At the end of this month, the Church will be celebrating John the Baptist—cousin of Jesus, and the last of the Old Testament prophets. For many years, I called the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in St. John’s my home church—one of the first buildings I saw when I landed in St. John’s in 1997 on my first visit to the province. So it wasn’t difficult to decide to make my final editorial of this academic year centre around John the Baptist—what we know about him, and what we can learn from him.
I’ve always known about John: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” We had the Godspell soundtrack when I was a kid, and I used to listen to it a lot. That’s the title of the opening track, and I loved it from the moment I first heard it. It’s uplifting! It’s hopeful!
Isn’t hope what we all need? What we’re all searching for? Hope is the light at the end of the tunnel that we all fight towards, even if it’s a faint glimmer. For Christians, that light is Jesus. The light of Christ is never dull or dimmed. But we are all human, and the things of this world get in the way and can cloud our sight-lines. But the light is never far, and John the Baptist is there, shouting, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” (John 1:29).
And when John sees Jesus and proclaims him to be the Lamb of God, he does what he’s been doing all along: he baptizes his cousin. Sure, he initially says that he should be the one being baptized by Jesus (Matthew 3:14), but Jesus disagrees, and so begins Jesus’ public ministry. This connection to Jesus through our baptisms allows the author of Romans (6:4) to write: “We are therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that … we may too live a new life.”
John is not a comfortable kind of figure. Matthew describes him as wearing clothes made of camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey. Something about John makes me think of an off-the-grid life of today—calling us all to change our consumerist ways, abandon oil and gas, and “get ourselves back to the garden,” to quote the amazing Joni Mitchell. John was never afraid to be who he was called to be—unapologetic in his decision to speak out for what he believed in, and for the laws of God. In fact, the choice to speak up for his beliefs eventually cost him his life.
John the Baptist never stopped pointing to Jesus. His own fame and followers never distracted him from that mission. At university, I was introduced to This is the Record of John, an anthem written by the English composer Orlando Gibbons. The text is taken from John’s Gospel, 1:19–23, in which priests and Levites are sent to question John the Baptist about who he is. John outright denies being the Messiah, never wavering and never tempted to take all the fame for himself. John describes himself simply, saying, “I am the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.”
John the Baptist reminds us that our calling isn’t always to be comfortable, but to be faithful—to prepare the way, even when the path is unclear. We are all encouraged to lift our eyes to the light, to listen for the voice in the wilderness leading to Jesus.
