Day 2 - Thursday, February 23
Title:  JOHN’S WITNESS
Scripture: John 1:19–34
This then is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He admitted with complete candor, “I am not Christ.”

So they asked him, “Who are you then? Are you Elijah?” “No, I am not,” he replied. “Are you the Prophet?” “No,” he replied.

“Well, then,” they asked again, “who are you? We want to give an answer to the people who sent us. What would you call yourself?”

“I am ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord’ as Isaiah the prophet said.”

Now some of the Pharisees had been sent to John, and they questioned him, “What is the reason, then, for your baptizing people if you are not Christ and not Elijah and not the Prophet?”

To which John returned, “I do baptize—with water. But somewhere among you stands a man you do not know. He comes after me, it is true, but I am not fit to undo his shoes!” (All this happened in Bethany on the far side of the Jordan where the baptisms of John took place.)

On the following day, John saw Jesus coming towards him and said, “Look, there is the lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world! This is the man I meant when I said, ‘A man comes after me who is always in front of me, for he existed before I was born!’ It is true I have not known him, yet it was to make him known to the people of Israel that I came and baptized people with water.”

Then John gave this testimony, “I have seen the Spirit come down like a dove from Heaven and rest upon him. Indeed, it is true that I did not recognise him by myself, but he who sent me to baptize with water told me this: ‘The one on whom you will see the Spirit coming down and resting is the man who baptizes with the Holy Spirit!’ Now I have seen this happen and I declare publicly before you all that he is the Son of God!”

Poetry & Poet: 
“St. John the Baptist: 2 Baptism”
by Malcolm Guite

Love’s hidden thread has drawn us to the font,
A wide womb floating on the breath of God,
Feathered with seraph wings, lit with the swift
Lightening of praise, with thunder over-spread,
And under-girded with an unheard song,
Calling through water, fire, darkness, pain,
Calling us to the life for which we long,
Yearning to bring us to our birth again.
Again the breath of God is on the waters
In whose reflecting face our candles shine,
Again he draws from death the sons and daughters
For whom he bid the elements combine.
As living stones around a font today,
Rejoice with those who roll the stone away.

THE WITNESS OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

The good news writer, John, son of Zebedee, bears witness to God’s Chosen Anointed One so that we might believe in Him and have life in His authority (John 20:31). John delivers a counter-narrative against the idol and ideology of “I do life on my own terms by my own smarts, in my own power.” Even Christians can slip-and-slide into a practical atheism.

John bears witness to a series of witnesses throughout his gospel. He’s attentive to seeing and sensing, codified as first-person perspectives that have a power to persuade.

Eyewitness accounts often have strong evidentiary value. John knows that to be the case. As Dallas Willard would say, a witness helps others come to know what they themselves have come to know and believe. A witness testifies. How can they not? The practice of evidencing is in their bones.

John the Baptizer is the first eyewitness in John’s good news story. He offers marturia (‘testimony’); eventually, a witness unto death. At this juncture in the 1:19-34 narrative, the Baptizer is presented as a forerunner. He is setting a pattern.

Narrative setting: The Baptizer enters John’s prologue in 1:6 and is announced with unmistakable evidence: “A man came, sent from God, whose name was John (NET, italics mine). By three quick facts, we immediately infer that John is not an angel or some other non-human spiritual being. He's a man on a mission; ‘sent (apostello) from God’. That’s not some sort of churchy, throw-away language. It evokes public and official ambassadorship, a representative that does not witness by his own accord. John comes bearing a message that is not merely his own. Mark that down in Witness 101.

Narratively, the coming-to-be of the Baptizer - his arriving into the story of God - is punctuated by a preceding exclamation point of Johannine metaphysics: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:5). Just when you might not expect there to be a God-witness on the earth - you think: darkness seen = total darkness everywhere - learn to doubt your doubts, let the surprise of divine economy interrupt your cynicism. Let hope arise, and its enemies (of fear and cataclysmic thinking) be scattered.

Witnessing does not happen in a vacuum. A witness to what is real often stands among a plurality of truth-claims for what is real. The Baptizer’s testimony is no exception. Additionally, Messianic hopes and longings are also in the air. Some might say, at ‘fever pitch’. The ‘sign and wonder’ of the Baptizer’s ministry exists amidst a cacophony of other curiosities from priests, Levites, and Pharisees. But they are not the main story or the main attraction in the economy of God; narratively, they are more like a way of drawing contrast (or, to switch metaphors), useful for accentuating the ‘volume’ of God’s witnesses and what they bear witness to.

