Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf

John The Baptist was not a Side Character in the Gospel | December 14, 2025

• Archdiocese of Oklahoma City

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A forgotten herald stands at the water’s edge, and his voice still changes how we hear the Gospel. In this episode, we revisit John the Baptist not as a narrative warm-up but as a towering witness whose movement endured for centuries, whose courage confronted power, and whose finger pointed a generation to the Lamb of God. Along the way, we wrestle with why modern preaching sidelined him, how an overreliance on slogans and proofs shrank our imagination, and why a sacramental way of seeing helps us meet Christ with our whole selves.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

SPEAKER_01:

This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives, and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolfe.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm in Senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. There's hardly a character more pronounced and less celebrated in the New Testament than John the Baptist. And while the notion that he's unknown hardly applies, he is, after all, mentioned in two of the four Sunday readings for Advent, and he is prominent in Christian art across the ages, he's not been much appreciated in the Christian rhetoric of the last several hundred years. Like the minor apostles, he's disappeared from concern in our age. John the Baptist has become yesterday's star. I didn't appreciate this fall from grace until three major things happened to cause me to perk up and pay attention. When these elements fell into place, I began to note the major historical part he played in the ministry and the identity of Jesus. It's embarrassing to say that because John is hardly a minor figure in the gospel, nor is he missing in the story of Jesus' proclamation and message. He's securely woven into the fabric of Jesus' life. And yet, in our age, we just don't get excited about him and his role. Partly, this is due to the preoccupations of our studies of the New Testament. Beginning a couple of hundred years ago, the anxious concern on the part of every Christian scholar was to validate the Gospels and both bolster the person of Jesus. After the attacks on the truthfulness of the gospel, when it became fashionable to claim Jesus was just one more in a long line of saviors and therefore of not particular concern to historical and scientific-minded people, the concern of scholarship turned to Jesus most of all. Every other character in the stories of Christ became a minor footnote in the grand concern of who Jesus was and whether his message was of any account. John became the loser in this refocus. He faded into the background. And let's face it, if the concern is whether Jesus should count for anything at all, then John's secondary place in the narrative of Jesus' history begins to diminish rapidly. Imagine, if we were to cast serious doubt on Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul in the first century B.C., if we made the claim that Caesar didn't even exist and that his famous book, The Gallic Wars, was just fiction, a kind of Tom Clancy novel for the first century, then marveling at his military logistics or commenting on the grand scale of Roman martial engineering would take a back seat. After a while, no matter what the world had thought of these things, the first and only question would be to prove Caesar's authenticity, not whether his army could build a bridge or besiege a city. John the Baptist says something of the same in the Gospels. The battle for Jesus left John a casualty in its wake. Plus, the great evangelical thrust of the last couple of hundred years has always been on the identity and purpose of the Savior, Jesus. Coming to know Jesus and to believe in him in one great act of acknowledgement and purpose has been the one and only act of Christian faith. This is a minor version of the major concern I mentioned above. If everyone is concerned to prove the critics wrong and belief in Jesus is wavering, the first thing to do is to bolster belief in Jesus. He is the principal character in the gospel, after all. Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior as a strategy for making Jesus known doesn't leave a lot of room for anything else. Thus, we have a contemporary Christianity that has no room for devotion to Mary, the mother of God, John the herald of Jesus' mission, Peter the rock of the church, or James and John, the two prominent apostles. It's all Jesus, and everyone else has become a minor character in a one-person show. In fact, paying attention to these other characters, as has been prominent in all of Christian history up to now, is regarded as a waste of time. They might, after all, keep you from the fullest possible embrace of the message of Jesus, which would be the greatest problem there is. That these characters could be a gateway into understanding and accepting the true character of Jesus and the message he came to proclaim seems to have fallen by the wayside. John the Baptist, even though he is the most prominent person in all of the Gospels to call attention to Jesus' identity and mission, he's left behind in contemporary preaching, especially the kind we see on TV. This is true even though he is the prototype of the one who strives to get the people's attention concerning who Jesus really is and what he's really up to. It's kind of odd, but then again, the type of Christian practice in our day and time is a bit odd. If we had to describe the role of John the Baptist in modern