John 3:30
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
A while back, an on-line satire magazine ran a whimsical piece about a fictional competition between a group of yogis and spiritual adepts. The headline for the piece was “Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship” and it featured a brash fictional yogi who was loudly and abrasively trumpeting his inner peace like the young Muhammad Ali: “I am the Serenest! No one is serener than me–I am the greatest monk of all time!” We laugh, of course, but the question is: why? What makes this absurd picture so funny? The answer, as usual, is incongruity. Those who aim to devote themselves to monastic pursuits, from whatever religious tradition, are supposed to be about the business of diminishing their egos, not announcing themselves as “the greatest monk of all time!” Yet (and here is where Christianity differs from the eastern tradition), there is something to our fictional monk’s desire for greatness that might make him more at home in the Christian Tradition than in the east. For the eastern goal is to simply decrease till one vanishes altogether. But the Christian goal, articulated by John the Baptist in today’s verse, is emphatically to decrease so that Christ may increase. John’s goal, like ours, is to one day enjoy eternal life, not nothingness, with the God of life. And God wants that for John and us. That is why Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
