Isaiah 65: 17-25; Psalm 126 - or - the Magnificat; I Thessalonians 5: 12-28; John 1: 6–8, 19-28
A homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at The
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Springfield, Illinois on Sunday, December 14, 2014.
“SIGNS”
(Homily text: John 1: 6–8, 19-28)
Ever think
about how important signs are?
Signs warn
us: “Danger, road closed ahead.”
Signs
encourage us: “Just two miles to the
best restaurant in town.”
Signs
direct us: “To I-55, second right.”
Signs are
meant to point to something greater or more important than themselves: Consider what happens when we’ve been
following sign after sign along the roadway, each one announcing some
attraction or another. The signs which
have been encouraging us, mile after mile, lose their importance if the
establishment they’ve been trying to get us to see is no longer in existence.
The fact is
that we rely on signs, all kinds of them, every day.
There was a
time when each of us first came to this Cathedral….Try to think back to that
time (yes, I know that, for some, it’s been quite awhile!). If your experience was anything like mine, I
knew that I had to find my way to the corner of 2nd Street and
Lawrence. So, once I’d gotten on 2nd
Street, I continued until I saw the sign for Lawrence. By then, of course, the Cathedral had come
into view, and so, I suppose, I probably looked at the sign out front just to
be sure I was at the right place.
Newcomers
to the Cathedral might use the sign out front to be sure that they’ve found
their way to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, and to be sure what time Mass is
celebrated.
So putting
all of these things together, the street signs, the sign in front of the Cathedral,
and the sign that tells us when services are held all serve to assure us that
we are in the right place at the right time.
Even in
this age of GPS hand-held devices, which can direct us right to the place we’re
trying to go, signs still help to confirm what that wonderful, small device is
telling us.
John, the
one who was baptizing in the River Jordan, was a sign. He was a sign of warning, a sign of
encouragement, a sign that pointed to the ultimate destination, Jesus
Christ. He was a sign that pointed
beyond himself to one who was greater than he.
These
observations bring us to our gospel reading for this morning, which is taken
from the first chapter of the gospel account according to John.
Several
aspects of our reading deserve closer attention.
First of
all, notice that the gospel writer does not tell us what John was doing. Matthew’s gospel account, for example, names
John as the “Baptist” or the “Baptizer.”[1] Mark and Luke tell us that John was baptizing
with a baptism for the repentance of sins. However, this gospel account tells us that
John (the Baptizer) was a witness to the light, which is Jesus Christ, the
light that was coming into the world.
So, we might conclude that John (the Baptizer) was a sign, a sign of
warning to get ready for the coming of the one who was mightier than John was.
As we jump
ahead to the next mention of John in this first chapter of the Fourth Gospel,
we notice that a group of priests and Levites have come to see what this man
was doing. They ask him, “Who are
you?” Instead of asking him, “Are you
the Prophet, or are you Elijah, or are you the Messiah?” they simply ask, “Who
are you?”
John cuts
straight to the heart of the matter and says, “I am not the Christ.”[2]
In
response, these emissaries from Jerusalem ask two further questions that are
related to John’s denial…they ask if he is Elijah, or if he is the Prophet.
We would do
well to pause here for a moment and examine the connections between John’s
first answer and these two succeeding questions.
In Jesus’
day, many Jews were looking for the Christ, the Messiah, to come. Allow me to digress just a moment…..I suspect
that those who had made their way from Jerusalem to seek John out weren’t
looking for the Messiah. Most likely,
they were checking John out, since the John had become a well-known sign of
warning to the complacent people of God in Jesus’ day. It’s likely these visitors had come to see if
John’s activity and ministry was a threat to their monopoly on the religious
life of the Jewish people.
But now,
let’s return to the matter of the connection between the Messiah, Elijah and
the Prophet.
Many Jews
took an oracle which is found in Malachi 4: 5 as a sign that Elijah would
return before the coming of the Messiah.
Malachi’s prophecy reads this way:
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome
day of the Lord comes.”
So since
John had mentioned that he was not the Messiah, it was, most likely, a question
which naturally follows John’s denial.
So, they ask John, “Are you Elijah?”
The point seems to be that, if John wasn’t the Messiah, then could he
have been (or think he was) the Messiah’s forerunner.
The next
question also follows in the same line of thinking….they then ask, “Are you the
Prophet?” Here, the words of Moses come
into view, as we find them in Deuteronomy 18: 15, which reads, “The Lord your
God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers
– it is to him you shall listen.” Many
Jews expected the Messiah to be one like Moses, a great prophet.
Notice that
John consistently points beyond himself to another One. John is merely a sign, and as we have
observed, signs are meant to point us to something other than the signs
themselves.
In the
verse which next follows the end of our gospel reading for this morning, John
will exclaim as Jesus passes by, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the
sins of the world.”[3] (John 1: 29)
With this statement, it is as if John is saying, “Here is the one you’ve
been looking for.” Taking John as a sign,
with this declaration, John is saying, in essence, “You’ve arrived at your
destination.”
You and I
are called to be signs.
We are
called to bear witness to the light of Christ that has come into the world with
the coming of Jesus Christ. We received
that light when we entered the waters of baptism.
We are
called to be signs of encouragement, bearing witness to the reality that, with
Christ, all things are possible. We are
called to be signs of the truth that God can make all things new, no matter the
circumstances or problems of life that seem to choke off any possibility of a
new or better life.
We are
called to be signs of God’s love in a very unloving and cruel world.
We are
called to be a sign, along with John, that the Messiah is here among us, full
of grace and truth.
We are
called to be a sign that says, “When you have found Christ, you are home!”
AMEN.
[1] I sometimes think that the term “Baptist” is
replaced with “Baptizer” so as to avoid confusion with the Christian
denominations that are known as “Baptists”.
[2] The word “Christ” comes to us from the
Greek. It is equivalent to the word
which means the same thing, “Messiah”, which comes to us from the Hebrew. Both terms mean the “Anointed One”.
[3] It is worth noting that John’s statement has
found its way into our liturgy, where we say or sing, “Lamb of God, you take
away the sin of the world.” This is
known as the Agnus Dei.