preaching and contemporary religious thought, we could do it in one phrase, which would be pay no attention to that man on the corner saying all those things. Plus, there's the great suspicion of the sacramental life that permeates the whole Western approach to Christian living in our day. Not in the Catholic Church, of course, but in almost all of the experience of the life of the Church not Catholic. From about 500 years ago, there's been a great suspicion of anything not rational or stated or explicit or coldly logical. While all these attributes have their place, they're not the sum of life, nor are they some of the sum of belief. And yet it has often become the stated policy of many Christian bodies that unless a person believes and expresses belief by these means, his belief isn't authentic and isn't meaningful. So in this context, a person's encounter with Jesus and with the whole corpus of Christian doctrine has to be an embrace of the mind by using the right words and the right formulations, and them wholly, rather than an embrace of a way of life or a cast of character. The temptation is to imagine all of faith begins and ends with the outline of words and the ideas captured by those words, and there's nothing else. But that's not all there is to believe. The alternative is best described as the sacramental imagination. This isn't limited to some contrast about Catholic and non-Catholic, it exists as a tension in all of Christian life and history. It has to be rediscovered and celebrated over and over throughout the ages. We Catholics have too much history to ignore and too many examples of living the faith to allow it to become simply a matter of the right words. Or to quote my friend Gil Bailey, if it's a contest between saying the right words in the right place or being in the right place at the right time, be in the right place. To make a contrast, let me quote from something I wrote a couple of years ago about the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I wrote, The Spanish missionaries appealed to reason, rationality, and the intellect to make their case to the ones they thought they sought to convert. Juan Diego's encounter with the Virgin was one in which the truth was made evident through intuition and awareness, touched by the wider beauty, the wider world of sensation and natural beauty. It was a story of art, rhythm, song, smell, flowers, and feeling. Of course, they were Spanish missionaries, not Calvinist pastors. They quickly understood they had encountered a sacramental moment, one in which the presence of God and the message of Christ overwhelmed the senses and pushed beyond the boundaries of books and concepts and into the realm of the heart and the soul. That's the gift of the sacramental life. It's the gift ignored in our day and time, all in favor of making sure the one soul aspect of the spiritual life is imaged in the rational soul and formulated by saying the right words in the right way. When placed in this context, the life of John and all of the other characters of the gospel disappear into the surrounding landscape. They become hardly more than a part of the wallpaper, minor details not worthy of our consideration, and certainly not worthy of our time, which is why John gets a few minutes of time and then goes on his way. But my mind has been changed. The first reason for it comes from a book by the noted Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown. His book on the early church, The Church the Apostles Left Behind, had a significant contribution to make about the identity of John the Baptist that I found intriguing. Raymond Brown noted that the followers of John the Baptist who thought John was the Messiah held on as a community of believers for almost 300 years. They continued to devote themselves to the preaching and witness of John for all that time. Most remarkably, they did this in the face of pressure from the Jewish community, stamping out deviations to its standard worship and teaching, as well as from the growing Christian community, devoting itself to the life and the ministry of Jesus. This note concerning Christian history was intriguing to me. Most of all, it helps to locate the position of John in the first century. Rather than being some sort of minor character who enters the scene just as Jesus shows up and then leaves so that Jesus can get started, John becomes a major player in the religious life of the time. Not only does he play the part of the one who announces the ministry of Jesus, he's a religious leader in his own right. He plays a part in sparking the imagination of all of Judah, deepening the thirst of those who were waiting to hear of the Messiah's coming. And they didn't just follow the direction pointed to by his finger as they looked at John's presence and decided that he was the one. Not only did they decide about his identity, they chose to fix their attention on his life and preaching to the exclusion to that of Jesus. John was not only the Baptist, he was also the competitor. Given the excitement John promoted, the mention of John in the Gospels makes more sense. Mark describes his confrontation with Herod. Matthew notes John's insistence on the power of the Messiah. And Luke links him to the lineage of Jesus himself, making him not only in the line of those preparing for the Messiah, but part of the same family and family encounter with the divine message. In the Gospel of John the Evangelist, he's the one who's explicit and forthright, insisting, John, his disciples quit their allegiance to him and give it to Jesus. In all these moments, John becomes the one who's leading the