8 Pentecost Cycle b proper 10 July 14, 2024
Amos 7:7-15 Psalm 85:8-13
Ephesians 1:3-14 Mark 6:14-29
Today we have read in our appointed Gospel what might be called the Passion Gospel of John the Baptist.
In a proverbial Christian Academy Award event, John the Baptist would be designated as the Best Supporting Actor in the Epic Story of Jesus of Nazareth.
The life and ministry of John the Baptist was told in ways which paralleled the telling of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
John had a marvelous conception and birth, even though still a natural birth. Jesus had a miraculous conception and birth, with a spiritual conception.
John baptized with water. Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit. John's program of repentance coupled with baptism represented the height of what a person could do to reform one's life.
Jesus became associated with what happened because of the grace of an internal reform. This was based upon the recognition that sheer human will power was not enough; there had to be an interior experience of grace to assist and aid the process of completeness that each person is called to in this life.
The lives of John the Baptist and Jesus came to be told in significantly different ways because of what we might call the "after lives" of John and Jesus.
The after life of John the Baptist became told as one who founded a community of followers who became those who would or should switch their spiritual allegiance to Jesus Christ.
The afterlife of Jesus included many events the like of which were not in the stories of the afterlife John the Baptist. The afterlife of Jesus included many post-death appearances to various people in many different ways.
We do not have accounts of after-life encounters of people with John the Baptist. But for hundreds of years people have been claiming to have life changing relationships with Jesus even though his physical body has left this world.
The accounts of John the Baptist and Jesus derive from how they have been experienced and regarded in their afterlives.
The poetry deriving from the mystical experiences of people with the Risen and unseen Christ was and is so significant as to influence how the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus came to be written about in the New Testament.
The cumulative effects of the mystical experiences of Christ meant the physical story of Jesus had to be told with the hyperbolic language and poetry of the fantastic.
The Christological hymns or poems about Christ found in the Pauline writings indicate that the story of Jesus could only be told in the most superlative language that was available to the writers of the time.
The Gospels writers wrote that John the Baptist was great, wonderful, and had a profoundly significant ministry, but he was set forth as the best human example to contrast with Jesus who became very other-worldly in his afterlife mystical encounters with many people.
Today we live on the "fumes" of those who had the foundation mystical experiences of the Risen Christ, people like Peter and Paul. But we too, may have been blessed with mystical experiences which our tradition has taught us to attribute to the Risen Christ in various ways.
John the Baptist stands as the prophet who said that we must repent and get our act together with the best recommended behaviors of the excellence of divine law.
In contrast, Jesus Christ stands to us as the one who represents both the good recommended behaviors of the law, but also the personal experience of the Sublime as the wonderful mysterious marking upon our life experience as being valued and known in personal esteem.
As we remember John the Baptist, his witness, his life, his teaching, and his death, let us be led to the events of the Sublime which both generally haunts the consciousness of life itself, but also becomes apparent in intermittent and serendipitous events to reinforce in deeply personal ways that we are valued children of God who are put here to model what being valued children of God means.
As we have known a baptism with water like the one proposed by John the Baptist, let us also know that we are always already having a baptism of the Holy Spirit that also becomes apparent in sublime events. May God help us to cleanse our receptors that have been soiled by loss, grief, and pain can easily redefine the normalcy of good. Let us awaken afresh our ability to identify the sublime. It is very close. Amen.
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