4th Jan 2011

John 1:19-29 – John the Baptist denies being the Christ

• “Tongue Tied Humility”
• A group is sent from the Sanhedrin to check out this unauthorized teacher as they see him in their eyes.
• This was a customary practice when someone was drawing a following and/or doing miracles. The Sanhedrin were in some simplistic way the religious police.
• John the Baptist speaks the language of courage that only true humility can give you. His status is not important only Jesus’ is. And therefore he gains great courage from this.
• He applies to himself a Biblical description that was being used heavily by another group from that time:
• I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord’.
• The other group was the Essenes. Their way of doing this was to reject the rest of the Jews and live in a holy huddle by the hills. They spoke harshly of the other Jews believing that only were the true sons of light. They moved out of Jerusalem believing that those living there were beyond redemption.
• I believe John was invoking Remez here. He was quoting one part of a passage of scripture to invoke the whole passage to people’s minds in this case the earlier part of Isaiah 40.
• In that passage were these words:
• Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.
• The Essenes pride led them to dismiss Jerusalem but John’s humility allowed him to minister to them.
• He then goes on to make this statement about Jesus:
• He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie
• John is referring here to the religious tradition of the day that in this case referred to discipleship.
• A lot was expected from a disciple, in fact they were specifically told to be to a rabbi everything a slave was to be to their master… but with one difference:
• “All acts a slave performs for his master, a disciple performs for his rabbi, except untying the sandal” Babylonian Talmud ketubot
• Jesus by the way, shares this belief of the master/slave relationship. He uses a Hebrew idiom of pushing His point by repeating the same truth but with different comparative words:
• “A student is not above His teacher, nor a servant above His master” Matthew 10:24
• John in humility says he is not even worthy of doing what is considered too demeaning for anyone to do.
• There is a paradox in all of this. Jesus eventually said to His disciples that he no longer called them servants but friends because He had revealed to them His father’s business.
• And so here is the paradox: The more humble we are; the more we are included in the Father’s business. The more we are included in the fathers business, the less we are seen as servants of God and the more we are raised up to the status of friends of God.
• But we cannot even see God’s true business on the planet without humility.
• Praying today for a servant’s heart and therefore a friend’s relationship.