January 11, 2026
William G. Carter
This is the testimony given by John
when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are
you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but he
confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they
asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the
prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to
him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say
about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one
crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the
prophet Isaiah said.
Now they had been sent from the
Pharisees. They asked him, “Why, then, are you
baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the
prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water.
Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who
is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal.” This
took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.
The next day he saw Jesus coming
toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a
man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I
myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that
he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified,
“I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on
him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent
me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and
remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And
I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Chosen One.”
Jesus says, “Come unto me and I will give you rest.” John bellows out, “You people are snakes, wiggling away from the fire that is to come.” Jesus looked at a woman who suffered from a debilitating illness and said, “She is a child of Abraham.” By contrast, John shouts, “Don’t ever presume to say Abraham is my father.” He is harsh. He is every bit as austere as the desert where he lives.
Today, he pops up in the first chapter of the fourth Gospel. It’s a brief encounter; one of the few times we hear from him in this book. But curiously, he’s not shouting at anybody. We don’t even see him splashing any water or dunking anybody in the river. What he is doing is testifying. He’s answering a series of questions.
Who
are you? “I am not the Messiah.”
Are
you Elijah? “No.”
Are
you the prophet? “No.”
Well,
who are you? “I am a voice in the wilderness.”
So, why are you here? And he says, “Someone stands among you and you don’t even know it.”
It’s as if John is being cross-examined in a courtroom. That’s fascinating, for that is how the Fourth Gospel concludes – with a trial. After Jesus is arrested, the Roman governor asks him a series of questions.
Are
you the King? “Did someone tell you to ask that?”
What
have you done? “My kingdom is not from here.”
So,
you are a king? “Those are your words; I am here to testify to the truth.”
Then, Pontius Pilate says, “What is truth?” The One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life stands in front of him, and he doesn’t even know it.
It is this “not knowing” that keeps coming up in the Gospel of John. The writer suggests this is the human condition, that we are congenitally clueless. As we heard last week in that magisterial introduction to the Gospel, “He came into the world that was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own people. and they did not receive him.” (John 1:10-11)
This is one of the key issues of the Gospel of John. Apparently, it is possible to stand in the presence of the Chosen One, the Messiah, the Lamb of God, and not even know it.
In this book, there’s one story after another like that. In the little village of Cana, there’s a wedding celebration. His own mother says, “They ran out of wine.” Jesus says, “Woman, what concern is that to you and me?” That’s what he says. Then he transforms huge jars of water into wine, and hardly anybody sees it. It’s a curious story, except it points out you can be in the presence of Jesus and not know it.
Or there’s that nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, the curious Pharisee. We’ll get to that one early in Lent. Nicodemus doesn’t understand who Jesus is. As a Pharisee, he is thoroughly trained in scripture. He thinks he understands the ways of God, but he can’t quite comprehend Jesus. In this Gospel, he’s in good company. There is a Samaritan woman, hampered by her own religious prejudice. There is a disabled man lying by a miracle pool in Jerusalem and it’s not doing him any good. There is an enormous crowd of people up in Galilee, chasing after Jesus because of their hungry stomachs; they want to elect him king. They don’t understand him.
Today, let’s just spend a little time with John the Baptist. He gets it, but not right away. That in itself is a lesson: comprehension does not come on demand.
If you have ever struggled with all this Bible stuff, all this faith stuff, you are in good company. The gospel of John understands you. Even the professionals who reflect on John’s book say there is something about Jesus that is revealed and concealed. We might see it and then it slips away.
It reminds me of that story Kathleen Norris tells. A Presbyterian elder and lay preacher, she began to stay in regional monasteries and worship with the monks. Her faith was nurtured by those visits, but she admits her Christianity often felt empty. It seemed like the center was missing. One day, she says, “I got up the courage to confess this one of the monks."
He
reassured me by saying, “Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another.
Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive.” I told him
that I probably felt Jesus’ hand in most things during worship, whether I was
in church at home, or at the monastery. Just a look around at the motley crew
assembled in his name, myself among them, lets me know how unlikely it all is.
The whole lot of us, warts and all, just seems too improbable, so absurd, I
figure that only Christ would be so foolish, or so powerful, as to have brought
us all together.[1]
We belong to a faithful community. This community is full of field reports of when we’ve seen the Christ. We are the stewards of a big, thick book called the Bible, which is offers hints and stories of when others have seen him. Yet we still have to wait for him. Trouble brews up when we try to force the issue. Or fill the gap. Or if we let ourselves get bored or distracted while we wait.
This is true, even of the clergy. I can recount stories from inside the religion business of leaders who do terrible things – steal from the offering plate, make empty promises to their people, put their hands where they don’t belong. Why do they do this? We can chalk it up to sin or evil or whatever we wish. At heart, it’s because even the religious professionals can’t manage the kind of God that we actually have. So, they force themselves into territory where they don’t belong.
And when these prominent people go off the rails, others are so scandalized. They drop out of church. Give up on believing. Look for substitutes, all of this understandable. Yet does anybody ever pause to reflect on what might happen if they became bored or spiritually distracted? It’s easy to point at somebody else and not see the fingers pointing back at me.
There’s that ancient story of Moses going up on the mountain to talk with God. And while he’s up there, taking his time, the people get restless down below. Then they get bored, then they get distracted. And they melt down their jewelry to make a golden calf. They start dancing around it. Moses comes down and says, “What are you doing?” And they said, “We wanted a god we could touch and see.” That’s not the kind of God we have.
Even Jesus, the eternal Word of the Father, taking form in human flesh – he remains elusive. As Flannery O’Connor describes him in one of her stories, “Jesus moves from tree to tree… a wild ragged figure.” There’s something so spiritually correct about that. He has come into the world. He is alive. He cannot be managed. Yet he can be worshiped. We wait for him because otherwise we are stuck with ourselves.
Can you see where the Gospel of John is pointing? Pointing to Jesus, only to Jesus, because he is the Chosen One, the Messiah, the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. There is no other way out. He is all that we need. And John the Baptist says, “I’m not him, and he is coming.”
And the very next day, John says, “There he is. He is here.” And does the Gospel writer ever explain this shift in perspective? Not really. John heard. He saw. He knew. His hopes became his convictions. All he could say was, “It was the Holy Spirit.”
It’s like C.S. Lewis. Brilliant scholar, classically trained, professional skeptic. He heard all the stories, read all the books, even wandered into a church once in a while. His believing friends were supportive, yet he remained unconvinced there was a God, much less a living Christ. Then one day, he hopped on a bus in Oxford town and had the sense he was “holding something at bay or shutting something out.”[3] By the time he stepped off the bus, the door to belief was open. Then it continued to open from the other side.
Belief is not a destination. It’s a journey. We can read the Gospel of John and quickly discover it’s very good at describing all the destinations. But take note: the writer says what he says as his invitation for us to take the trip. We may proceed, we may pause, we may turn this way or that. We begin by declaring with John the Baptist, “I am not the destination. I am not the end of all things.”
Then we can look with John to see what he sees. Light, life. The Holy Spirit. Jesus. And that is only the beginning.
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