way, pointing toward the right direction, and allowing his disciples to begin to see what's important and necessary. That is, the gospels take care to make sure we understand exactly what John's ministry meant as the precursor to Jesus' own ministry. They want to make sure we get the right story about the right person. Knowing they had a good reason to pursue this strategy makes their words more meaningful and more poignant. Plus, with Ray Brown's information, we're given a glimpse of John as someone deeper than the introductory character who simply sets the stage for the important stuff. John the Baptist and how he lived, in what he preached, by his condemnations, in his conflicts, and by his death was a deeply powerful religious figure who cannot be ignored by those who want to celebrate Jesus and the message of repentance and hope he offered. Indeed, by Father Brown's reminder, we can deepen our understanding of Jesus' own words that of all those born of women there is none greater than John the Baptist. That's not something we hear very often, and yet they are the words of Jesus just as certainly as for God so loved the world, he sent his only son. John mattered. John matters. The second element in deepening my appreciation of John has been the development of the historical understanding of the group of men, and some women apparently, who formed a community of disciples awaiting the arrival of the Messiah. This ascetical group, known as Essenes, which means the pious ones or the holy ones, were active from the 2nd century BC to about the second century AD. They had a kind of monastery where they lived in a community, a bit of a ways out of Jerusalem, where they prayed together and studied the scriptures and prepared themselves for the arrival of the Messiah. But they also had groups of people who lived in various cities who were also devoted to pious living and to preparations for the anointed one who was to come. These groups had been known about for some time, but the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has brought them to light over the last generation or so. The recovery of these writings and their translation has given us a new appreciation of their presence and has awakened us to a more developed sense of the religious environment that Jesus was a part of. History is always new. There's always more to know about any age and any time. In the last generation, with growing information about the first century seeping into our understanding, we can see what we couldn't see before. I've mentioned this before, but when I was in the seminary, our scripture professors assured us that celibacy was unknown in the Jewish world and would have been unthinkable as a preparation for piety or a response to godly awareness. It just didn't happen, they said. Just as soon as their assurances sounded in our classrooms, the life of the Essenes was being excavated from the documents to reveal a thriving monastic-like life in Jesus' day, where men lived their lives in community, foregoing marriage in order to prepare for the coming kingdom of God. The past, it appears, is always changing. This awareness allows us to see a situation in which John the Baptist in the desert is someone more than the wild man who wanders among the boulders and stares into the night sky, seeking God in solitary remoteness. John could also be a resident of this community of men who had spent centuries reflecting on and preparing for the Messiah as an expression of their longing to discern the work of God in the world. John isn't just a startling creature interrupting the peace and tranquility of Jerusalem. He's an example of the religious restlessness of the entire age, symbolized by those who have sought refuge in their community together. Simply by way of their existence, this group of pious believers gathered together to seek the coming of the Lord. It allows us to imagine the life of Christ and the work of John differently. For example, if John had spent time in this group and had absorbed their teachings, some of which is described so well in the scrolls that we have, then he's not simply walking out of the wilderness to tell us about a private revelation. John is speaking in the name of a whole religious movement. It's not only his personal reflections about these things, it's the insight of a whole community that has been studying the texts and praying deeply for generations. That makes John's assurances about Jesus even more powerful. Not only that, it provides for a more comprehensive explanation of how the message of Jesus was embraced and practiced after Jesus' death and resurrection. Perhaps John was not the only one who believed Jesus as the Messiah. If an entire movement of people trusted in the same insight and preaching as John when the disciples began to move among the people to proclaim Jesus' message, they may have had a lot of help. There's also been some speculation that Jesus himself could have had a connection to these Essenes. He spent his time in the wilderness as well. Not only that, there are hints that Jesus could have belonged to a larger community of believers than simply those whom he had sparked by his teaching. For example, when Jesus told his disciples about preparing for the Last Supper, he told them to go into Jerusalem to find a man who would have a room with everything ready for the Passover. This makes more sense if there were a community present in Jerusalem who knew him and knew of his place in their movement. Also, when Jesus spoke to his disciples about finding a donkey he could ride into Jerusalem, he told them where to find it and to let the owner know who needed