Sometimes we misjudge things.
Some years ago, preaching, I noticed a man sitting near the front asleep. I was committed to ignore it, but the gentleman began to snore rather loudly, and during a rather meaningful bit. Eventually, I had enough, and so I stopped what I was saying, pointed to the man now deep in slumber and said, “Somebody wake that guy up!” It was deliciously awkward. “Here I am casting pearls,” I thought to myself, “and this guy has the audacity to snore!” It was not a moment of great humbleness for me, but it worked. He woke up, and I never saw him sleeping in church again. However, my sense of victory was short-lived. After Mass I learned the man had a medical condition and that his new medication could cause rather serious narcolepsy. In an instant, with that information, my righteousness disappeared, and I began to feel less holy and more like the back end of a pack animal. I felt terrible for misreading the situation and for misjudging him, and I have been rather more cautious ever since. I’d do it again though (if you’re thinking of dozing off); I felt bad about it, but not that bad. Yet, I was reminded, in that awkward moment, that sometimes we misjudge things, that appearances are not everything.
It is of course a common sin, primeval and biblical. Paul suffered from mistaken judgment. He hated Christianity, before the Lord got hold of him, persecuting Christians with zeal. And when he became a believer, the Christians around him didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Ananias, whom the Lord instructed to baptize Paul, didn’t want to; “Lord, I have heard…about this man” he said.[1] There were all sorts of rumors swirling about. “Isn’t this the man that was in Jerusalem persecuting believers?”[2] It was hard for folks to welcome Paul at the beginning. They didn’t know what to make of him. They misjudged him.
It’s part of the human experience to misjudge and to be misjudged. Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, called them “mismeetings,” that sad common failure to connect genuinely with another person.[3] It is a generalization, but generally true, that we often mistake the people around us. We misinterpret others, foiled either by ignorance, emotions, prejudice, or all the above. This is just the way it is it seems.
In today’s gospel, which is of John’s account of the baptism of Jesus, we find a familiar account of mistaken judgment, mistaken at first but soon redeemed. John the Baptist, in a moment of mystical clarity, points to Jesus and says, “Behold, the Lamb, who takes away the sin of the world.” Yet, he admits immediately that he was up to that moment ignorant of Jesus. “I did not know him,” he says. But in that moment, when he saw the “Spirit come down like a dove…and remain upon him,” John the Baptist was no longer ignorant, no longer mistaken.[4] This man, this Jesus, is the Son of God, the Lamb—dreamt of and hoped for—the Passover Lamb of liberation, the suffering Lamb of Isaiah’s prophetic ecstasy, the worthy Lamb which was sacrificed but is alive which John saw in his apocalyptic vision.[5] Mistaken no more, now the Baptist knows. Now he sees. And all he can do at that moment is point and say, “Look.”
Of course, some see a difficulty here. How can John the Baptist say, “I did not know him”? Luke, you see, says that he and Jesus were cousins, so what did John the Baptist mean saying he didn’t know him?[6] Many today, I suspect, just chalk it up to inconsistency and move on; however, our forebears wrestled better with it—certainly with a bit more naïveté but probably more wisdom. What did John the Baptist mean, “I did not know him”? Perhaps he meant that, by comparison, what he knows now of Jesus—that he is the Lamb of God and the Son of God—his previous knowledge of Jesus was meaningless. “[W]hat did the dove teach him?” Augustine asked.[7] The dove taught him the truth. The dove showed him Jesus was God. Mistaken judgment redeemed, ignorance assuaged by the descent of the Holy Spirit.[8]
Yet what does this mean for us? It means, first, that if our knowledge of Jesus is to be full, it must be knowledge of Jesus with the Spirit—the “Spirit of truth” which “will testify to me,” Jesus said the night before he died.[9] That is, if we are to know Jesus truly, we must know him to be the only Son of the Father, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” to quote the Creed.[10] Our knowledge of Jesus must be authentically biblical, properly theological. Coming through Christmas and Epiphany, we’ve recalled his birth, his family life, the miraculous star, and his baptism. Today the Church reminds us that to understand any of this, we must also see the work of the Holy Spirit: how he came down upon Jesus, revealing for us his divinity, and revealing the Father in turn—the Trinity, “the mystery of God in himself.”[11] And for a purpose: divinity made a lamb, God readied for sacrifice
But our knowledge of Jesus must be knowledge in the Spirit too. That is, to see Jesus correctly, we must be in the Spirit, and the Spirit in us; as Paul said “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”[12] That is, if we are to know the Lord fully, we must realize that the Spirit has come down upon us too.
