There’s a story by the great Lebanese writer, Kahlil Gibran, called “John the Madman.”

The main character, John, was a simple man, a quiet shepherd. Tending sheep in the fields of North Lebanon, he kept to himself. He spent his days out with his flock reading the Bible, secretly. He “spent his youth,” Gibran writes, “between the beautiful earth of God and the New Testament, full of light and truth.”[1]

A young peasant shepherd, filled with the truth of the Gospel, soon—the story goes—he was forced to confront the greed and hypocrisy of a corrupt monastery during the final days of Lent. Twice in the story, John spoke out against the evil he witnessed in the monastery and in the local church; and on both occasions his words did nothing. Because no one listened, no one believed him. As the conflict unfolded, John found himself standing alone before the greedy, self-righteous monks; looking at them, he said calmly, “You are numerous, and I am alone—you may do unto me what you wish; the wolves prey upon the lamb in the darkness of the night.” Words which, of course, filled the monks with greater anger.[2] Only his parents saved him from punishment by saying he was insane. Which is the end of the story: a young shepherd boy filled with the Gospel, declared a madman by corrupt monks and an unthinking village. “And when the people spoke of John,” the story ends, “they mentioned his name with humour and ridicule, and the maidens looked upon him with sorrowful eyes.”[3]

The truth-teller ridiculed: it’s a well-worn theme, ancient as well as modern. Cassandra, the Trojan princess who refused the lustful advances of Apollo: for her punishment, the legend goes, she was doomed always to speak the truth, but never to be believed—“lips the gods had doomed to disbelief,” Virgil wrote.[4]

In the Bible it’s about prophecy and rejection. Take the story of Jeremiah, for instance: commanded by God to write against “Israel, Judah, and all the nations;” it was the evil king, Jehoiakim, who cut away the prophet’s words with a knife, throwing those bits of Jeremiah’s words he did not like into the fire, “until the entire roll was consumed.”[5] Then there’s that little known prophet, Micaiah. Ahab, the king of Israel, hated him. Because, as he said, “[h]e never says anything good about me, only evil.”[6]

Rejection is also part of Jesus’s story. John is rather poetic about it in the beginning of his gospel: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him,” it says in the prologue.[7] Jesus the prophet, portrayed in each gospel explicitly as a prophet, suffered a prophet’s fate. If truthfulness had been treated so harshly before, it only makes sense that Truth himself should suffer the same. There is something very normal, something unsurprising, about the crucifixion. That’s just what we always do with the truth, isn’t it?

And so, we come to today’s gospel: the disciples stopped a man who had been casting out demons in the name of Jesus, but why? “[B]ecause he was not following us,” they said.[8] The problem with this should be clear enough. The problem wasn’t that he was doing good in Jesus’s name, but that he wasn’t “following us.” It’s a story about the freedom of God, of how he isn’t bound by us, by our sins or by our bureaucracies. It’s also a story about how God surprises us—often by putting his truth in the mouths of the unlikely, in the mouths precisely of those people we don’t want to hear.

The lesson is simple, and so I’ll be brief. “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets,” Moses said.[9] Wherever the truth is found, you can be sure it belongs to the Lord, Saint Augustine once said.[10] If we’re to be Christians in love with the truth, we must be open enough to hear that truth wherever it’s found: in friend or enemy, in your favorite irritating person as well as in the person you admire most, in a political party not your own as well in the one you normally vote for. Of course, I’m talking about common human sense—that we should be open to truth everywhere—but also, as this gospel teaches, I’m talking about the truth of Christ, that it too can be found everywhere. Which is the point. That we should be looking. Amen.

[1] Kahlil Gibran, “John the Madman,” The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, 192

[2] Ibid., 198

[3] Ibid., 208

[4] Virgil, Aeneid 2.342

[5] Jeremiah 36:2-3, 23

[6] 1 Kings 22:5, 8

[7] John 1:11

[8] Mark 9:38

[9] Numbers 11:29

[10] Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 2.28

© 2021 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield