The relationship of St John the Baptist to the Christ

St John's Saturday morning workshop: The relationship of St John the Baptist to the Christ presented and led by Rev. Michaël Merle

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

​The workshop began with a presentation that focussed on the Epistle in this season of St John’s, the letter that is prayed at the beginning and at the end of the Act of Consecration of the Human Being. We will come to understand what it is to pray this letter at the beginning of the Act of Consecration of the Human Being and what it is to pray it at the end Act of Consecration of the Human Being. The inserted prayer for St John’s-tide will also come under discussion. The correct liturgical term for an inserted prayer is an embolism. This term has been usurped by the medical profession.
 
The presentation began by introducing a word that derives from Greek but has lived as an idea since the earliest civilisations. The Zarathustran religion was familiar with the concept and so was the Ancient Indian culture. The word is Aithein from the Greek αἴθειν. The word is pronounced ethyn (with the ‘e’, the ‘th’ and the ‘y’ as in the word therapy). The word meant to burn and to shine. It was a fire that shone, a light that burned brightly and shone. Thus, it was a light where the source of the light was fire. It is a burning that shone out. This word became the foundation for another word in the Greek language: aither. This meant ‘the upper air’, the upper air where the light of the sun is captured to be transmitted to the earth’s surface. What is radiated by the sun, which is a source of warmth, and light and fire, is captured by the upper air and transmitted to the surface of the earth.
 
The word ‘aither’, for upper air, came into Latin, and through old French and the Norman conquest of Britain gives us ‘ether’ in English. There is a lot about ether that is misunderstood. There are several meanings of ether.

• It was used to describe the substance that was believed to occupy space. The space between the sun and the earth and between the planets and beyond the planets is filled with ether. The first problem arises: that a word that was conceptually connected with forces, powers and spiritual insight is used to describe a physical manifestation.
• It is also used to describe a pleasant-smelling, colourless volatile liquid that was used as an anaesthetic.
• It was also used in a literary sense. An example might be that ‘odours dispersed into the ether’.
• It can also mean air as in the medium through which things moves, which is a good understanding of ether on a physical level. One could say: ‘the soul wafts across the ether’. It means more than just the air, it means something that is able to move through the air. There is a power or force that enables this activity to happen.

 
The latter meaning of ether is the nature of ether that is discussed in this presentation. It is the force or power that makes it possible for something to be transmitted through air. In the considerations of this workshop there is a deep connection between ether and air. In physics, ether was considered as a rarified, highly elastic substance believed to permeate all space. Then when the substance could not be found, ether was thought to not exist. What is being described is the force behind what substantially appears or doesn’t appear.
 
The next concept is that of etheric forces. These are the forces of life. They are the forces of creativity. Therefore, we can say that these are forces that belong to Christ. They are Christ forces. We understand the human being and the world around us as having been shaped and formed with a physical form in which there is a living, forming capacity, force or power. Not to be confused with might or strength, which operate in the physical, but power. That is in the etheric. It is the possibility that we have a force in us that keeps forming us. When we lose this force, at death, the living body, now dead, disintegrates. There is a relationship for us between this formative force, the living force in us and air. The air that we breathe, our breath, is part of what sustains us and keeps us alive.
 
So, when Rudolf Steiner spoke about these etheric forces, he spoke about four different types of etheric forces and they appear to us in the stages of evolution. The first great stage of evolution brings us the warmth ether. The warmth ether is the force of coming into being, the force of becoming, of arising. In the second great stage of evolution, we have the light ether. This is our interest today. The light ether has the quality of raying out or extending, of growing. In the third great stage of evolutionary development, we get the tone ether. The tone ether has the quality of levity, of movement and the ordering of movement. In our time, the fourth great stage of evolutionary development, earth existence, we have the life ether. The life ether has to do with the force of wholeness and healing. All four ethers need to be experienced in our time. We need a relationship to the warmth ether, the light ether, the tone ether and the life ether. There are times of the year when each of these ethers becomes more apparent through the experience of the movement of the sun at the solstices and the equinoxes. There are four opportunities to notice the ethers. The warmth ether – the force of becoming, of appearing, of arising – has been associated with Christmas, in our attempt to relate to the spiritual world. We hear in our Advent epistle, the word “becoming”. The warmth ether is the ether of birth and of coming into being. The light ether of raying out and extending, is associated with St John’s. The tone ether of levity, of overcoming gravity, of movement, is Michaelmas. We hear it in the epistle, the quality of not being bound by gravity; of being able to arise in our spiritual force. The life ether, connected with forces of wholeness and healing, is connected with Easter and celebrated with the Resurrection. This is the possibility of growing into our true life as Spirit Human.
 
