Epiphany 2A, John 1:29-42

If it's the historical John the Baptist we're looking for here, it’s not rocket science to recognize the cut-and-paste that’s been worked by the gospel writers. That is, if it matters. It doesn’t have to if we just want to let the gospel writers have their way. Nonetheless, we are left with certain textual lacunae and non-sequiturs that remind us the writers are seeking to honor traditions in the telling of the story of Jesus Christ that don’t necessarily square with their purposes¹. John the Baptist is a case in point. Joan Taylor writes in her introduction to The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism:

As I hope to show, John may be seen as a building block on which the Church would be constructed, but he was also very much a Jew of his time and place. John could never have imagined that the Church would subsume his message. Rather. . he wished to point people towards the renewed commitment to Torah and total obedience of the heart to God in the light of eschatological events soon to unfold².

As is usually the case in these historical queries into the person behind the persona, there is not a lot of direct evidence to work with. Nonetheless, in Taylor’s book, we learn a lot about, say, how the idea of baptism evolved from Jewish ritual purification washing to early notions of Christian baptism. But who was the real John the Immerser? At best it can only be a good guess. That good guess, however, might spell bad news for canonical readings of scripture, as in the notion that Jesus was without sin. That he was baptized by John as a purification rite to ratify that he had repented for his sins – it’s implicit in the act - was, Taylor, observes, an embarrassment for the gospel writers.³ They contain it in different ways.

Which makes me wonder how you and I might eventually be repurposed. Assuming we think we have a pretty clear idea who we are and what we’re doing with our lives – at the end of the day, the matter might not be in our hands! This might not be so bad, actually. We may as well confess we’re pretty tripped up in our self-conceptions, no matter what measure of integrity we’ve set our sights on. In those self-disparagements of vss. 30-33 of today’s text, the repurposed Baptizer may be telling more truth than that guy living off the land could have imagined at the time. Think of it as a kind of traveling mercy, not just for the Baptizer, but for all the names inscribed in the story - and by virtue of our own dip in the water (or dip of water), ours included.

We are more than we thought we were.

¹Joan E. Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI, William E. Eerdmans, 1997), 321.

²Ibid., 8.

³Ibid., 268.

Copyright © 2017 Andy Gay