by CCW | 24 June 2012 15:30
Summertime! The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist signals the beginnings of summer, falling as it always does near the summer solstice. For Canadians, too, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist is significant. On this day in 1497, John Cabot landed in Newfoundland. It marks, we might say, the beginning of the Christian encounter with this northern land we have come to know as Canada. John the Baptist has become the Patron Saint of Canada.
There are only two nativities that the Christian Church celebrates on the basis of scriptural witness: the nativity of Christ and the nativity of John the Baptist. They are not equal. The whole point of the story of the nativity of John the Baptist is how it is preparatory for the birth of Christ. John the Baptist is the great and intriguingly complex figure who sums up the whole of prophecy and points us to the new reality of Christ. “Art thou Elijah,” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask him, to which he replied that he was “not the Christ,” nor the Prophet Elijah, but simply “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Isaiah” and the one who points out to us the one who comes, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.”
His birth is understood in the context of the Old Testament stories of the births of important figures such as Isaac and Samson, for instance, and the prophetic witness of such figures as Elijah. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks the multitude concerning John the Baptist, and goes on to identify him as a prophet and yet more than a prophet. “Art thou he that should come,” asks John the Baptist in prison about Jesus “or do we seek for another.” “Go and show John again, those things which ye do hear and see,” Jesus tells John’s disciples, “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” He then adds something which goes to the heart of the Gospel proclamation and which speaks as well about the figure of John the Baptist. “And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”
There is much that challenges and even offends our sensibilities about the Gospel and certainly about John the Baptist. There is something uncompromising, stern, insistent and uncomfortable in his message. There is nothing middle class about John the Baptist. He gives austerity a whole new meaning! It is the austerity of asceticism and denial, on the one hand, and the strong thirst and hunger for the righteousness of God, on the other hand. He is sent to “preach a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Repentance is part of the necessary preparation for the presence of God with us in our hearts and in our world.
It can only happen through the awakening of our consciences to the reality of sin and to the desire for the overcoming of sin, to the desire for forgiveness and salvation. There is something about John the Baptist which stirs us up to desire what is a good and holy, a desire for something more than the comfortable yet deadly ruts of our ordinary lives.
The familiar canticle, the song of Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, known as the Benedictus, speaks profoundly about that preparatory work of the stirring of our consciences. Zacharias had questioned the angelic prophecy of the birth of a son to him and his wife, who like Abraham and Sarah were both old and beyond the age of child-bearing it, seems. For his skeptical cynicism – itself a kind of denial of God – he was struck dumb until the birth and the naming of the child, named by Elizabeth his wife and not by him, and named not after him, but as John. He concurs by writing down that “his name is John.” Only then does he regain his voice and sings the wonders of God’s providence about the meaning and purpose of his son’s birth.
Beyond the aspect of miracle, the greater wonder here lies in the insight about the nature of God’s workings with our humanity. The coming of God to us requires an awareness, in some way or another, of his coming in us. Without the awareness of our lack and our need, of our radical incompleteness, we can make no sense of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, as God with us. And repentance is the key concept, the key idea in the gospel of preparation. God makes us part of his own coming to us through the preaching of repentance.
Jesus’ own public ministry will begin with the words, “Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And what is repentance all about? Simply our honest realization that not everything is alright with us and our world, that all of us have done and not done the things we should and should not have done, that all have fallen short, and none can take refuge in the pretensions of self-righteousness. Tough stuff for our culture and age. They are the very things that occasion the rebellion against the Christian faith within and without the churches, the atheism of the rejection of divine authority. Yet this is the strong message and wonder of John the Baptist, the one who not only points us to Jesus but points out the way of Christ in us. It is about our humble openness and desire for God’s healing mercy and grace in our lives. We hear it in Zacharias’ exultant voice, “And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest.”
Fr. David Curry
AMD Service, June 24th, 2012
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