Michaël read something about the light ether in preparation for a study of the St John’s epistle, as there are many references to light ether qualities in this epistle. “We must understand that every earthly source of light is a receiver for the ether light.” This makes a distinction between ether light as a spiritual force and power that makes physical light possible. Physical light is a form of something spiritual and that is the ether light of which is being spoken. “We must understand that every earthly source of light is a receiver for the ether light whose direction of activity is aimed towards its peripheral origin, the infinitely distant plane.” The ether light fills space. “In contrast to the radial directed nature of light (light radiates from a source and has a direction) air is in itself directionless, a chaos.” The word ‘gas’ comes to us from the word meaning ‘chaos’. “Air is always between things, continuous and coherent within itself, filling the space. This inner coherence of air is evident when one tries to rarify it. It is barely possible to create a true, complete vacuum (because of this inner coherent nature of air). The most characteristic quality of air is its elasticity. It can be compressed and stretched. Light ether must therefore be an expansive, stretching force and the contrary physical force will be the force of densifying and compacting. The opposite of elastic is brittle. Light, physical light is brittle which is why it can be split. If I wave a stick in the air the air moves out of the way and then flows together again behind the stick. If I hold the stick in front of a light source, the light does not join up behind the stick but rather shines on divided in a straight line on either side of the stick.” So, light can be split and broken. That is the physical quality of light, but the ether light is elastic. The force is elastic. The force is able to move in the medium of air. Therefore, when we speak of ether light, we must be careful that we do not think about the qualities of physical light, or we are missing the point. The ether light lives as a force that fills all of space.
 
“Another property of air is tension. There is no air without a certain degree of tension. Tension is an internal effect that creates and sustains. Light demonstrates the opposite phenomenon. With physical light all is outer effect, externalise. Take a source of light, a candle flame, the essential quality is not what holds it together but what it releases, what it rays out. The increase or decrease of tension corresponds to the greater or lesser intensity of light.
 
“The light ether also works organically, active in living organisms when we are able to also grow and expand and increase in volume and take up more space, whether we are a tree or a human being.
 
“The light ether creates the periphery and thereby space itself, or more concisely, ether creates light ether spaces. In the organic realm light ether as growth energy causes the specialness of living things.” We can take up space. There is no living thing that does not take up space, a certain volume. We can see it because it appears and because we can see it, we realise it has a form. The ether light force helps to create the periphery, the skin, the outer shell of what is able to take up that space, and live and grow and expand in space.
 
“In summary, we can characterise the life ether as the actual vitalising and individualising force that creates organic wholeness and heals wounded ones.” This is a description of a Christ force. The ethers are really the forces of the Son God. These are the forces of creativity, of life, of warmth: light, tone, life. These forces of creativity as also expressed in the Trinity epistle in relation to the Son God. The Son God works with the Father God which offers substance and being, with the Spirit God that completes the picture and holds it altogether. They reveal themselves in space and in time: in the ordering of space and in the course of time. We are looking at the Christ forces. St John the Baptist announces to us this force; it has to do with the formative forces of our origin, what has formed and shaped us; created us in the way that we are. St John is the messenger of that light ether force, of that light, the spiritual light that we know as the light of Christ. This is the light that St John longs for and the light that he knows. It is the light that he can see and speak about; and the light that then enters us, and the way in which we develop a new sense organ for this light. It is a new sense organ for experiencing the Christ in our lives.
 
“In summary, we can characterise the light ether as the actual vitalising and individualising force that creates organic wholeness – that created wholeness, organic and spiritual, living and truly living, and heals wounded ones. It forms organisms sculpturally by creating a skin and sustains integrity in every part of the organism. Life ether creates living bodies. It embodies. It is not the body but creates living bodies.” Opposite to this is the earth element which creates object bodies that we can come up against. An object body can be divided. This is what modern science does, it fragments the body when it considers the body.
 
At this point we heard the St John’s epistle and what is says about life and about light. We considered each phrase of the epistle as each phrase expresses a complete concept. This was followed by a consideration of the inserted prayer.
 
From these we learn that St John announces the blessing of Christ. He is the messenger of the light and a witness to its arrival on earth in the being of Jesus who is then known as Jesus the Christ, Jesus Christ, who is the Son of the Father God, and our Lord, as we hear in the Act of Consecration. We are then able to experience the full power of the ether light, not just in the world around us, but in us, and through us, that ether light can now ray out, because we become a source of it too. That is the great mystery that St John announces, that the light can be in us.
 
We then had the opportunity to listen to and fulfil the Act of Consecration of the Human Being.
 
This was followed by dividing into smaller groups to consider two exerts of scripture: the pericopes chosen this year for the Second and Third Sundays of St John’s-tide: John 1: 19-29 and John 3: 22-36, reading the translation proclaimed from the altar.
 
John the Baptist is the messenger of the light; Christ is the light. The force, the true spiritual power, in what we can speak of as the light ether, is the creative force and life of Christ. The ethers: warmth, light, tone and life manifest as the elements of fire, air, water and earth for us in our material reality. We should not mistake the force behind light for the thing itself. There is a whole world of life and growth and ripening that has produced the fruit (the mango, the avocado, the pear). When we eat the fruit, we eat the substance of these processes but not the processes. However, in the substance something of the processes are present because there would be no substantial form without those processes. We must not mistake the thing for the process that brings it about. We heard earlier that we can split light with a stick, but light ether is everywhere, making the light possible and also belonging to the substance of air.
 
