John apparently had second thoughts about him later on, however, and it's no great wonder. Where John preached grim justice and pictured God as a steely-eyed thresher of grain, Jesus preached forgiving love and pictured God as the host at a marvelous party or a father who can't bring himself to throw his children out even when they spit in his eye. Where John said people had better save their skins before it was too late, Jesus said it was God who saved their skins, and even if you blew your whole bankroll on liquor and sex like the Prodigal Son, it still wasn't too late. Where John ate locusts and honey in the wilderness with the church crowd, Jesus ate what he felt like in Jerusalem with as sleazy a bunch as you could expect to find. Where John crossed to the other side of the street if he saw any sinners heading his way, Jesus seems to have preferred their company to the WCTU, the Stewardship Committee, and the World Council of Churches rolled into one. Where John baptized, Jesus healed. Finally John decided to settle the thing once and for all and sent a couple of his disciples to put it to Jesus straight…
—Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (1979)
When I was approached to write for The Buechner Review, I was deep in a sabbatical research project on John the Baptist. “What about something on Buechner and the Baptist?” I suggested, having promised myself I wouldn’t take on anything unrelated to my yearlong focus. Me and my bright ideas. It would turn out that my research on John would lead me away from certain widely-held views of him, including a couple that are reflected in Buechner’s explorations of the Baptist’s story. The more I read Buechner, however, the more my sense that this might go horribly wrong subsided. Buechner was a master storyteller, and at times he explores the same texts in varied ways, each of them engaging. My mind has changed about the Baptist over recent years, but I’m not sure that I’ve got him right. I do think I’ve managed to tell more of his story, though, and am increasingly persuaded that the effort to narrate ancient lives is not an optional extra that may tag on after we’ve got the history figured out, but something we must do as part of the process all the way through. As Buechner reminds his reader, ‘in essence this is what Christianity is’ – a story.[1] As important as it is to get history right when we can, it is also possible to be uncertain about history or to change our minds about it, and yet nevertheless to try and succeed to tell the story in a way that conveys the significance and message of those ancient lives.
I’m an academic first, a storyteller second, and a homilist barely at all. My admiration for Buechner the storyteller and preacher, and my work as a scholar, rarely find themselves in tension, I should emphasize. But when they do, it is disconcerting. “That’s so powerful and challenging, it cuts me to the heart,” I sometimes think, “but, but…that’s not how I understand the text.” Those moments have gone from being frustrating puzzles to precious providers of insight. When Buechner makes the text come alive in a powerful way, even while approaching the story in a way that runs counter to how I understand it, so that it speaks to me nonetheless, I am forced to reflect deeply on my own vocation and my priorities. As important as it is to get the facts right, none of that matters if we don’t have a transformative encounter with the story.
Back to the Baptist. Buechner’s sermons cover a range of texts that featured prominently in my effort to bring the historical Baptist into focus. The way John interjects into the prologue of the Gospel of John puzzles Christian readers and scholars alike. On the other hand, the Baptist’s testimony in that Gospel sounds worryingly like we are hearing him say what the later church was sure he must have said because he was supposed to. That’s the sort of thing that historians are forced to ponder. Those in the pews are often spared from ever having to consider such historical matters. Both scholar and churchgoer, however, are liable to fail to place themselves in the story and engage with it in the way Buechner does in his sermon on John’s prologue, “Air for Two Voices.” He invites us to step into the place of John by the river and decide what we make of Jesus, what we’re really hoping for and what we fear as he approaches.[2] Buechner tells the story with his characteristic effectiveness and before we know it we are within it, no longer confronting the scene as observers but finding ourselves confronted within it. Buechner’s homiletic exploration and the scholarly endeavor converge in confronting us with a Jesus who may diverge from and disappoint John’s expectations and ours. It takes a storyteller like Buechner to help us realize that that might be just the way it should be.
Ironically, the points at which I have come to think about John the Baptist differently than Buechner’s portrait can all be summed up under one heading: I think that John was much more like Jesus than our popular impressions have tended to assume.[3] We so often imagine him as a grim and stern figure, yet we are told that prostitutes and tax collectors listened to John. Can you really imagine such people seeking out, listening at length to, and finding their lives transformed by a preacher of gloomy fundamentalist fire and brimstone sermons? It takes someone who combines seriousness with kindness and love to make such an impression. The same kinds of people were drawn to John as to Jesus because the two were very much like each other in this regard. John and Jesus also both had a way with words. They were masters at storytelling. In just the brief summary of John’s message we are given early in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we have a pun (between sons and stones in Aramaic), vibrant imagery (the axe at the root of the trees), and a thought-provoking puzzle (of all the ways to emphasize someone else’s greatness, why mention sandals?). Jesus became part of John’s movement because he affirmed what John was proclaiming. They were also surely drawn to one another because of their shared love for puns and appreciation of the power of storytelling. They were also on the same page when it came to their incredible humility. John said that one who comes after him—that is, one of his disciples—would be far stronger than he. Jesus said that no human being ever born was greater than John.
Given who they were and what they stood for, how much would John or Jesus care how precisely I managed to reconstruct and bring into focus the details of their lives? Would they not much rather that I retell their stories well, that I take up their message and find ways of turning it into stories, puns, and captivating imagery that can be heard and transform lives today? Revisiting Buechner’s treatments of the subject of my sabbatical research gave me a new perspective not only on my research but myself. It is both ironic and perfectly fitting that, precisely by helping me realize that the individual I was studying did not have the same priorities that I do, Buechner brought the Baptist into still clearer focus.
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Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York: Seabury, 1966), p.59.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp.120-121.
[3] On the assumption of a “break” between them, see: Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus (Riverwood/Simon & Schuster, 1974), p.106.
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