Tuesday during the Christmas Season, January 2, 2024

John 1, 19-28

This is the testimony of John.  When the Jews from Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to him to ask him, “Who are you?” He admitted and did not deny it, but admitted, “I am not the Christ.” So they asked him, “What are you then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” He answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you, so we can give an answer to those who sent us? What do you have to say for yourself?” He said: “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” Some Pharisees were also sent. They asked him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ or Elijah or the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water; but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.” This happened in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

The week between the end of the octave of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany does not really have a name.  It makes for an troubling time in figuring out where you are in the Breviary, too.  Even in the traditional calendar it is simply a week in January.  In the current lectionary, the first readings are taken from the First Letter of John and the Gospel Readings from the first chapters of the Gospel of St. John.

In today’s Gospel Reading, St. John the Baptist is confronted by “priests and Levites” sent by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.  These priests were of the tribe of Levi and had a line of descent that went back to Aaron, the brother of Moses, whom God chose as his priest at the time of the Exodus.  These offered sacrifices in the Temple but were restricted from entering the holy of holies, where only the high priest could go.  The Levites were other male members of the tribe who had charge of various tasks within the Temple, assisting the priests.  These did not offer sacrifices as they were not descended from Aaron.  The questions they are told to ask John seem a little odd: “Are you the Christ?  Are you Elijah?”  Since John does not conform to the ideas the Jewish leaders fancied for the Messiah, we might think their questions are pointless.  On the other hand, they might have been asking not to learn something new but to rebuke John for what he was doing.  As if to say: You admit that you are not the Christ and not Elijah.  So why are you doing all this?  You are a nobody.  Go home.  All the same, they must have felt a little threatened by him or they would not have paid much attention to him.  All the Evangelists speak of John and make him out to be a man who drew large crowds from all over.  The Jewish historian Josephus also talks about him in this way.  But if the Jewish leaders hoped to discredit John, they did not succeed.  Jews came to hear him from Galilee, beyond the Jordan, and even from Asia Minor.

“I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.”  John remains steadfast in the mission to which God had called him, even giving up the priesthood which he had through his father Zechariah.  He makes no great claims for himself.  He is a voice, and not even a voice with his own words but calling out the words of the Prophet Isaiah.  In doing so, he establishes his own legitimacy.  He is merely repeating what Isaiah had said.  In fact, he is doing part of the work assigned to the priests by Almighty God when he established the priesthood of Aaron and his descendants: to teach the people what they needed to know in order to serve God.  This work, however, was seldom done by the priests who preferred to work their shift in the Temple and then to go home to their towns until they were called up again.

“There is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”  John speaks of Jesus, the Son of God.  He is “among” the priests and Levites in the sense that he may have been in the crowd at the time, or in the sense that God had come among us, humanity.  Now, this would have episode would have taken place after the Lord’s Baptism, where John recognized him, and after Jesus returned from the wilderness where he had fasted and prayed for forty days before being tempted by the devil.  The Lord was probably using one of niches in the rocky hills of that part of Judea for his living quarters.  He had come back to the place where John was baptizing because it was there, and not in Nazareth, that he would find his first Apostles.

We look forward to the day when he is among us in heaven, where he will recognize us as his own.