January 18, 2026, Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Psalm 40; 1 Corinthians 1:1; John 1:29-34
to listen to an audio version of this
What’s really interesting to me about the gospel today is that it tells the same story we heard last week, the story of the baptism of the Lord, it repeats it, but from a different point of view.
The author of Matthew shows us the baptism—we see things as they’re happening—Jesus came, the heavens opened—but in the reading today from the Gospel of John the baptism itself happens offstage. We only hear about it secondhand, from John the Baptist: I saw the Spirit come down like a dove, he says. I have seen the Lord.
Today we don’t witness an event but listen to someone talk about his own experience of it and what he thinks it means.
It’s a subtle difference, but it matters. It shifts the meaning, even if we’re not aware of it, and there are differences like this in Mark and Luke’s version of this story, too, and all over the place in the gospels, sometimes big differences, and that’s OK. The people who put together the New Testament knew what they were doing. They knew that the gospels vary in what they say and how they say it, and that’s part of the point, that the truth revealed in Jesus Christ is so profound that all we can do is glimpse little pieces of it.
As Lawrence Cunningham puts it, the gospel is always “according to”—according to Matthew. According to John. According to you. According to me.
This is important.
A friend gave me permission to tell this story.
She was in the checkout line at Bi-Mart, and after she paid and was walking away, she almost knocked someone over, a tall, bearded man in a Carhart jacket, a stocking cap pulled over his ears. He smiled and said, “you dropped this,” then pressed a $20 bill into her hand. He was so tall that she had to crane her neck to look at his face. “It was all so quiet,” my friend said, “like no one else was there.”
She was pretty flustered, of course, but she thanked him and took the money. But as she was crossing the parking lot on the way to her car, she suddenly remembered that she hadn’t brought any cash with her that day. That twenty couldn’t have been hers.
She stopped and looked around, but the man was already gone, walking down ninth street towards town.
This is the story my friend told me, as today John the Baptist tells us his story.
And they’re the same story.
The more she thought about it the more my friend began to suspect that the man at Bi-Mart had given her “a job to do,” that what she had experienced in that moment was “grace in action.” There was no mistake. Suddenly she knew: this money wasn’t hers to keep but hers to give away again.
It’s true that when John the Baptist sees Jesus coming, he immediately knows who he is. He cries out, Behold, the Lamb of God.” It’s a moment more vivid, more distinct, than the moments most of us are given. But the gospel tells us twice that John “did not know him,” not at first, before the moment happens–and when the moment does happen, he’s ready, and he’s ready, I think, because he’s humbled himself, he’s learned to open his ears to “obedience,” as the psalmist puts it today.
John the Baptist knows that Jesus “ranks ahead” of him. “I baptize with water,” he tells the Pharisees a few verses before this, “but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”
This is important, too, very important.
We are not “worthy.” There is “one among us” we “do not recognize.”
We think that John the Baptist was a superhero and that we need to be superheroes, we need to be warriors, but that’s completely wrong. What defines him is radical humility. We must strive for the virtues, of course, we must wrestle every day with our egos and desires, but all our striving and straining only serve to level us, to teach us that we have to let go. “It’s God who sanctifies us,” Ruth Burrows says. “No one can evolve into holiness through personal effort and discipline no matter how spiritual and sublime. Of ourselves we can do nothing at all.”
In fact, it’s only by submitting to the ordinary, by surrendering to the everyday, that we open ourselves up to grace. “God is always working to bring us to an awareness and acceptance of our poverty,” Burrows says. This is “the essential condition of our being able to receive him,” and all “the petty frustrations, the restrictions, the humiliations” of our ordinary lives, all the occasions when we realize we are not in control, the moments when are helpless and overwhelmed—it’s through moments like these that God calls us. These are what Burrows calls God’s “chosen channel” into our souls.
Who, after all, was “Sosthenes”? Paul just mentions him in passing in his greeting to the Corinthians—“Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the Church of God in Corinth.” But almost nothing is known of him. There’s another brief mention of him in Acts, but no great deed of his is recorded. No great speech of his is written down.
Who was he? A tall man in a stocking cap walking down ninth? A hurried woman at Bi-Mart suddenly given a task?
All we really know is that he is “our brother.”
What is the gospel according to us? To you? To me? What glimpse have we been given? What task is ours?