The Baptizer stands in a very long tradition of bearing witness, textually and extra-textually. Living good news itself is part of that tradition. So are the heavens, sunsets, visual arts, poetic and musical form, and writers of good news stories, carpenters and craftsmen, the wisdom of knowledge and the fear of the Lord - among others - carry, even embody, evidentiary value for a ‘something more’. Indeed, when has God ever been without a witness, whether in the heavens or on the earth?

Consider the allure of love itself; the act of willing the good of another. Does it not bear witness to the goodwill-giving-God who is Love?! Poet Malcolm Guite perceives that “Love’s hidden thread has drawn us to the font . . .” It calls us to a ‘baptism’, he alludes:

Calling through water, fire, darkness, pain,
Calling us to the life for which we long,
Yearning to bring us to our birth again.

Dancing with 1 Peter’s words, Guite’s words discern that we are “As living stones around a font today, Rejoice with those who roll the stone away”; for even the “stones will cry out,” if they must (Luke 19:40). That’s the kind of reality we stand in, representing the with-God kind of life that John the Baptizer introduces.

What are you getting present to when you think about a witness? What kind of witness are you becoming? How do you locate who you are as a witness within a larger story of God and His witnesses on the earth?

Witness surprise: The Baptizer’s witness in 1:19-34 comes with a variety of ironic twists in John’s art of story-telling, just given some of the imagery at play. For example, the Baptizer identifies himself as the “voice of one crying in the wilderness” (1:23, quoting Is. 40:3). But who expects renewal or a movement of God to spring-up from a barren place like a ‘wilderness’? Can God really enact deliverance among what’s perceived to be ‘God-forsaken’, or a place of neglect? Is there a God-witness in disregarded places? Indeed, it is precisely from the standpoint of that literary imaginary - ‘wilderness’ - that the Lamb of God comes, and is, indeed, heralded.

What if writer John is trying to challenge some of our ingrained assumptions on what it means to be a witness, especially God’s witness? What if he is seeking to open up our thinking on the nature and role of ‘knowing’ in our witnessessing?

Notice: In 1:26, the Baptizer declares to the Pharisees that he baptizes with water, “but among you stands one you do not perceive (eido, emphasis mine). But later, the Baptizer confesses two times that he himself did not even perceive or understand (eido) Jesus as the Lamb of God (1:31, 33). In the second confession, the Baptizer tells us that “He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, ‘He upon whom you see (eido) the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit” (1:33, NASB, italics mine). Implied in the Baptizer’s testimony is the working role of revelation via a sign (ironically, also a form of witness, often prompting wonder). The Revealer who sent John to do one thing ends up also unveiling (his) eyes to see.

Big takeaways: The Holy Spirit seems deeply invested in not only what we see (“simple seeing”) as His witnesses, but how we see; “seeing as” what we see. The Baptizer does not merely see Jesus, but (eventually) recognizes him - and declares Him - as the Lamb of God (one of the many titles revealed about Jesus in John’s gospel). The practice of witnessing is an education in learning how to pay attention and stay alert. We are tracking divine action on the earth.

The bottom line: ‘Education’ of sight prospers by not leaning on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6); ultimately, learning to live not by eyeball-sight alone. With the Baptizer, we learn to stand under the Spirit’s revealing. Isn’t that an act of trust? Eyeball sight is not the only way to see. Simple seeing with our eyeballs can only take us so far. If we are to be witnesses of God - witnesses of His action in the world - how can we not make room for faith; a way of grasping what is real on the basis of what is revealed? To put it differently, why rest on the assumption that I alone perceive what God is doing, even what He is doing with me?

The Baptizer’s testimony concludes: “I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God” (1:34). He sees rightly. If paying attention to John’s witness of the Baptizer’s witness, the testimony invites us to consider if we ourselves are serious about evidencing what we have been given to see? Are we serious about the evidencing of God that we embody? John’s witness paves a way for more witnesses, even for his own students to decide who’s witness will they trust, who will they become as God’s witnesses (1:35-42)?

Prayer
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Help me see what I do not yet see.
Blow on me, wind of God, remove the specks in my sight.
Come, Lord Jesus, come.
I receive you as the Lamb of God, God’s Chosen Son.
Let my seeing not stand on my own right-ness.
Come, Father of Lights, with whom there is no shifting shadows of change
Form my heart for your family of lights throughout your world.
Enlarge my heart for those who have yet to see and hear, even as I come to see and hear!

Joseph E. Gorra
Writer and Educator
Biola Alum

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