A finger pointing to God

Advent 3 – John 1.6-9, 19-37
December 13 – Neil Millar

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind –

Do this. Don’t do that. Can’t you read the sign?

Who remembers that chorus from the early seventies? It was a hippie protest song, sung by long-haired, cool looking musicians (Five Man Electric Band), and as a young high scho0ler I was impressed. Yes, stop telling us what do, stop controlling us – get rid of the signs!!! 

Still, signs have a place. Without them, life can be very confusing. Can you imagine driving along a freeway or negotiating an unfamiliar shopping mall without signs? Save for the simple yellow arrows (flechas) painted along the many crossroads and forks on the way, I’d never have reached Santiago de Compostela on my last pilgrimage? I’d still be wandering out there, tilting at windmills like Don Quixote. It’s hard to imagine how society would function without signs – especially in unfamiliar situations.

And, the important thing about a sign is that it’s clear, and accurate. On the occasions I did get side-tracked on pilgrimage it was because I followed the wrong sign, or because it was ambiguous or obscured, or because some mischievous person had redirected the sign and it was pointing in the wrong direction!!

The other thing to say about signs is that, by definition, they always point beyond themselves, to something else. A good sign does this well. So much so, that you often don’t even notice them.

So, why am I talking about this? Because today’s passage is about John the Baptist, and he is nothing, if not a sign. In this reading he’s introduced as, a man sent from God with a very clear signalling vocation. ‘He came as a witness to testify to the light’, it says in verse 7. And it goes on: ‘he himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light’. Did you notice the repeated use of words like testify, witness, declare, and confess in the reading? They’re all signing words, and they’re all related to John. In fact, every time he speaks, John is deflecting attention from himself towards Christ; every time, without exception.

There’s no question that his presence was attracting attention. In Mark’s gospel (as we heard last week) multitudes were flocking to hear him preach. This was unsettling the religious authorities. Who does he think he is, this weird, wild man from the desert? Another disturber of the peace; another radical, another pretender? John had them worried, he was uncertified and he was unsettling their system. They were keen to sort the disturbance. Their solution? Send in compliance officers – officials in white coats complete with clipboards and checklist. Question 1? Who are you? At which point the text becomes very deliberate, it says: He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ There you go, immediately deflecting, pointing beyond himself. Messiah (strike). Okay, next question? Are you Elijah? ‘I am not’. Elijah (strike). What about the prophet? He answered, ‘No’. Strike.

Notice the style of examination. There’s no genuine inquiry here, it’s all tick the box stuff – closed questions emanating from rigid predefined categories. But now, they’re out of boxes, and still no positive ID. It’s a statistical crisis, and you can imagine beads of sweat forming on their brows. They ask again; more desperately, I imagine. ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us.’ And then, finally, a more open question: ‘What do you say about yourself? And John replies: I’m the voice of one crying in the wilderness. ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’. In other words, I’m a herald, a proclaimer, an announcer… a sign pointing to the coming Christ.

In your service sheet is a photo of an early 16th century painting by German artist Matthias Grünewald. It was painted as a panel for the Isenheim altarpiece in the hospital chapel of St Anthony’s monastery, near Colmar in Germany. The hospital specialized in the treatment of ergotism, an especially painful skin disease. The Christ figure is depicted as suffering from these same sores – a sign to patients that he shared in their afflictions. To his right, Mary Magdalene kneels in humble adoration and Mary his swooning mother is supported by the apostle John. On the other side, you can see John the Baptist standing, with his hand outstretched pointing toward the figure pinned on the bending beams. His finger is enormous, exaggerated out of proportion, to make a theological point. And the point is? It’s not about me… it’s about him; he is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

In the background, written in Latin, are words, which translated read: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’. These are John’s words, and when he said them, he meant it. So much so, that the end of our reading, when Christ walked past, John exclaimed to his two disciples: ‘Look, here is the lamb of God!’. And when they hear this, they leave him and ‘follow Jesus’… He must increase, but I must decrease. And in this regard, there’s a lot we can learn from John (as individuals and as a church), for are we not also called to be a finger pointing to Christ – witnessing by the manner of our lives and our love to the One who reconciles and restores us?

Well, if you get nothing else from today’s sermon, remember the finger and where it points. But there’s one other feature to draw out, and it’s to do with the notion of certainty when it comes to discerning the presence and action of God. Did you notice that twice in this passage, John confessed that he did not know Christ before he saw him? While John is clear about his signing role, he doesn’t seem too clear about who he’s supposed to be pointing to or what it’s all going to mean. Whereas the religious authorities insist on pre-established criteria for evaluating truth and effectiveness, John entrusts himself to a different kind of knowing – the knowing of the heart. In his poem, ‘The Quickening of John the Baptist’, Thomas Merton writes of the moment John is said to leap in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, when she’s visited by a pregnant Mary. Merton speaks of ‘the wise, wild baby, The unborn John who could not see a thing’. Nothing much changes for this wise, wild baby, who remains compelled his whole life to testify to that which he has not yet seen.

There is risk in relying on this kind of heart-knowing, this knowledge beyond knowledge. It looks suspiciously like that nutter element in religion which supposedly just ‘knows’ that God is doing this or that. But true heart-knowing is not nutty; it’s neither uncritical nor irrational. It’s a different kind of intelligence and attunement to things – born of non-grasping attention and humility, silence and self-forgetting. Our tradition holds that we dwell in a world where light does dawn in the darkness, where truth is revealed and a deeper intelligibility may be found by those who seek it. And it seems to me that our task, like John’s, is to cultivate the capacity of the heart’s knowing, to expand our intelligence, tuning in at the level of Spirit.

We live, as John did, at a time of major transition – religiously, politically, socially. We don’t yet see where it’s all heading, and when it comes to discerning God in the midst, we can’t be fixed about what that will look like. Finding our way on issues such as same-sex marriage and euthanasia, and even finding our way as a local church, asks of us a willingness to be with unresolvedness, not to know fully – a capacity to watch and wait on what is being revealed.

In my experience, and perhaps you know this too, crises about identity and life direction can involve long periods of suffering, as we’re tossed by anxiety, confusion and resistance. But if we’re faithful to the watching and waiting, there comes a moment when we break through. ‘A small shy truth arrives’, as Michael Leunig says – something usually quite simple and clear and liberating – even if it can also seem huge and impossible and painful. And when that happens, we recognize it – even though we didn’t know in advance, just as John insisted that ‘I myself did not know him’ before he pointed with absolute assurance to Jesus as the one of whom he had been speaking all along. His was not the strident certainty of opinion, but a deep knowing of truth, an unveiling that sheds light and brings peace and remains.

So the figure of John testifies to Christ – and testifies also to a way of being capable of recognising Christ’s appearing. These weeks of Advent, there’s an invitation to us to live more like him – not in the sense of dressing in camel hair and feasting on locusts, but in the sense of looking to Christ and waiting for what he reveals, cultivating the heart’s knowing and the willingness to follow where it leads, with all the risk and possibility that entails. Amen

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