In any story or play, we pay special attention to the moment when the protagonist or leading character makes a first appearance. Jesus first appears in the 4th Gospel in today’s opening verse: When John caught sight of Jesus coming toward him, he exclaimed: “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Aha, say I to myself, this “Lamb of God” is what I will preach about this morning. And indeed, I did get well into my preparation when it slowly dawned on me: but in this scene, Jesus stays on the sidelines and says nothing. The focus, rather, is on John’s witness – not even on John’s baptizing Jesus, for actually the Johannine Jesus is not said to be baptized by John (or baptized at all, for that matter). No, the focus here is entirely on John’s witness, his testimony.
One clue in the text is that it consists almost entirely of direct discourse, and thus speaks powerfully to the hearer. Notice that the 4th Evangelist does not talk about John’s witness, but allows us to hear John’s witness for ourselves. This emphasis on John’s witness got me thinking about Christian witness today—and specifically, about our personal witness in whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves.
“Witness.” “Witness” is probably not one of our favorite words in our religious vocabulary, given its juridical overtones and its association with fundamentalist groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. If someone comes up to us and wants to “witness” to us about Jesus, we may find ourselves inwardly cringing, looking for an exit, or at least feeling a certain awkwardness. I remember experiencing this over forty years ago while serving as a campus minister at Arizona State University in the Bible belt. I just couldn’t get comfortable with the somewhat in-your-face “witnessing to Jesus” by fervent students.
Well, this morning the Baptist puts “witness” right out there for us to pay attention to—making unavoidable a question that we perhaps rarely ask ourselves: namely, how are we to understand our call to witness? Perhaps some of us would rather wiggle out of this and content ourselves with just being an “implicit sign” of the Kingdom to one another, and let it go at that. But is that really enough?
I would like to begin my reflection with the observation that there is something about Christianity that always pushes beyond “presence” to “epiphany” (manifestation). This is borne out by the earliest liturgical tradition in celebrating Christ’s birth. In the East, the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6th, which is about the disclosure of the glory of God among us and which also commemorated the Baptism of the Lord, was at first more important than the Feast of the Nativity of Christ (“Christmas”), celebrated on December 25th ever since the 4th century. Then, after Epiphany there soon follows another celebrated epiphany - when Simeon receives the child Jesus in the Temple he rejoices, “For my eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples.” And throughout the whole Christmas season of epiphanies, we hear St. John frequently attest, “we proclaim that which we have heard, and which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands.” In a word: what has been manifested. It is this pushing beyond “presence” to “manifestation” that underlies the whole matter of “witness.”
A second point: in coming to terms with ourselves and Christian witness, we notice that our faith yearns to take visible form, to be seen, to be made manifest. This is because our faith naturally tends to be “incarnational.” After all, together we are the Body of Christ and individually members of it. St. Paul insists that at Baptism we “put on Christ”—we are now His face, hands, feet, and touch in the world; we are meant to actually see Christ in one another. It is also telling that for most of Western history, our faith has been made visible – in glass, painting, and sculpture. Ever since the Iconoclastic Controversy in the 9th century, Christianity has sought to show God’s face. In the Middle Ages, people rarely saw the image of any face except those of Christ and the saints, but in our world, we are bombarded with faces. Everywhere there are faces: of politicians, actors, ballplayers, the rich, people who are famous just for being famous. But we believe that all of humanity hungers to see another face, the face of God. The question is: How can we manifest that face?
Obviously, it would not be enough just to add Christ’s face to the crowd. The challenge is: how can we disclose the glory of God, God’s beauty? (This is precisely the role of the Servant of God, in today’s First Reading: “The Lord said to me: you are my servant, Israel, through whom I show my glory.”) In this world filled with images, how can God’s beauty be manifested? That, I believe, is the real question concerning religious “witness.”
Von Balthasar speaks of the “self-evidence” of beauty, “its intrinsic authority.” We recognize in beauty a summons that we cannot easily ignore. This beauty has the authority of the author of heaven and earth. C.S. Lewis said that beauty rouses up the desire for “our own far-off country,” the home for which we long and have never seen. Beauty discloses our ultimate end, that for which we are made, our wisdom, the wisdom of humanity’s final destiny. This final destiny is glimpsed in the beauty of God’s face. How can we show it now? This alone gives “witness” a certain urgency.
This leads me to the conviction that as Christian witnesses we need to present images, and faces that are different in kind from the faces that we see in our streets and advertisements. The images of our society offer entertainment, and distraction, whereas the beauty of God is disclosed in transformation, in our personal transformation. The images of our culture show the beauty of power and wealth. It is the beauty of the young and the fit who have everything. It is the beauty of a consumerist society. The Gospel, however, locates beauty elsewhere. The disclosure of the glory of God is the cross, a dying and deserted man. (“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin, the brokenness, of the world!”) This is such a scandalous idea that it seems to have taken 400 years for the first representation of the crucified Christ to have been made in 432 on the doors of Santa Sabina, after the destruction of Rome by the barbarians. The point not to be missed here is that God’s irresistible beauty shines through utter poverty.
This may seem a crazy idea until one thinks of one of the most attractive and beautiful of all saints, St. Francis of Assisi. His life is hollowed by a void, poverty, which God can only fill. Francis shows us that “to be a witness to Christ does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would make no sense if God did not exist.” (Card. Emmanuel Suhard) We see God’s beauty in Francis because his life would make no sense if God did not exist. And likewise, we see God’s beauty in one another most especially when we see that our lives would make no sense if Christ did not exist. Now, that is witness!
To conclude: our real challenge today, as
we stand on the banks of our own Jordan Rivers, is to show the beauty of the
poor and powerless God, the Lamb of God – a beauty disclosed above all in
personal transformation wrought by forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation,
redeeming love. Personal witness is born of personal transformation in this
poor Christ, in the Lamb of God upon whom the dove descended. It is this Lamb
of God who communicates to us, pours into our hearts, the intimacy of the Holy
Spirit, who in turn makes of us (poor and powerless though we are) “epiphanies”
of his glory to one another.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Today's homily by Father Dominic.
