John and Jesus

The Christian religion teaches men these two truths: that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature that makes them unworthy of God.  It is equally important for men to know both of these truths, and it is equally dangerous for men to know God without knowing their own wretchedness, and to know their own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer, who can free them from it.

Blaise Pascal

My sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Advent, Year A:

One of the things which this Sunday's gospel reading illustrates is that, although John the Baptist and Jesus were both men whose lives were consecrated to God's Kingdom, they had very different temperaments, and very different ways of proclaiming and serving God's Kingdom.

John's vocation involved reviving the way of life and the style of preaching that people associated with the great prophets of the Old Testament. John was identified especially with Elijah, who boldly confronted idolatry and called down fire from heaven.

John felt called to a way of life that was hard and comfortless and there was something hard and comfortless about his message.

He had a great sense of God's holiness and justice and truth, in a way that accentuated our human lack of truth and justice and holiness. So he tended to see the arrival of God's Kingdom in apocalyptic terms: there's going to be a great judgement, and punishment for those who flout God's Law. This meant that John's message had a single theme: the urgent call to repentance.

When Jesus began his ministry, he also called people to repentance. But his vision of God's Kingdom was far less one-dimensional.

Jesus surprised a lot of people - including perhaps his cousin John, following Jesus' ministry from his prison cell - by stressing God's patience and compassion and forgiveness. God's Kingdom, in Jesus' preaching, was much more a matter of "the divine pity" and God's willingness to pardon rather than to punish our sinfulness.

That makes Jesus' words of praise for John all the more significant. What did you go out to the wilderness to see? he asks his followers. A reed bending in the breeze? A man wearing fine clothes, living in a palace?

It seems obvious what Jesus was getting at with these rhetorical questions. There was nothing weak or soft or equivocal about John. If anything he was rather rigid and unbending in his principles, a fierce and forbidding character. But although he was very different in his own approach to people, Jesus doesn't disapprove of these qualities, he admires them - and in a sense he recommends them.

John's prophetic outspokeness got him into trouble, most of all when he turned his fire on Herod Antipas, criticising the way he had married his brother's wife. But Jesus' preaching, in time, also involved outspokeness, and elements of disagreement and conflict with powerful interests, and he eventually suffered the same kind of fate as John.

If there's a lesson here for us as the present day community of Christ's followers it's the lesson that faithful and consistent witness to God's Kingdom will always, in some circumstances, require courage and the refusal to compromise.

The Church community often comes under pressure to equivocate, to avoid conflict, to adapt the gospel message to principles which don't belong to the Kingdom and which sometimes even run counter to the Kingdom. That's especially true in a moral climate that values flexibility and everyone's right to his or her opinion, and that shies away from any commitment to absolute truths.

Of course there are times when flexibility and compromise are acceptable. But there are other times when they're not, and I'd suggest that when we find ourselves in a context that makes a positive virtue out of equivocation, that's the time to reflect on John the Baptist's "unbending" qualities, and to remember why Jesus drew attention to John's particular brand of holiness, and why he admired and praised John as highly as he does in today's gospel reading.