel can move on to the question of who Jesus is (a question at play throughout the entire Gospel), it must settle the question of who John the Baptist is. The Evangelist uses the device of having the Pharisees question the Baptist (the rabbis would have been successors to the Pharisees, and it was to the rabbis that the Evangelist’s community had to make its defense). The Baptist begins by telling us who he is not, in emphatic terms, using the ego eimi formula (with a negative) that Jesus will use in the great I AM statements.
Most emphatically, he is not the Messiah. He confessed, he did not deny, but confessed that he is not the Messiah, just in case you miss the point. Nor is he Elijah, thought to be a forerunner of the Messiah. This differentiates John’s Gospel from the other three, who portray the Baptist as an Elijah redivivus. Nor is he the prophet like Moses, also seen by some as a forerunner of the Messiah. In the Synoptics, when Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is, the give all three answers: John the Baptist, Elijah, or the prophet.
So, when the Pharisees ask him to state positively who he is, he says that he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, a misquote of the Isaiah reading we had last week. And when asked why he is baptizing, he states that he baptizes with water, but among them stands an unknown, mightier one. We expect him to add, “He will baptize with Holy Spirit and fire” (as he does in the Synoptics). But he doesn’t.
The Evangelist could not not have known at least Mark’s story, and so the omission of baptism in the spirit has to be a considered theological statement. It leaves us hanging. Perhaps the Evangelist wants us to hear echoes of baptism in the Spirit, when Jesus breathes on his disciples after his resurrection, and says, “Receive Holy Spirit. The sins of whoever you release are released for them; the sins of whoever you hold on to are held on to for them.” Not a person baptism, but a vocation to function as a priesthood for the world.
The very next verse after where our reading ends, the Baptist will see Jesus, and proclaim, “Behold! the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” This is not a vocation imagined for a conquering Messiah.
It stands in contrast to the image painted in Isaiah, of the anointed servant who announce a day of vengeance for our God (perhaps vindication would work as a translation as well). This is the passage Jesus quotes in his first sermon at Capernaum in Luke’s Gospel. The language of anointing and of the spirit of the lord resting on the prophet combines language used earlier in Isaiah for Cyrus (anointing) and the suffering servant. Again, that’s an odd juxtaposition: conquering might and suffering servitude. It is no wonder that early Christian writers, from Paul onward, fastened on the language of the latter part of Isaiah in describing what God was doing in Jesus. God has begun the restoration of all things imagined for the conquering Messiah, but not in the way expected.
John Courtney Murray, SJ has said that the concept of the nation-state is predicated on the ability to make war. When we think of a kingdom, we think of a king, and kings, of course, must be able to defend their kingdoms (make war). But God is setting up a different kind of Kingdom, predicated on the death and resurrection of Jesus. John the Evangelist has John the Baptist leave us hanging as to the identity of Jesus, so that we have to read through the Gospel to discover that Jesus dies at the exact hour the passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple court to discover a different sort of Messiah.