it. Again, this makes more sense if we imagine there was a group of men and women who knew him, a group he was a part of who were connected to him, one of whom would understand he needed an animal to ride into town. Those are speculations, of course. But knowing this group existed and that both John and Jesus could have been a part of it makes for an intriguing and a powerful understanding of the time and place of Jesus' ministry and proclamation. John was leading the way, but he wasn't just one man with one message. He was a man who bore a message percolating throughout this society, one guarded and cultivated for centuries before he arrived to point the world toward Jesus. If anything, this connection invites me to understand John to be a much more important, to be much more important than an individual who just happened to show up at the right time to walk on stage so as to introduce the world to Jesus. Instead, he was a product of the religious ferment in the Jewish world that made the message of Jesus so powerful. This would be no more than we would expect. After all, when a farmer goes out to sow, he doesn't simply throw seed all over, hoping some of it will come up. He cultivates the ground, preparing it to receive the seed and allowing it to sprout, without being choked out by everything else already growing there. So God would prepare the way for the message of Christ, not simply by having someone show up out of the desert with no pedigree and no preparation, but as the voice of a movement with the inside of 200 years and part of the notoriety of men who had been laying the foundation of proclamation by the dedication and commitment of their own lives. John makes a lot more sense to me now. He's a fuller, more meaningful character, not simply the half-crazed product of too much time in the hot sun. Plus, if he and Jesus had some connection to this group in the desert, John's opinion of Jesus wouldn't be based only on his familial relationship or on the reports of others, or on what the popular response was, but on his personal appreciation of the association they shared together. It's true, we could be making too much about what we don't know about fully. We could be making too much of this one place in this one group. After all, it's only lately we've come across them and the depth of their presence at that time and place. Maybe there were other groups and other energies running through there. We're still making sense of what we know, for example, of the Vietnam anti-war movement and the Tea Party's activities. And they were only two generations ago, not 2,000 years ago. But no matter what the Essenes were, they were real and they were really present in Jesus' and John's time. Plus, it reminds us that the work of the Spirit is throughout a society, moving the hearts of many. That's something to be reminded of when we're striving to appreciate the precur the precursor and the one who pointed the way to the Messiah. God was preparing a whole people, not just twelve men. Finally, I began to appreciate John the Baptist when I found out how important he was in the understanding of the Orthodox Church. The focus of Orthodox theology is on the incarnation. The saving moment of the divine was when God entered the world at the Annunciation by way of Mary, and when he was acclaimed as the Savior by John's preaching. In fact, in many places, the icons of Mary and John are placed in the sanctuary of Orthodox churches and have a station of honor and prominence much more central than the crucifix. After all, God's saving action was to enter our world in order to save it. The roles of Mary his mother and John his herald were central to salvation at his entrance into the world. Our world has been united to the divine presence through Jesus, and our lives are made different when we know who He is. Mary, the mother of Jesus, and John the Baptist make this happen. No wonder John's place is so central. Our religious sensibilities are the product of our age. We focus on what we find important and we listen to what sounds congenial. But we can't afford to ignore what believers have found to be necessary for centuries. John the Baptist is the figure from the scriptures and from the life of the church, whom we can't be content to keep in the shadows. It's because he matters. Back in just a moment. The pall that falls over the confessional walls is not quite awful. That would imply that modesty would fly and good sense die. Yet not so there at the elbow rests the screen, low, for the privacy there, it precisely where the sins are bared, forgiven as the evils driven away and all is shriven, in the midst of hope that believers cope and grace can float. And God reigns as evil doing wanes, and we reclaim our lives. That's the confessional wall! I urge everybody to make contact with your parish and make sure you're clear about what the times and places of celebration are to be during the Christmas holidays and all through the Christmas season. This is a time that is of great importance to all of our families and to all of us together. So if you're traveling and are going to be out of where you're normally at on Sunday, find out what's going on during those holiday times. And if you're in your parish, make sure that you pick up the bulletin and are clear about when the celebrations are and what's going to be taking place, especially if you have visitors who are going to be a part of your celebration. We want everybody to find their place and to be a part of the celebrations that we are hosting. So be prepared to join us again as we continue to practice and to explore what it means to be living Catholic.org.