The following thoughts are based on two sermons by the Very Rev Michael J. Pitts, the first preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal on the Feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, Sunday 24 June 2001, the second on 5 August 2001, during the Cathedral's annual festival of modern music.
1. John the Baptist as social activist.
This festival of St John the Baptist provokes different emotions here in Quebec, hope and jubilation or fear and despair, according to which side of the political debate you are on.1 However, we will leave all that aside for the present, and think rather about some of the connections between this Cathedral Church, both building and community, and the history and tradition of John the Baptist.
The first connection is in the reredos of the High Altar. The reredos, carved by the Warham Guild in England and assembled here, was a memorial to Cathedral members who died in the 1914-1918 World War. (The names of those who perished in the second world war were added at that time). The central statue depicts Christ seated in majesty, and the lower bas-relief panels depict scenes from the life of Christ. The six figures who stand in the upper level, though, have probably as much to do with war and (British) nationalism as with Christian faith.2 To our left of Christ is St John the Baptist in his role of patron saint of Quebec, and indeed of the whole of Canada.
The second connection lies in the Chapel of the North 3 transept. This is the chapel of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, and the colours of the order hang from the walls. The order began in the 11th Century to provide hospitality, and later a hospital for pilgrims to Jerusalem. The order was placed under the patronage of St John the Baptist, who, in this connection was known as St John of Jerusalem. When the Knights left Jerusalem they subsequently became the Knights of Malta and the Knights of Rhodes. Various present-day groups claim descendance from them. The Order connected with this chapel was revived (after having been suppressed in England during the reformation) by Royal Charter in 1888. In 1926 a second charter allowed priories to be established in Commonwealth countries under Royal patronage. Today the order is responsible for the first aid, assistance and educational work of the St John Ambulance organisation, and also bestows honours on those who support its work. Some of those honours are bestowed here in the Cathedral each year, usually by the Lieutenant Governor. The chapel originally in the South transept was created after the first world war through the generosity of Herbert Molson.
The third connection I want to trace is with a small number of our Cathedral members who form our Social Justice Group. Recently they joined others from across the country who descended on Ottawa, bearing blankets, symbolizing the demand for justice in land-claims issues by the aboriginal peoples of our land. This connection however, is going to need some explanation.
The story of the birth, life and mission of St John the Baptist is woven into the four Gospels of the Christian Scriptures. It is also told by the Jewish historian, Josephus.
Each of the Gospels has a particular spin, as does Josephus, who somewhat changes his spin between Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Overall, however Josephus wants his readers to focus on the Flavian dynasty as the true saviours of the world, while the Gospel writers want to point us to Jesus as the real saviour, and, at the same time, dispel any hint of the political nature of Christianity which might detract from friendship with the Roman powers.
John Dominic Crossan 4 tries to look behind the stories to extract the history. He comes to the tentative conclusion that John was one of a series of apocalyptic prophets, who preached of the imminent intervention of God in history, with a particular reference to the setting up of a Jewish state freed from Roman occupation, and the removal of the corrupt priesthood which governed the religious and much of the secular lives of the people subject to Roman authority. Several of these prophets took people to the East of the Jordan River, and then brought them back as a revolutionary mob through the Jordan, thus recalling in an almost liturgical way, the first conquest of the promised land under Joshua. Faced with the military might of the Romans these mini-revolutions all failed and their leaders were executed. John the Baptist, thinks John Crossan, acted in a slightly different way. Instead of attacking Jerusalem in a hopeless and pitiable way, John took his followers through the Jordan experience one by one, and then sent them back into their ordinary life with a heightened sense of expectation of God's intervention, people waiting and ready and eager to act when the time came.
In other words, despite the spin of both the gospels and Josephus, John was a highly political figure, implicated in the religious, political and social unrest of the time. Much of the cause of this unrest was not unlike the social injustice of our own time: the rapid urbanisation of the Roman empire was causing the growth of large estates (latifundia) to feed the urban populations. The result was huge numbers of disposed, homeless, landless peasants, and a growing chasm between rich and poor. Something of this social message and involvement of John remains, especially in the Gospel of Luke, even if much toned down.
(John said) "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages." (Luke 3:11-14 NRSV)
Today the Cathedral's Social Justice Group keeps reminding us of an important part of our mission - to be the people of God, called to interpret the history of our day, and called to transform society into a more just, free and human place. In this they are the living connection with the mission and ministry of St John the Baptist.
As well as these three specific connections between our Cathedral and John the Baptist, there is of course the more general connection of the whole church: we baptize, and it is appropriate that we are performing a baptism as part of today's liturgy. As, in a few moments time, we come to the place in our liturgy where we all renew our baptismal covenant, I want to close now by drawing your attention to two promises we shall make again:
Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself? I will, with God's help.
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? I will with God's help (BAS Liturgy for Baptism).We all promise to undertake a John the Baptist ministry: I hope that when the rite is next revised there might be added after human being, the words and the integrity of creation. We always need to review our mission in the light of circumstances and conditions which would never have been known to the people and writers of our Christian story.
2. The early church - young and upwardly mobile, but with a social conscience
If John Dominic Crossan is right 5, we have to locate Jesus and his disciples, sociologically, among the landless peasants, the very bottom of the ladder of the free world. They are part of a large, deprived, oppressed and restless class, constantly threatened by being thrown one rung further down the ladder into slavery, constantly tempted to revolution.
