One of my regular “go-to” exegetical blogs offered an intriguing wondering question this week on the Matthew 3:1-12 text. “I wonder who baptized John.”
It’s easy sometimes to sit where we sit and venerate the inspiration of God in the life of John and other prophets. God had a special connection with these folks, right? They aren’t like us. God was guiding them and they were going where God led. Only they were creating new understandings of where God was leading, not just for themselves, but where God was leading the faithful community through them. They were both being discipled themselves and discipling others.
We have a tendency in life to stick with what we already know, rather than slowing down enough to listen and observe how we might be led to new understandings. As John baptizes others, and eventually Jesus, in waters of repentance, he has an understanding that something even more transformative than what he is doing will come to pass. He is imagining that future that God is bringing into being. But he is doing so while also living into the new thing he is doing himself. John was working out a new ritual, inspired by God, but still needing discernment and time to understand what this new thing meant. You have to wonder how God may have been at work in others who John encountered along his own journey to this understanding.
If we remember that prophets are among the great cloud of witnesses, both as disciples who followed and as those who discipled others, then what might that mean for each of us? We’re the earthen vessels of God’s goodness, capable of being connected just as John was. What should that mean about how open you are to the inspiration of God?
Seeing in the Dark
Isaiah 2:5, the prophetic oracle as we journey into Advent, prompts us to walk in the light of the Lord together. But for us to walk in this light, the light needs its natural opposite of darkness to accompany it. Not to be in opposition to the light, as we so often assume and attach those sorts of connotations to it, but because the light and the darkness are complementary parts of a larger whole. Think for a moment about what we hear in Genesis, darkness, and light, water, and land are separated from each other but remain as linked pairs that offer different aspects of a larger whole. And John begins his Gospel drawing from this sense of the beginning of all things,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:1-5)
God is present in the darkness and the light for all of the time, God creates out of this darkness. Our lives depend on a cycle of light and darkness. We need our times of resting and being re-created in the darkness of sleep and our times of rising in the light to do the daily work of living. The light of God allows us to see and to trust in this creative darkness to inspire and refill us for our days. How do you need to trust more in what might be discovered in the richness and inspiration of God’s darkness?
Once You Start Looking
This last Sunday in the Church year is known as Christ the King Sunday and in each of the 3 years of the lectionary cycle we encounter different readings that highlight the uniquenesses of Jesus’ kingship. In this year of the cycle we read Luke 23:33-43, the passage at the cruxifixction of Jesus when one criminal recognizes Jesus’ innocence and asks to be remembered. This criminal carries an awareness of his own brokenness into this moment and through his own awareness, his own ability to see who is truly before him, recognizes the unique sort of king that Jesus is.
Sometimes our ability to see, to really bring awareness and compassion to our encounters, requires us to start looking for something first in order for us to see it when we encounter it. We hear about grandeur, power, and strength in much of scripture and so we often look for the presence of God in more powerful forms of those characteristics. But what if, as we see in this text, the God we are looking for in traditionally kingly ways shows up in a grandeur that is more focused on the beauty of rich and authentic relationship and presence. What if the power that God shows is a power that seeks to share and empower others instead of to wield authority over others. What if the strength that God demonstrates is the strength to stand alongside of others in the midst of brokenness instead of strength that lifts us beyond the troubles of daily living. What if we need to be reminded to look for this sort of kingship that Jesus shows us on the cross and to live it out with each other as we begin another year in Christ?
