“Who are you?” the Pharisees demand. Not that they’re anxious for an answer, unless that answer produces silence instead of the fiery preaching of this man whom many, even Herod, thought might be Elijah come back.

They need not have worried. John is not just about to announce that he is the Messiah. That role is to be fulfilled by his cousin, not him. John “knows his place” it seems. He is the one who cries out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the LORD.”

The only problem with this is that the reference to the Old Testament establishes exactly that John is the Messiah. When we look at the reference in Isaiah 40:3, it is clear that the one who does this “crying out” is “the One whom we are to expect.” So what’s going on?

I think that the evangelist’s point is precisely that John the Baptizer is announcing, not the coming of the Messiah, but the coming of GOD. To prepare the way of the LORD in Isaiah is the announcement of the “end times,” the time when God will come to judge all the people.

The announcement is for the “great and terrible Day of the LORD.” John – both the evangelist and the baptizer – is making his case that Jesus is not simply the Son of God, not merely a human being who is adopted by God, much as Moses was. His argument is not, as Paul says in the first chapter of Romans, that Jesus became the Son of God.

No, his argument is that Jesus of Nazareth is the costume God wears to go out among his people, as many mythical kings are reported to have done, so as to see how the kingdom is really doing, rather than taking the reports of  advisors who so often have an ax to grind. Jesus is the Word of God, begotten, not made, through whom: all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

But that information is “buried on page 2” as it were. The Pharisees ask their question, and John answers it, but they have not the eyes to see that in this answer Jesus is elevated, and John at one and the same times denies that he is the expected Messiah (which is true – he is nothing of what they expect) and admits that he is indeed that Prophet who comes before God’s return to earth.

In our post-modern world, this is not an easy idea to preach. We are too aware of all the mystery religions of past and present, who extol a God who dies and rises again so that we might live, our crops prosper, and we have many children to care for us in our old age so we don’t wind up in the nursing home. We ignore Jesus’ own words, that John was “if you will accept it, Elijah come back.” But the Pharisees were in no mood for the world to meet God. They were too busy trying to see to it that the religion of their ancestors survived for their children to inherit it.

You and I, who are we in this story? Are we of the Pharisees, trying to preserve church as we have always known it, fending off the entry of the Mystery into our lives? Are we the Prophet, aware of our own magnificent role in the transmission of the Story? Or are we really trying to shrug off the pain and the glory of our assigned role in the world?