He must increase

2nd Week of Advent - Saturday (15 December 2018)

Ecclesiasticus 48:1-4,9-12. Psalm 80:2-3,15-16,18-19. Matthew 17:10-13.

“Elijah has come already and they did not recognise him.”

The Gospel of today once again focuses on St John the Baptist, by referring him to as the Prophet Elijah who was to return. The passage follows immediately after the Transfiguration, when three of Jesus’ disciples – Peter, James and John – were given a glimpse of Jesus as the glorious Son of his heavenly Father. During that experience, they saw Moses, representing the Law, and Elijah, representing the prophetic tradition, speaking with Jesus and thereby clearly endorsing the mission of Jesus as Messiah, including what he had told them about his suffering, dying and rising again. A prophecy which had upset them very much.

On the way down from the mountain, the disciples ask Jesus, "Why do the scribes says that Elijah has to come first?" To which Jesus replies: "I tell you that Elijah has come already and they did not recognise him but treated him as they pleased." Jesus does not really answer the question but confirms that Elijah will come again. In fact, says Jesus, he has already come but he was not recognised and he was mistreated, just as Jesus himself will not be recognised and be rejected. The disciples immediately realised that Jesus was speaking of John the Baptist.

The role of the returned Elijah was to pave the way for the coming of the Messiah and that is exactly what John the Baptist did. The First Reading from the book of Sirach is about Prophet Elijah but much of it can be applied to John the Baptist.

What John teaches us is humility, and dying to our egos. "I must decrease, He must increase." We grow more by subtraction than by addition. So our growth is not a matter of accumulating more and better information, but a matter of letting go of our ego and "decreasing." Growth, paradoxically, in spiritual terms is not about increasing, but about decreasing. It is about decreasing our fears and our attachment to self-image. Spirituality thus is more about unlearning and unburdening, than about gathering knowledge. In other words, human development is primarily about being more, not having more.

John the Baptist knew who he was, and who he wasn't. We can come to such knowledge only by tapping the divine within us. We have no real access to who we really are except in God. Only when we surrender ourselves to God, can we find our true selves. Thus we can say a human person can only know herself from the inside out, not from an outside view. Both self-knowledge and God-knowledge are an inside job.

As we accept the witness of John the Baptist, let us also see ourselves in the role of John, sharing with him the responsibility of preparing the way for Jesus to come into people’s lives especially during this Advent. And, like John and as disciples of Jesus, we too can expect challenges, opposition and perhaps hardships. That is one way to say, "I am not important, but He is important." That is one way to die to our false selves, and rise to our true selves. "Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth, and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much fruit" (John 12:24). Our carefully constructed ego container must gradually crack open, as we realise that we are not separate from God, from others, or from our true selves.