He Came As a Witness to Testify to the Light

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
(John 1:6-9, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I had Christmas Eve off from work, so I decided to spend the afternoon watching King of Kings (1961), one of my favorite Jesus movies. Actually, I love the film because it shows comparatively little dramatic interest in Jesus, preferring to focus its attention on the impact he makes on the people around him. The screenplay digs deep into Judas’s character, for example, proposing sympathetically that he had hoped his betrayal would force Jesus to reveal his full power and, ultimately, liberate Judea from its Roman conquerors. It even creates an elaborate backstory for the Roman centurion mentioned in Matthew 27:54, a career that stretches all the way back to the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem, investing the statement “Truly this was the son of God” with 33 years of feeling.

The film also has a lot to say about John the Baptist. 

As with Judas and Lucius the centurion, however, much of the story it tells extends beyond the gospel accounts. In one scene, after he has baptized Jesus, John pays a visit to Mary, and they discuss how her son will take God’s message to Jerusalem, something John laments he cannot do himself. But then, a little later in the film, John does go to Jerusalem, because the film needs to stage a face-to-face confrontation between the Baptist and Herod Antipas.

That meeting ends with John in prison, after which Jesus comes to Jerusalem for the first time in order to visit John in his cell. Yet John still has to ask Lucius to send a message to Jesus—the famous “Are you he who is to come?” query. Lucius, already beginning to form a rough respect for Jesus, wonders at the apparent doubt, but John assures him that he does believe: “But I would like to hear it from his own lips.” (He never does, though, for Herod orders John executed soon after.)

As I was watching, I thought about the Baptist’s willingness to speak truth to power when brought before Herod. It reminded me of the earliest Quakers, unwilling to blunt their messages to appease the Puritan leaders of republican England. Like John, these Friends were often thrown into prison. Some, like James Nayler, were tortured; in Puritan-controlled Boston, four—including Mary Dyer—were hanged. And, like John, these Friends accepted the possibility of such grim fates because of the strength of their faith. They saw themselves as voices crying out in the wilderness, imploring their peers to recognize the arrival of “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” and straighten out their lives.

The intensity of John’s spiritual vision placed him at the outer edges of first-century Judean society. 

Yes, his ministry thrived on the banks of the Jordan, in the sense that great crowds came out from their homes to hear him speak and to be baptized by him. But they came to him because he needed distance between himself and the centers of power he criticized—even then, his attacks on Herod (and his wife, Herodias) became so pronounced that he could no longer be dismissed as a fringe dissident. Instead, he became a threat to the social order, one that required removal before his ideas spread too widely among the people and inspired them to action.

That brought me right back to the first generation of Friends, and I asked myself: Would you or I prove capable of holding on to our faith under such conditions today? Would those of us who identify as Friends risk our livelihoods, our social standing, perhaps even our freedom to uphold our Quaker testimonies? I suppose it depends on how firmly we believe in those testimonies, and that leads us to another question: Do we believe that the true light which enlightens everyone is coming—has come—into the world?

Do we really gain anything, you might object, by comparing ourselves to the likes of James Nayler and Mary Dyer and finding ourselves wanting? Doesn’t that just set ourselves up for failure and disappointment and self-recrimination? Perhaps. But what if, instead, such examples could inspire us? What if they lead us to come up with solid answers to George Fox’s challenge: “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?” 

Quakers love to bring up those last four words. But I’d like to call your attention to the question that immediately follows them: “Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?”

Well: Are we? And is it?