Saint John the Baptist : The Man Who Decreased That Truth Might Increase

There is a strange and startling fact about the most important men in history that is seldom stated, though it stares us in the face from the pages of the past. It is this: that the truly essential figures are often those who point away from themselves. They are the men who, having caught a glimpse of something infinitely greater than themselves, spend their lives declaring their own comparative insignificance. And of all such men who have ever lived, perhaps none exemplifies this noble self-diminishment more perfectly than that strange and solitary figure, John the Baptist. He stands forever in Christian memory as the man who, when his moment of greatness came, responded with those immortal words: "He must increase, but I must decrease."

It is one of those statements that grows more profound the longer we ponder it. For there is in it not merely the modesty of a good man, but a metaphysical and almost cosmic principle. In those seven simple words lies the secret of all spiritual growth, the paradox of Christian advancement, and the complete inversion of the world's understanding of greatness. That a man should deliberately orchestrate his own eclipse in the service of a greater light represents something utterly foreign to our modern sensibilities. We might even call it madness, if it were not demonstrably the highest sanity.

The figure of John appears suddenly in the Gospel narrative, like a lightning flash in a barren sky. He comes from nowhere, this wild man clothed in camel's hair, feeding on locusts and wild honey, delivering his dreadful message of repentance. It is important to remember that before Jesus began His ministry, it was John who was the religious celebrity of Judea. The countryside emptied itself as throngs journeyed into the wilderness to hear him. Even skeptical scholars admit that John created a sensation that reverberated through all levels of Jewish society. He had, as we might say today, an enormous platform and a ready audience. In the currency of our age, he was a successful man.

And yet—and here the paradox begins to unfold—his entire message consisted of announcing that he was not the one people should be concerned with. His sermon was essentially: "I am not worth your attention; but Someone else is coming who is." This is strange enough on its face, but becomes positively bewildering when we remember that in our age of self-promotion and personal branding, the cardinal rule is to make oneself the center of attention. John broke this rule so thoroughly that he became memorable precisely because he insisted that he was not worth remembering.

The Christian tradition has sometimes called John "the forerunner," a title that captures both his dignity and his limitation. For a forerunner is both essential and temporary. Without him, the greater one would arrive unheralded and perhaps unrecognized. But once that arrival occurs, the forerunner's work is, by definition, complete. To be a forerunner is to accept both your own necessity and your own obsolescence. It is to understand that your greatest triumph consists in becoming unnecessary.

Consider what it means to grasp this truth in one's deepest being. Modern psychology, with its relentless focus on self-actualization and personal fulfillment, would diagnose such an attitude as pathological self-abnegation. The contemporary therapeutic gospel preaches the expansion of the self, not its contraction. We are told to take up more space, not less; to assert our importance, not diminish it. And yet here stands John, declaring that his greatest joy is found in becoming less significant. It is either profound foolishness or profound wisdom, and we must decide which.

If we look more closely at John, we find other paradoxes clustered around him. This man who prepared the way for universal salvation was himself the most particular and peculiar of individuals. He did not smooth his rough edges to appeal to a broader audience; he did not package his message for mass consumption. Instead, he made his home in the wilderness, dressed like no one else, ate what others would not touch, and spoke with a bluntness that must have shocked his hearers. Far from making himself relatable, he heightened his distinctiveness to the point of eccentricity.

There is in this another lesson that runs counter to our contemporary wisdom. We live in an age obsessed with authenticity, yet one that paradoxically encourages everyone to be authentic in exactly the same way. John's authenticity, by contrast, set him dramatically apart. His fidelity to his calling made him not more acceptable but less so. He did not attempt to bridge the gap between himself and his audience; he allowed that gap to speak its own truth about the distance between humanity and God.

And what of John's message? Here too we find a curious inversion, for the man who prepared the way for the good news did so by preaching what sounded very much like bad news. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" is hardly calculated to soothe the troubled mind. John's words cut sharply against the grain of his listeners' comfortable assumptions. He called religious leaders a "brood of vipers" and warned of the axe laid to the root of the trees. If he were alive today, no public relations firm would touch him, no publisher would risk his unvarnished prose. He violated every principle of effective communication—except the one that matters most: he spoke the truth.

For all his severity, however, we do John a disservice if we imagine him as merely grim. There must have been in him a quality of joy, perhaps all the more powerful for its austerity. When he announced the coming of one greater than himself, it was with the evocative image of a bridegroom coming to the wedding feast. And he described his own role in this cosmic marriage with a striking tenderness: "The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete." Here is a man who found his fulfillment not in his own celebration but in witnessing someone else's.

This leads us to one of the most fascinating aspects of John's character: his complete freedom from envy. When his own disciples came to him, troubled that Jesus was baptizing and drawing crowds, John responded not with the resentment of a competitor but with the pleasure of one whose deepest hopes were being fulfilled. "You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, 'I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.'" There is in these words not a trace of the bitter disappointment that might be expected from a man watching his influence wane. Instead, we hear something like relief—the relief of one who never wanted the spotlight but accepted it only until he could direct it elsewhere.

It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary this freedom from envy truly is. Envy is perhaps the most natural of all sins, the one that requires the least cultivation. Even small children feel its sting without being taught. And yet here is a man who, when faced with the perfect occasion for envy, responds instead with celebration. This is not natural; it is supernatural. It suggests a heart so transformed that it operates according to laws foreign to our ordinary experience.

