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| Piero della Francesca, Baptism of Christ |
From time to time I have had occasion to cite, to quote, and to express my admiration for, Sœur Emmanuelle Billoteau, a Benedictine hermit from Provence who periodically provides comments on the daily readings in that admirable French booklet Prions en Eglise. This Sunday, the first after Epiphany, I found her meditation on the reading from the Gospel of John instructive enough to translate it here.
AND I KNEW HIM NOT
John I:29-34
“The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me. And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water.’ And John bare record, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.’”
The story of John the Baptist is that of a revelation received from God. John has been able to recognise him whom it was his mission to announce. The text bears the mark of wonder, the fruit of a lived experience. As a privileged witness, John is the spokesman of the Evangelist.
Observation
John’s verses provide a key for reading the whole of the gospel. They contain a teaching of great density concerning this Jesus who comes to John. In citing the faith in the pre-existence of the Word, “before I was, He was”, the Baptist embraces equally the time of Jesus’ earthly life and its beyond, with the evocation of the Paschal mystery, the gift of the Spirit, and the glorification. A sequence we can follow by means of the names given to Jesus: “Lamb of God”; he who “baptises in the Spirit”; “Son of God”. The first of these titles refers us back to the sacrificial ritual of the Temple, with its burnt offering, to the Paschal lamb the blood of which protected the children of Israel at their departure from Egypt, and to the triumphant lamb of the Jewish apocalypses of the inter-testamentary period (from the 5th century BCE to the 1st century CE).
Meditation
In pointing us back to the Paschal mystery, the highest point of the revelation of God’s love, John the Evangelist reminds us that strength is deployed in weakness. Thus the royalty of Christ, the triumphant Lamb, is not conquered according to the usual human modalities, through force and violence. The way God has chosen for the establishing of his Kingdom, which “is not of this world” (Jn 18:36), is that of humility, of the love that proposes and exposes itself. It is in the self-humbling of the Son that the Spirit revealed himself by resting upon Him. And it is the Spirit, the gift of his Passover, who gives us access to the confession of His sonship by the renewal of our intelligence. Which allows us to pass from a partial knowing to an ever more profound knowing of the mystery of the Son, our discovering of which is never-ending. So we should do well to beg the Father to make us open ourselves to the Spirit, so that he may guide us to the whole and entire Truth.
