John the Baptist bridges the two great themes of Advent, of the coming end of all things and of the incarnation. His presence here in the lectionary is a reminder of Advent themes more probing than those of the premature Christmas now being celebrated in the wider world. Jesus comes, John the Baptist will say, because the world struggling in ignorance and sin needs him to come.
As promised or threatened though, we have veered quickly from the Gospel of Mark to that of (the other) John, given the brevity of Mark’s introductory material, in order to provide a more substantial picture from one John of the other.
The lectionary here first plucks a few verses from the prologue of John’s Gospel (1:6-8) which are a sort of aside about John the Baptist (“There was a man sent from God…”) before jumping to the narrative proper in v.19 (“This is the witness of John…”). It may not be just an accident that these fit together; more than one scholar has suggested that an early draft of the Gospel, without the Prologue, might have begun at verse 6, which certainly reads well in a “once upon a time” kind of way. The verses about John the Baptist in the Prologue (see also v. 15) now sit awkwardly in the grand hymn about the origins of Jesus and the universe, as if the narrative and the hymn have been spliced together. So the beginning of today’s Gospel reading might once have related to the narrative more or less as the lectionary presents it.
Apart from dealing with the problem of Mark’s brevity, using John the Evangelist’s more expansive treatment of the Baptist—probably written with full knowledge of the Synoptic tradition— allows us to dwell further on the Baptist’s ministry, but also adjusts some of the impressions left in Mark and in the other Gospels. Most striking overall is how this narrative amounts to a sort of via negativa about the Baptist: you must first understand who he is not, to understand who he is.
Much of this reading thus consists of correction of apparent misconceptions about the Baptist, wrapped around the core of the same tradition (“a voice…”) we read last week in Mark. The first correction, in the extract from the Prologue we read, is the striking insistence that John was not “the light”—which might not otherwise have occurred to us, but apparently was an open question for some readers. Other evidence that even some decades later there were still followers of the Baptist (cf. Acts 19) suggests that some people had taken John himself to be a messianic figure, and hence that the Gospel of John is correcting that.
More positively, this text then emphasizes “witness” as the heart of John’s work; John was sent from God, to be a witness, to bear witness (the same word or its variants are sometimes rendered with words like “testify” and “testimony,” which may lessen the modern reader’s sense of how consistent this theme is). “Witness” is a key theme in this Gospel more broadly, something that others also do for Jesus (the woman of Samaria [4:39]; the crowds [12:17]; the Father [5:37]), while Jesus witnesses to the truth with the Father (8:13-18). To understand the Baptist, we must know that “He himself was not the light, but he came to witness to the light” (1:8).
The main narrative concerning the Baptist, from verse 19, continues both the positive emphasis on witness, and the set of corrections. The “witness of John” (vv.19ff) in fact starts as three more corrections; is he himself the Messiah, or Elijah, or “the prophet”? “No” is the answer each time. That John the Baptist is not the Messiah (Christ) does not surprise us. That he is not (in some sense) Elijah may be more surprising. Already in Mark, in a dialogue following the Transfiguration story (Mark 9:9-13), there is an unresolved but potent hint that John actually “is” Elijah, meaning at least that he functions as Elijah was widely believed or expected to, as forerunner of the Messiah (see Mal 3:23). Matthew makes this less a suggestion (Matt 11:14) than a cryptic reality (the third denial, the “prophet” notion, is probably a variant on this idea, another version of a forerunner before the Messiah). Yet the Gospel of John’s Baptist will have none of these.
So there is a tension of sorts moving back and forth between Mark and John, but there are also some specific agreements. John the Evangelist uses material shared with Mark and the others, and interestingly these elements are aligned precisely with the positive aspect of this Gospel’s presentation of the Baptist. First is the verse from Isaiah found in all the Gospels about John, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness…” (Isa 40:3). Here this is the correct answer to the Baptist’s identity, presented once the three misconceptions have been dispensed with. To be a “voice” is effectively a variation of “witness.” This aligns with what we had already noted about the Baptist in this Gospel: it is not John’s identity that matters, but his message.
The second common tradition is a statement shared almost verbatim between Mark and John—a rarity: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals” (Mark 1:7; cf. John 1:27). Here in the Fourth Gospel this is part of the Baptist’s answer to the question of why, since he is none of the three things he was probed about, he is baptizing at all.
It’s not a bad question. There is no mention in this Gospel about a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, or any other reason given for the rite. One might say John’s response is not much of an answer, but in fact it is almost the same answer yet again, namely that his baptism, like John, is a witness to someone else.
The common tradition about order (and sandals…) thus serves a different purpose here. For Mark, the importance of John the Baptist is that he comes first, and Jesus follows and succeeds; the sequence makes John the lesser. Yet in John’s Gospel, just after the passage read this week ends, something like the reverse is said: “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me” (1:30). This of course reflects the unique perspective reflected in John’s Prologue, of Jesus as “in the beginning.” Sequence matters less now, but precedence matters even more.
For John the Evangelist the questions have changed from those Mark had addressed, and hence the answers have too. Mark and the Synoptics are deeply rooted in historical narrative, and for them the truth must actually happen, and the world change, before the salvation of the world can occur. Elijah must come because this is how that history will work, with the appearance of the prophet. In the Gospel of John however, since Jesus himself has been from the beginning (1:1), before John the Baptist, the truth needs witnesses rather than events. Adding some identity to John merely confuses his purpose: to witness.
Reading on in both Gospels this coming year, we will see that while for John the truth is always available, in Mark it will be hidden until the Cross. Nevertheless their different ways of thinking about history and the world converge on how this voice crying in this wilderness, John the Baptist, bears witnesses that Jesus is the answer to the struggling world’s deepest need.