My Morning Minister

John the Baptist has constructed an entire religious movement around his own marginality—he's the voice crying in the wilderness, the advance team, the warm-up act for something he can barely articulate. And then Jesus shows up, and John does something that runs counter to every institutional and psychological impulse: he makes himself obsolete. "Look, the Lamb of God," he says, and his best disciples—the ones who've been with him through the locusts and the camel hair and the general discomfort of his prophetic method—immediately walk away. No exit interview, no transition plan, no "let's circle back after you check this out." They just go.

What's theologically destabilizing here is that John doesn't experience this as betrayal or failure. He later says, "He must increase, I must decrease," which sounds like humble piety until you realize it's actually a kind of ontological catastrophe. John is describing the voluntary diminishment of his own significance, the intentional evacuation of his ego from the center of his narrative. This is the opposite of how we're taught to build anything—platform, audience, influence, legacy. John builds toward his own irrelevance, and he seems to understand this as success.

Then there's Jesus' question to the disciples who start following him: "What are you looking for?" Not "Who are you?" or "What do you want from me?" but What are you looking for?—which is both simpler and more complex. It's the question underneath all religious seeking, all philosophical inquiry, all the ways we try to narrate our lives into meaning. And the disciples, in what might be the most endearing moment of scriptural awkwardness, respond with: "Where are you staying?" Which is practical and existential at once—they want to know his address and his ontological location, the GPS coordinates of holiness.

Jesus doesn't give them Google Maps. He says, "Come and see." This is the epistemology of faith: you don't get the answer before you take the step. You don't get certainty; you get invitation. The text specifies "it was about four o'clock in the afternoon," which is such a weird detail to include—except that it marks the moment when everything changed for them. Time itself gets punctuated by encounter.

Here's what lingers: faith that points away from itself toward something truer might be the only kind worth having. John's whole life was training himself to become an arrow, not a destination. And when the moment came, he let go.