The Tail of Two Yochanans (Johns)

I find myself awake, sitting by the low light of a fire at 2am, wandering around in deep thoughts. I would like to share a story with you all. Something I hold close to my own heart. 💚

Its called the:

“The Tale of Two Johns (Yochanans)”  

By JoshM

Let me tell you this story slow, like we're sitting around a small campfire and the night itself is leaning in to listen. No pulpit here, no fancy stage, just us sitting in a circle, watching how the flames make our shadows lean toward each other. I'm not some scholar in robes. Just someone who's walked by rivers, read by lamplight, and picked up a whisper that came to me once and never really left.

There were these two guys, both named Yochanan, John in English, and for a while their voices got all tangled up in the same story until people started listening more to one than the other. I want to tell you about both of them, not to settle some theological debate or anything, but because remembering both keeps us honest, you know?

The first John was a wild man. He stood out in the river with mud squishing between his toes, voice cutting through the air like a reed pipe. He didn't use big words or complicated diagrams. Just called people out of their houses and into the water, plain and simple: “Repent.” He baptized them right there in the Jordan, and the whole thing was meant to be seen, this turning, this public change of direction. You could actually watch it happen. Families watching, neighbors watching. The water would wash away the old shape of someone's life and leave this wet, visible mark where they'd decided to turn things around.

There was something urgent about him. He'd point at injustice, at those little compromises we make that slowly twist our lives crooked. He wanted people to stop pretending that what's inside us doesn't affect what we do out there. If your heart had changed, your hands would show it. If your life was different, your neighbors would know. His baptism was prep work, clearing the path, and it demanded a kind of courage that shows up in your body, in how you move through the world.

The other John, though, he was more of a lamplight guy. Wrote in this voice that flowed between poetry and argument. Talked about a Word that was with God and was God, about a Son giving eternal life, about baptism not with river water but with the Holy Spirit. His words reached inside you. Promised this rebirth that happens beneath the surface, this remaking of the heart that you might carry quietly through exile, persecution, through those times when hope just slowly wears away. Where the river guy baptized with water and called for visible repentance, the lamplight writer taught about faith, identity, the Spirit working inside you.

One of the voices I hear, Gavri'el, told me this story. He didn't come booming like thunder. More like a neighbor leaning in at the edge of our circle, someone who's watched families and churches and seasons change and wants to point without making you feel ashamed. He said to me, kind of sadly, “A lot of Christian streams have leaned way more on the lamplight John.” Not judging, just observing, like pointing out that a family's been using the wrong map for generations.

I've carried that whisper around like a stone in my pocket. Not an accusing stone, just one that weighs on me when I think about how people gather and what they choose to carry forward. Over centuries, communities needed words that could hold them together when leaders died, when persecution hit, when little fragile groups grew into big organizations with rules and boundaries. The lamplight writer's language, cosmic, theological, inward, fit that work well. It comforted people. Explained things. You could teach it in a room with a teacher and a list of beliefs. Write it into creeds, read it aloud in big halls.

The river man's call, though, that's harder to stuff into an institution. Repentance gets messy and public. It shakes up comfortable arrangements. It wants visible change in how we actually live with each other. Institutions, by their nature, like stability. They prefer texts you can quote, doctrines you can defend. So the lamplight's voice, talking about Son and Spirit and inner life, became the one many leaned on. Not because it was wrong, but because it fit what communities needed to survive and define themselves.

I'm not telling you this to win some argument. I'm telling you because I've seen what happens when one voice drowns out the other. I've seen churches that can recite beautiful theology but whose people live like nothing's actually changed. I've seen movements that shout about repentance but forget the tenderness of the Spirit that heals and holds. Both failures are real, and both are dangerous.

There's something humble about holding both Johns together. The river teaches that faith has to show itself in how we live, in how we talk to our neighbors, treat the poor, find courage to turn away from what hurts us and others. The lamplight teaches that faith is also this deep, sustaining thing that can carry you through doubt and suffering, that the Spirit remakes you from the inside in ways not always visible. One without the other is like a body without breath, or breath without a body.

When I tell this around the fire, I tell it knowing how small I am. I don't have some final answer about who wrote what or the tangled history of how these texts came together. I just know that texts are human things as well as sacred ones. They carry the marks of the people who wrote them, the questions they faced, the powers they lived under. Saying a book bears the imprint of its time doesn't dismiss its truth. It just means we read it carefully, listen for the voice beneath the voice.

So what do we do with two Johns? We listen. We let the river's call to repentance be real in our bodies and communities. We let the lamplight's promise of Spirit born faith shape our inner lives. We refuse the easy comfort of picking one and pretending the other doesn't matter. We practice both visible turning and quiet remaking.

If you're sitting here by this fire with me and the night's thick and the stars are patient, I'll hand you this small, simple invitation. Go to the water when your life needs to change in ways people have to see. Sit by the lamp when your heart needs the slow, steady work of the Spirit. Don't let one erase the other. Let them meet.

Well, thank you for sitting with me, and taking the time to read or listen to my story.

May peace be upon you all,  

💚JoshM