There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe.  He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

At first, this simple verse doesn’t seem to do justice to John.

John is a significant prophet in his own right, bravely standing up to proclaim God’s word and to call people to repentence, even when it leads to his death by beheading.

Like Jesus, he had disciples who followed him into the wilderness and helped spread his message of repentance.

But in the end, John is remembered for one thing: serving as the man who introduced Jesus to the world; a witness to confirm that Jesus was, in fact, the Son of God.

We could speak of the historical context of how important witnesses were in a days where record-keeping was far less detailed than it is today, but we live in a time where witnesses may be becoming nearly as important as they were in the far past.

With advances in technology, particularly digital manipulation of images and sound and of artificial intelligence, the trust we have held in documents and photographs and video is on shakier ground than it has been for decades or even centuries. The word of a trusted and trustworthy witness is regaining its value.

When I worked as a reporter, a big part of the job was trying to figure out how good my sources were. While I occasionally came across a source who was deliberately dishonest, a more frequent challenge was spotting people who thought they were being honest, but had only limited understanding of the facts, or who could not see beyond their own perspective, or honestly believed they knew more than they really did.

It was always safer to depend on the word of someone who had proven trustworthy in previous dealings, or whose word was respected by other people I could trust.

We, like John, are not the light, but are called to be witnesses to the light.

And the first step to being an effective witness is to be the kind of person who can be trusted to provide honest, and true, testimony.