John, the Avante Garde
Gramps49
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
From John 1
This seems like a weird insertion to the prologue of The Word becoming flesh.
From what we can gather in the Gospels John seems like an outlier. After all, he lived in the wilderness, wore camel's hair garments, and ate locust (crunch, crunch, yuck, yuck, yuck).
Would we want to invite him to dinner (ala Sidney Portier, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.)?
What I am looking at is that John admits he is the Avante Garde of someone coming after him. Preparing the way of the Lord.
I am searching for examples of avante gardes of our day-people still preparing the way of the Lord. Three people I have come up with is the Pope, Micheal Currey, Rachel Evans. But I wonder if the hive can come up with a couple more. People in your experience who have acted as Avante Gardes that I might be overlooking.
That, or we can argue about how the followers of John were a separate religious movement that got folded into the Christian Kerygma,
6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
John the Baptist Denies Being the Messiah
19 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders[c] in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. 20 He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”
21 They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.”
“Are you the Prophet?”
He answered, “No.”
22 Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”
23 John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”[d]
24 Now the Pharisees who had been sent 25 questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”
26 “I baptize with[ water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. 27 He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”
28 This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
This seems like a weird insertion to the prologue of The Word becoming flesh.
From what we can gather in the Gospels John seems like an outlier. After all, he lived in the wilderness, wore camel's hair garments, and ate locust (crunch, crunch, yuck, yuck, yuck).
Would we want to invite him to dinner (ala Sidney Portier, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.)?
What I am looking at is that John admits he is the Avante Garde of someone coming after him. Preparing the way of the Lord.
I am searching for examples of avante gardes of our day-people still preparing the way of the Lord. Three people I have come up with is the Pope, Micheal Currey, Rachel Evans. But I wonder if the hive can come up with a couple more. People in your experience who have acted as Avante Gardes that I might be overlooking.
That, or we can argue about how the followers of John were a separate religious movement that got folded into the Christian Kerygma,
Comments
John did not operate with any sort of authorization from the religious authorities, which seems to have been a problem for those asking him questions. On that basis I would not choose the Pope or Michael Curry (if you mean the Episcopal bishop; I cannot comment on the basketball player) as both of them have official religious authorization.
If you mean Rachel Held Evans, she's dead.
I'd consider someone like Greta Thunberg. She's not authorized by anyone, and pisses a lot of people off, like John the Baptizer.
@Gramps49 was explicitly looking for someone who was "preparing the way for the Lord". Ms Thunberg is an atheist. She might occupy the same sort of prophetic "speaking out and annoying people" niche, but she's certainly not intentionally preparing the way for any sort of God, because she doesn't think that any sort of God exists.
"Intentionally" may be key here. IMO working on the health of the planet is preparing the way of the Lord, even if the person doing so doesn't have that intention, but YMMV.
The only analogies that are springing to mind are technological ones. Gopherspace prepares the way for the World Wide Web, anyone? Or GPT preparing the way for AGI?
I take it you mean Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) instead of Adjusted Gross Income.
I get your point.
To the point whether Greta Thunberg is Avant Garde, I would say her push for a better environment is Avant Garde, yes. While she denies God, God is still using her for God's purpose.
Avant-garde seems to me to be very much the wrong term to use with regard to John the Baptist, I’m afraid. At least as used in English, the term carries connotations of artistic or creative experimentalism, and of an intelligentsia or elite group who spurn the establishment and the status quo.
John certainly did spurn the establishment and the status quo, but not out of any experimentalism, and certainly not as a member of the elite or the intelligentsia. Rather, I’d say he was radical—in the sense of returning to roots, getting back to basics.
To me, the bit of the Gospel of John quoted in the OP that always jumps out is where John the Baptist, after being asked “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?,” says “among you stands one whom you do not know.” I tend to hear that as “that Messiah you’re so busy waiting and watching for? Yeah, he’s already here. He’s already among you, and you haven’t even noticed.”
I think we may all be called to do likewise in our own contexts—“he’s here, among us. He has come.” Unlike John, I don’t think we’re so much called to exhort people to prepare the way of the Lord. John had a specific role in a specific time, and even in John’s context, that exhortation carried immediacy, a sense of “Prepare the way, because he is coming. Now.”
We’re called, I think, to announce, by word and by how we live our lives, that the Lord has come. Or, as put in the prologue: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
He said so.