Homily for Saturday, 11 January 2014– Saturday after Epiphany

Readings of the day: 1 John 5:14-21; Psalm 149:1-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; John 3:22-30

How many of us can admit to having a competitive tendency from time to time? This tendency is not bad, in and of itself. Competition is, to some extent, embedded in our culture. We want to better ourselves; we want to achieve that promotion; we want increased wealth and social status. Many of us even challenge ourselves to be more faithful or prayerful, or to be involved in more ministry activities in our parish.

Some degree of competition can be healthy. However, today we hear in John’s Gospel a challenge against the kind of competition that inhibits us from Christ and Christ’s Gospel.

Our Gospel reading says that a “dispute” developed between “the disciples of John” the Baptist “and a Jew,” but how many of us recognize the many small but important details of this Gospel’s setting of the scene? The reading begins by describing the place where John was baptizing as having “an abundance of water”; a place to which “people came to be baptized.” An abundance of water and an abundance of people: John the Baptist recognizes that this abundance is not his own but a gift from God.

Then John the Baptist’s role is described like that of “the best man,” the one in a wedding whose role is to bring together the bride and the bridegroom, in this case Christ and the faithful. In this gift from God John rejoices. No gift is greater than to bring the faithful to Christ. “So this joy of mine has been made complete,” John says. There is no greater honor on earth; no greater joy; nothing greater for which we can compete than to be a people of God and to bring yet more people to Christ.

Yet we, like John, are not the Christ. We receive our abundance; our joy; our love; our Christian baptism not from ourselves but from God. Our task, like that of John, the task that will bring us the greatest joy, is to make Christ, not primarily ourselves, known by our actions and words. God, not we, “must increase.”

In a culture that too often tempts us to compete for the greatest honor, the greatest wealth, and the greatest status, sometimes at the expense of other people, we are invited to make the Baptist’s last words in John’s Gospel our own prayer:  In Christ, “this joy of mine has been made complete. He must increase. I must decrease.”