If Wayne Meeks and Rodney Stark are right 6, we have to locate the churches founded by St Paul among the successful middle class, drawing their members from those involved in commerce, the military and the imperial bureaucracy. What took place between 30 C.E. and 90 CE was a profound shift in the socio-demography of the followers of Christ, a shift much more profound than those we usually attribute to this period, namely the intellectualization of the faith through the influence of St Paul, and the shift from the church being a Jewish to being a Gentile community. Indeed Rodney Stark believes that the latter shift was not numerically important until much later on into the 2nd century.
These observations are based by the writers on the Biblical and other contemporary texts, and on archaeological and historical-sociological evidence. If they are right, and if in addition we see the Gospels as the church re-telling the story of Jesus for its own generation, then it is temping to stratify some of the stories. We can see some belonging to an earlier period, reflecting the situation of Jesus and his disciples, while other stories contain the wisdom and experience of a later generation. I want to suggest that the gospel of today 7, with its story of a rich man who built bigger barns to cope with his success in accumulating goods, may well be of this later stratum. But we notice how, none-the-less, he is challenged by another voice.
"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." (Luke 12:20-21 NRSV).
So, maybe, this story was retold with a community in mind, which was comfortable (even if occasionally harassed or persecuted) in its middle class context, and yet was a community aware of its humbler and more radical origins. It was a church where the earlier memory remained to challenge the comfortable to a more radical commitment.
I think we see this challenge of an earlier memory also in the Pauline writings, as in today's New Testament reading 8. But in these writings the challenge is not so much in economic terms, as it so often is in the Gospels, but more in ethical. The radical challenge to the middle class members of the Pauline churches is to leave behind the pagan mores of their fellow class members, and adhere to a more rigorous personal moral code.
Now, I believe that the western church today (and this Cathedral community is a typical example) is very much in the same situation as these late first and early second century Christians. We are, by and large, drawn from the middle classes. Most of us have steady incomes or pensions, and sufficient reserves or credit so that even a period of unemployment does not threaten us with anything like the slavery to which some of the Gospel stories refer.
This community is highly implicated in the commercial life of the city. We draw over 75% of our income from our partnership in commercial endeavor. Our weekly broadcast of Evensong has commercial sponsors. The Colors in the Baptistery tell you that we are related to the Military. Many of our members belong to the professional elite of the 21st century. We are lawyers, doctors, accountants, professors and teachers.
It would be easy for such a Christian community as ours, and the many like it, to live with a comfortable middle class faith and spirituality, whose object would be to establish and confirm who we are and what we possess. It would be a rather individualistic spirituality, which might demand that the liturgy was always exactly as we liked it. The sermons would make no demands on us, and God forbid that they should ever suggest that there was anything wrong with our life-style. The music would be familiar and comfortable, the old and well tried hymns, and liturgical music, old or new, which made little intellectual demand on us.
But here we strive to be faithful to the whole of the scripture and Christian tradition, not just to the parts we like and that suit us. And so here we try to listen to another voice. We hear it in the scripture, but we also hear (and see) it in those who are radically different from us, migrants and refugees from other cultures and faiths, the poor and the homeless, people of different races, different first languages, different sexual orientations, not to mention students whose proper role in life is to question everything in the relentless pursuit of knowledge. We sing hymns and worship with music which jolts us awake with its strident modernity. We hear sermons inspired by the questions of a post-modern world. We keep hearing from our Social Justice and Mission beyond Montreal Groups that, life being very far from comfortable beyond the narrow confines of North America and even within those confines, others make proper demands on us. And, of course we read the scriptures, all of them in our liturgical cycles, and, through listening to them, we learn to interpret that other voice as a call to a different, new and radical commitment.
O yes! Sometimes we are so disturbed by all this that we think nostalgically of a simpler time when the hymns were well known and the words were comfortable. But if that comfort is a temptation, them recall that image from the Bayeaux tapestry, which reminds us what the English word comfort really means. William the Conqueror is shown riding on his horse, and pushing the point of his spear into the back of the man in front. Beneath is a text which reads "King William comforteth his troops".
1. The festival of St John the Baptist is a national holiday in Quebec, and although there have been thematic changes in recent years towards civic rather than ethnic nationalism, the festivities are still connected with the long debate over the possible future separation of Quebec from Canada.
2. Left to right they represent St George (patron saint of England), St Martin of Tours (on whose feast 11 November, the Armistice was signed), St Lawrence (presumabley patron of the river surrounding Montreal), John the Baptist, St Nicholas (holding a ship in his role as patron saint of seafarers) and the Archangel Michael (patron saint of airmen).
3. North and South are here used as liturgical designations.
4. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus A Revolutionary Biography, HarperCollins 1994
5. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus A Revolutionary Biography, HarperCollins 1994
The Historical Jesus, Harper Collins 1991
6.Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians, Yale University 1983
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, Princeton University Press1996
For a different, but parallel anaysis, see Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children, Harvard University Press, 1986
7.Luke 12:13-21
8.Colossians 3:1-11
The Very Rev Michael J.Pitts, Dean