Now I’ve mentioned this several times before. John the Baptist said he saw the Spirit come down and “remain” on Jesus.[13] The significance is lost in English, but the Greek verb here for “remain”—menein—John, the gospel writer, uses as a sort of technical term. It describes the bond between the Spirit and Jesus (as in today’s gospel), but also the bond between Jesus and the Father, and also the bond between Jesus and us.[14] “Remain in me, as I remain in you,” he told his disciples the night before he died, using that same little verb. John saw the Spirit come down upon Jesus and “remain”—but the Spirit remains upon us too. The Holy Spirit has come down upon us, and he remains, and we live, and we will never die. Because we remain in Christ just as he remains in the Father. But how can this change the way we live, how we see the world?
Here’s a story I’ve told before: In the spring of 1996 seven Cistercian monks living in Algeria were abducted by Islamist radicals, their bodies found about a month later. The French government had refused to negotiate for their release. These monks—the “martyrs of Atlas” as they’re called—had lived for decades in their little village, serving peacefully the peaceful children of Islam. As extremist violence began to swell, the monks decided to stay, fully aware that doing so risked their lives. They felt bound by their monastic vows and their love for the people to remain. The 2010 film Of Gods and Men tells their story beautifully. The papers and diaries recovered from the monastery tell of a community struggling with fear and commitment, prayer and joy. One diary in particular, however, and one particular entry in that diary—belonging to Father Christophe—has always haunted me and given me hope. Writing in January 1994 just days after their first frightening encounter with the militant group that would eventually kill them, Fr. Christophe wrote, “This Christmas has not been like any other. It is still charged with meaning…The meaning pierces us like a sword…We are in an epiclesis situation.”[15] Epiclesis is a liturgical term for that moment in the Eucharist Prayer when the priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and calls down the Holy Spirit—“graciously make holy these gifts we have brought to you for consecration” we’ll pray in a moment.[16] Father Christophe called their moment of great fear and insecurity an epiclesis. John the Baptist saw the Spirit come down and remain on Jesus—the same Jesus who said to his disciples, “Remain in me.”[17] The Spirit of God in a frightening world: that’s the point
Dr. King, whom our nation remembers tomorrow, had a similar experience. A few weeks into the Montgomery bus boycott, he received a wicked, threatening call late one night. Unlike the others, this one got to him, worried perhaps about his new little girl, only a month old at the time. Shaken, he got out of bed and went to the kitchen to make him some coffee. And it was there in that solitary moment King later said, “I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself.” “You can’t call on Daddy now,” he told himself. There, in that moment of real danger, real fear, and real weakness, King knew he had from then on, truly, to trust in God and not himself. Only then did he hear a voice saying, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”[18] The Spirit of God in a frightening world. Again, that’s the point.
How can today’s gospel change the way you live? In your moments of pain, your moments of fear or challenge; in your moments of joy and sweet communion; in your moments of desolation or even confusion when you see nothing and understand nothing, what one true thing can you always say about your life—believer that you are, weary or strong?
Well, you can always say this: The Holy Spirit is upon me, and Jesus remains in me and I in him. And because of that I will never be alone. No, never alone. Come whatever may. Amen.
[1] Acts 9:13
[2] Acts 9:21 paraphrase
[3] Maurice Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, 131
[4] John 1:29-32
[5] Exodus 12:3; Isaiah 53:7; Revelation 5:6,12
[6] Luke 1:36
[7] Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 5.9
[8] Matthew 11:3
[9] John 15:26
[10] The Nicene Creed
[11] Catechism of the Catholic Church 234
[12] 1 Corinthians 12:3
[13] John 1:32
[14] John 15:10; John 17:21 (einai en is practically synonymous with menein en)
[15] Bernardo Olivera, “Our Brothers of Atlas-III” (October 12, 1996)
[16] Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer III
[17] Ibid.
[18] Martin Luther King, Jr., A Knock at Midnight, 425-430
© 2023 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