The contrast between John and our present age could scarcely be more stark. We live in a time of desperate self-promotion, of social media profiles carefully curated to portray our best angles, of "personal brands" and "influencer status." The currency of our economy is attention, and many will do anything to obtain it. Into this frantic scramble for recognition steps John the Baptist, the man who had attention and deliberately redirected it elsewhere.

There is something almost dizzying about this inversion of values. It is as if John understood that the world works precisely backward from how we imagine it does. We believe that to become more, we must accumulate—more possessions, more status, more followers, more influence. But John suggests that true greatness lies in the opposite direction: in decreasing, in emptying, in stepping aside. He anticipated by several decades St. Paul's description of Christ, "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant."

This strange logic of self-emptying runs contrary not only to our modern sensibilities but to human nature itself. It is the logic of the cross, already prefigured in John's ministry. For what is the cross but the ultimate symbol of decrease—God Himself reduced to naked vulnerability, stripped of glory, emptied of power as we understand it? In embracing his own decrease, John was not merely being humble in some conventional sense; he was aligning himself with the fundamental pattern of divine revelation.

We might call this the "Baptist principle"—the paradoxical truth that the way up is down, the way to gain is to lose, the path to greatness leads through service. It is the truth that Jesus would later articulate explicitly: "Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all." John embodied this principle so completely that we might say he decreased even in how he decreased—his self-effacement was itself self-effacing, calling no attention to the sacrifice it entailed.

The culmination of John's decrease came, of course, in his death. After fearlessly speaking truth to power by condemning Herod's marriage to his brother's wife, John was imprisoned and eventually beheaded—all because a dancing girl caught the fancy of a petty ruler. It seems an ignoble end for such a man, a death without dignity or apparent purpose. Yet even in this final diminishment, John continued to point beyond himself. For his death, coming before Jesus's ministry was complete, served as a foreshadowing of the greater death to come. In his suffering no less than in his preaching, John prepared the way.

There is something else worth noting about John's death: its apparent futility. He died not in some grand moment of testimony but in the squalid darkness of Herod's dungeon, his head served up on a platter as a party favor. If we were writing the script, we would give such a man a more fitting end—a public martyrdom, perhaps, with stirring last words to inspire the generations. But God's economy of salvation operates according to different principles than our notions of dramatic satisfaction. Sometimes the greatest witness is given not in spectacular moments but in obscure sufferings that the world never sees.

What are we to make of this man, this strange figure who strides onto the stage of history only to point away from himself? There is in him a quality almost alien to our nature, a freedom from the compulsion to make ourselves the center of the story. Most of us, if we are honest, find it difficult to play even a minor role in someone else's drama. We want to be the protagonist, or at least a major character. The thought of being a mere herald, a voice preparing the way for another, strikes us as somehow inadequate, even if that other is God Himself.

Yet this is precisely John's glory—that he understood his role and embraced it without reservation. If there is a kind of greatness in expanding to fill the available space, there is a rarer and finer greatness in deliberately making oneself smaller so that something more important can grow. This is not self-deprecation in the modern sense, the false modesty that secretly hopes to be contradicted. It is rather a clear-eyed assessment of what truly matters and a joyful subordination of everything else to that supreme value.

What would it mean for us to take John seriously? Not to imitate his diet or his clothing, which were particular to his calling, but to embrace his fundamental orientation toward Christ? To genuinely desire to decrease so that Truth might increase? The implications are radical, extending far beyond personal piety into every dimension of life.

In our relationships, it would mean setting aside the compulsion to dominate, to be proved right, to have the last word. In our work, it would mean caring more for what is accomplished than who gets credit for it. In our churches, it would mean being less concerned with our preferences and more concerned with whether Christ is made known. In our politics, it would mean subordinating partisan advantage to the common good. In short, it would mean a complete reorientation of life around something larger than our own importance.

This is not natural to us. Our instinct, from earliest childhood, is to assert ourselves, to claim our space, to insist on our rights and recognition. We are born grasping, and without a profound transformation, we will die grasping. The Baptist principle cuts against the grain of this deep-seated tendency. It suggests that our fulfillment lies not in self-assertion but in self-giving, not in accumulation but in dispossession.

There is something here that goes beyond ordinary morality into the heart of Christian spirituality. For Christianity has always insisted that we find ourselves most truly not by looking inward but by looking outward, not by attending to our own development but by attending to God and to our neighbor. The paradox is that the self expands most genuinely not when it is the direct object of our concern but when it is allowed to recede into the background of a larger purpose.

John the Baptist understood this with a clarity that continues to challenge us. He was, in Jesus's own assessment, the greatest of those born of women—yet his greatness consisted precisely in pointing away from himself. He decreased not because he lacked worth but because he had glimpsed something of infinitely greater worth. And in that glad surrender, he found not loss but fulfillment, not diminishment but expansion of his truest self.

We live in an age desperately in need of this wisdom. Our culture of self-promotion and personal branding has not delivered the satisfaction it promised. Instead, it has produced epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. We have made ourselves the center of our universe, only to discover that it is a cold and lonely place to be. The Baptist principle offers a radical alternative—the possibility that we might find our truest fulfillment not in our own increase but in our decrease, not in being recognized but in recognizing something greater than ourselves.

This is the final paradox of John the Baptist: that the man who decreased continues, two thousand years later, to loom large in our spiritual imagination. In deliberately stepping aside, he achieved a kind of immortality denied to many who desperately sought it. He lives on not because he asserted himself but because he directed us toward Christ. And in that pointing, that decrease, that self-emptying witness, he shows us still the path to true greatness—the greatness of those who know that Truth must increase, and they must decrease.

-The Seeker's Quill