If St John is the messenger of light, he is the messenger, the light is the light of Christ. And much like he is an independent human being, he is also just the message, the process in him is the message, the Word of Flame, the announcing. Then the light that we speak of is the process and the power of what manifests as the Christ being in Jesus of Nazareth.
 
The questions that we considered were the distinction between the baptism of water and the baptism of fire. What is the baptism of water? And why do we not have it today? Baptism means immersion. When we baptise and infant or a child it is with smallest quantity of water and with salt and ash.
 
The first passage from scripture (John 1: 19-29) was read in order to discover what it says about baptism, and about the role of St John and about his relationship to Christ. After reading the passage the question was that John immersed people in water to the point of death and they would emerge gasping for air and be filled with something: a reconnection. The question to consider is how we can immerse ourselves as adults without being immersed in water. The translation provided to us spoke of the baptism connecting the person to the formative forces of humankind. These are the etheric forces that we carry in us. They form us. They are the Christ forces of life in us. This is the life that could die; it is the life that might not last if we cannot reconnect to the intention, if we cannot reconcile ourselves to its true purpose.
 
So, the baptism of John the Baptist woke people up. It matched with his message of “metanoia” – change your mind and heart. It asks us to rethink, feel and act according to this new consciousness, become aware of one’s connection to life and of one’s need to have it. Become aware that one is connected to these formative forces. However, it is only an awareness. This was a baptism that woke one up. It was not a baptism that immersed one in the new life of Christ. It was a baptism that immersed one in the consciousness of one’s original connection to Christ in the Christ forces – the formative forces.
 
Christ comes with a different baptism: the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He immerses us in the new life of Christ, in the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha, in the Resurrection. He immerses us so that we are no longer just connected to our formative forces, we are also connected to our spiritual destiny.
 
John connects us to where we came from, Christ connects us to where we are going. John reconnects us to our memory that we came from the Divine. When an adult arrives at The Christian Community, we understand that the person has woken up to this reality, the person is already baptised in that consciousness, is already baptising themselves in that consciousness. The priest no longer needs to do this for them, the individual can do it for themselves. In The Christian Community an infant is baptised into a community that will carry them spiritually. An adult must carry themselves spiritually, the need for external immersion into such a community is no longer necessary.
 
Baptism in its essence means immersion into a reality. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is to immerse one into the reality of the ‘I’ of the human being finding a home in the human being, integrated into the human being. It is only through the integration of the ‘I’ that we can work from the inside to develop ourselves into the future human being. This will not happen without the working of the ‘I’-organisation. In the Christian Community baptism is ongoing and we confirm it by making the three crosses in The Act of Consecration of the Human Being. We recommit to the baptism in the Father, in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, as scripture requires in the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go forth and be teachers of all peoples and baptize them in the name and with the power of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.
 
What then is Christian baptism? Because of the baptism of the Holy Spirit encapsulated in the event of Whitsun (Pentecost), we have a constitution into which we are born that provides us with the power of our own baptism as adults by immersing ourselves in the Act of Consecration of the Human Being.
 
The second excerpt from the Gospel (John 3: 22-36) was read in order to continue the investigation into who John is and who Christ is. What is the relationship between John the Baptist and Christ? The first consideration is to be found in the two talks on St John: St John – messenger of the Light and St John – witness to the Incarnation. A question that was posed was why the announcing of the coming was necessary. We experience this throughout our lives, that events of significance are announced. The birth is announced with labour pains. As human beings we need to prepare ourselves inwardly to fully appreciate the arrival. This can be the overture to a composition that prepares us for the themes that we will hear in the composition, and when we hear them in their context we have been prepared. We find in these excerpts from scripture the statement of John: “He who sent me”. John is sent by the Father to announce the Son and the Son announces the Father – in Him the Father is revealed – and the Son announces the Spirit – “I will ask the Father to send the Paraclete”. We hear it also in the Act of Consecration that the Son orders and bears the life of the world which He receives from the Father and makes whole through the Spirit.
 
Michaël brought the way in which the St John’s epistle expresses John as the messenger of the Light and the witness to the Incarnation. The Epistle ends with our need to develop a new sense organ. As we develop the organ to sense the light, we are developing a sense for love. This is the Christ’s forces of a sense of love. This connects to the instruction given by Christ that we “love another as I have loved you”. This sense of love that we are developing senses the Christ in the other even when the other person is not displaying any Christ qualities. Even when a person’s behaviour is despicable, we should be able to sense the Christ in that person through this new sense of love. This sense will have developed by the sixth post-Atlantean Epoch which will only develop in over a thousand years to come. Then it will be expressed to the extent that we will have developed a sense of the other “so keenly that we will be able to know that our neighbour is hungry, and we will feed our neighbour before we settle ourselves to sleep”. This level of care for the other will develop only if we engage in the world today.

John the Baptist is the messenger and the witness of the light power and earthly reality of Christ. This is the relationship between John the Baptist and Christ. Hold this in the understanding of what the ether light is. The light power is the light ether which is the forming force of light. It is the spiritual light that enlightens; the true light that is the life of a human being; and the true life of a human being, John tells us in the Prologue, is the light that now shines from the human being.