“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways”
The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist falls immediately after the Summer Solstice, the longest day and the shortest night of nature’s year, and points us to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and the longest night of nature’s year, that falls just before the Nativity of Christ at Christmas. The interplay of natural and spiritual themes is an intriguing feature of the Christian religion and speaks to a number of other interactions as well, not least between prophecy and fulfillment. The whole significance of John the Baptist lies in his mission. He is sent to prepare the way of the Lord, the way of God’s being with us in the intimacy of the humanity of Jesus Christ.
We are, I suspect, at once very leery and all too gullible about signs and portents; quick to jump to conclusions about the coincidence of events in our own lives, claiming some special blessing from God, but much more reluctant to acknowledge the same reality in the experience of others. It is, I suppose, a feature of our age: insecure in our narcissism, and skeptical, if not altogether suspicious, about others. Yet the story of John the Baptist is a major part of the New Testament witness. The child of an older woman, Elizabeth, thought to be long past the age of child-bearing, and of an old priest, Zechariah, who is rendered dumb for challenging the very idea of the birth of a child in their dotage, John the Baptist’s birth itself is a kind of preparation and foretelling of the birth and ministry of Christ. In a way, that is the whole point. Summer points to winter only to open us out to the eternity of God’s good will and purpose for our humanity and for our world in the Christ who comes into our world.
He does not come without warning. While Christ’s Incarnation is the unexpected thing, it is only because it challenges all our thinking and understanding. It opens us out to an entirely new reality for which we have always to be prepared and brought to see. Yet, the birth and ministry of John the Baptist are presented to us in the Gospels to help us understand better the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. The lessons are profound and necessary. They show us one aspect of the divine preparation for the redemption of our humanity. Zechariah’s song, what has become known as the Benedictus, immortalized in our Anglican liturgy, at least for those who have the blessing of the occasional experience of Anglican Morning Prayer, captures the missionary significance of the John’s birth. It marks a recap of salvation history in its Jewish terms and points beyond it in its Christian terms. Again, the interplay of past and present, like the interplay of the solstices, is most instructive. We opened out to the play of God’s glory in and through human lives.
John the Baptist, as he will come to be known, is the greatest and last of the prophets, Jesus will say, not only because he stands at the brink of prophecy’s fulfillment but he is so much a part of the story. There is a wonderful sense of intimacy and wonder captured in art about the relationship between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, John’s mother, the meeting of the mothers in Israel, as it were, known as The Visitation. And there is the more intriguing contrast between the question of John’s father that results in him being struck dumb until his son is born and named by his mother and ratified in writing by him, the consequence of which is his regaining his speech and giving voice to his canticle, the Benedictus, and the question of Mary which lies at the heart of our engagement with God’s will and purpose. It requires our willing assent and desire to enter into the understanding of what God seeks for us. “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years,” Zechariah had said to the angel who had announced that Elizabeth will bear a son and that “you shall call his name John.” Mary asked, too, “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?” And yet the difference clearly lies not merely in the words but the heart behind the words; the heart that doubts and denies, on the one hand, and the heart that questions so as to learn and wonder, on the other hand.
We backread the story of John the Baptist in the light of the story of Christ, to be sure, but that is what the story in its New Testament expression requires us to do. We are meant to see John as the precursor of Christ, as a prophet who stands in a long line of Old Testament figures, some whose births and dedications have a special quality to them, such as Isaac and Samuel, for instance, and others whose ministry has something of a similar hard-sell quality to it, like Elijah, for instance. We are meant to locate John the Baptist in terms of the Old Testament and in terms of the New.
The Collect expresses it well. John the Baptist was “wonderfully born” and he was “sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour” and to do so by means of a wonderfully rich Jewish tradition, “the preaching of repentance” Why repentance? To awaken us to our heartfelt need for God and for his grace in our lives. The summer, spiritually as well as naturally, is a time of growth but all growth returns us to the seed, to the fons et origo of all life including our spiritual life; it is found in the mysteries of God. The Nativity of John the Baptist provides for the increase of our spiritual understanding by pointing us through the qualities of his ministry to the coming of the one who is Lord and Saviour.
“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways”
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
Christ Church, Windsor
June 24th, 2013