Canter Bridge

Lineage and chronology place the formidable ministry of John the Baptist in dangerous proximity to competition with Jesus. More than a few of the two men’s disciples looked askance, by all appearances, at the alternative thrown onto the stage by the other man. John, for all the fire of his temperament, seems to have maintained clarity about his secondary stature. He seems to have understood both his own impressive ministry and its waning in the face of Jesus’ accumulation of followers as things given by heaven:

They came to John and said to him, ‘Rabbi, the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him.’ John answered, ‘No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven.’

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It is no easy thing to hold ministry and the adulation that sometimes accompanies it with an open hand. The service of others in God’s name does not happen in the abstract. Rather it calls upon all one’s intentionality, purpose, and exertion. Divine compassion—or a divine word or divine justice—do not flow through inert objects. To the contrary, God’s work seems most of the time to be almost inseparable from the work of persons, who receive the kudos and flinch under the scarring whip that such labors entail.

How stirring, then, that the Baptist—whom ‘all of Judea’ famously tromped out to the Judean desert to hear—should have retained the capacity to understand the whole of it as a gift from above. Imagine this: a fiery prophet stirring the hearts of waiting Israel, facing down contemptuous guardians of stability, calling the Lord’s own axe to hack at the nation’s roots, then naming it all something he had received. A mere gift, with all the temporality and absence of ownership that issues from the metaphor. From the truth.