Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

January 18, 2026

John 1: 29-34

We have just celebrated the Baptism of the Lord last Sunday, and already John the Baptist appears in our Gospel today.  John the Baptist can seem a much overlooked and overshadowed figure.  Sometimes it is even difficult to see him as a real person at all.  We think of him as the precursor or forerunner of Jesus who is the Christ.  We think of him as just a shadowy and necessary person who gets the stage and the people ready for Christ. He is a lonely person out in the wilderness who eats little and dresses funny.  But only to see this picture is to miss the reality of who John really was.

First, John is a man who listens to the Father;  he is very close to God.  He has read the scriptures with his heart and heard what the Father asked him to do.  To do this, he spent many years in the desert, probably alone.  But he was not a loner.  He needed this quiet time to hear that God wanted him to make the people ready to accept his only Son and John's cousin as Savior and Redeemer.

Second, John loved people.  In his active years of preaching and baptizing, he was surrounded by people.  And not just by the hundreds or thousands of strangers who came to hear him speak or be baptized by him.  He apparently had a core of disciples who were devoted to him and his message.  It is not difficult to imagine that those disciples loved him.

Thirdly, it is difficult to believe how humble and self-depreciating John was.  One would have thought that John would have made a lot out  of the power he had over others, at least in dominating them if not getting rich off their gifts.  But, no, John was a truly humble person even though he had great opportunity to make others his cult followers.  Instead, he said, “A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me.”  And in another passage says, “I am not worthy to untie his sandal strap.”  This is a humility so true and unpretentious that it blows the mind.

So, John the Baptist is not some shadowy figure creeping along the pages of the Gospels.  No;  rather, he is a real person who has more reality than we can hope to have.  John is single minded in his listening to the Lord;  he meditates over God’s word and tries to determine what they mean to him and how he can live them out.  John does not think of himself at all;  he does not manipulate others, he does not try to hold power over them.  In fact he is a St. Francis who is only an instrument of God’s hands, never looking to see what is in it for himself.  Would that we today would live like John.  We could change the world.  Today, let us focus on what the Father, Son, and Spirit have in mind for us.  We pray:  May we, like John the Baptist, attend to your voice, O God.

Fr. John Tran