The Lord works mercy

Johanan, “Il Signore fa grazia”

24 June 2008

Birth of St John the Baptist

Summer has just begun, and here we have the feast of the birth of John the Baptist, a very old feast, already celebrated by St Augustine in Africa. Besides Mary, the mother of the Lord, John the Baptist is the only saint of whom the Church celebrates not only the day of death, the dies natalis to eternal life, but also the dies natalis in this world: in fact, John is the only witness whose birth, so intertwined with that of Jesus, is noted in the New Testament. That very intertwining of the two births has le to the choice of 24 June: if the Church recalls Jesus’ birth on 25 December, then it was bound to recall that of John on 24 June, since, as Luke’s Gospel records, it occurred six months earlier. The parallelism of these dates is also symbolic, at least in the Mediterranean basin, which was the crucible of the Jewish-Christian faith: while 25 December is the feast of the sun-victor, which begins to increase its declination to the earth, 24 June is the day when the sun begins to decrease its declination, just as it happened in the relationship of the Baptist with Jesus, according to John’s own words: “He must increase and I decrease” (Jn 3, 30). John is the lamp that declines before the victorious light, he is the lamp prepared for the Messiah (cf. Ps 132,17 and Jn 5,35), he is his precursor in birth, in mission, and in death, he is Jesus’ teacher, his disciple who follows him, he is the friend of Jesus who is the approaching Spouse, as the fourth Gospel justly says.

We could even say that the Gospel is the synchronic account of two prophets, John and Jesus, with their profound peculiarities, their specific call, but also their essential unanimity in carrying out God’s designs, with the same resoluteness in the service of the Kingdom. Today, unfortunately, the Baptist no longer possesses the post he merits in the Church’s memory and consciousness: after the first millennium and the middle of the second — in which John the Baptist and Mary together represented the bond between the old and the new alliance and together stood as intercessors next to the Lord in glory, in the liturgy and in iconography — the growth of the Marian cult overtook the Baptist and ended by obscuring it, drifting with danger to the equilibrium of Christological consciousness. If the Church still today solemnly celebrates the Baptist’s birth, that is because it remains conscious of this figure’s central position according to Revelation: in the Synoptics the good news of the announcement of the kingdom always opens with John, just as the Gospel of Jesus’ infancy according to Luke open with the angel’s annunciation to Zacharias and with the story of John’s marvelous birth.

John is a man whom only God could give to Israel. At the beginning of his story there is an old, sterile woman, Elizabeth, and a father in the temple, he too advanced in years: the Lord’s poor, “just before God, irreprehensible in the observance of all the Lord’s laws and prescriptions” (Lk 1,6), the humble rest that trusts in God, and it is just to these that God turns to carry out his design of love and salvation. Nothing can condition God’s choice, nor can it be impeded by human limits such as old age and sterility: he only asks that there be predisposition, awaiting, faith. This is how John is born, announced by an angel to the father-priest officiating in the temple, and he is only an embryo in his mother’s womb when he already dances at recognizing the presence of the Messiah and Lord Jesus just conceived in Mary’s womb, and in his mother’s womb he is sanctified by the Holy Spirit who descends on her.

Then when he is born, his names defines his vocation and mission, the name given by God through the angel — Johanan, “the Lord works mercy” — and his father intones a Messianic psalm in thanksgiving and praise of God, but in which he also addresses his son: “And you, who now are little, will be called prophet of the Most High and will walk before the Lord” (Lk 1,76). This is how into the world came “he who is the greatest of those born of woman… more than a prophet” (Lk 7,28), according to Jesus’ confession about him: he is not the light come into the world, but “the lamp that burns and illuminates” (Jn 5,35) to testify to the light.
All his earthly life is intertwined with that of Jesus, and the events of his life narrated in the Gospel not only prefigure what will happen to Jesus, but are synchronous with them, contemporary, even superimposed and mingled together: John and Jesus lived together! Even when John will be violently killed, his life and his mission will appear fully in that of Jesus. It is certainly not by chance that the Gospel registers king Herod’s opinion about Jesus: “It is John the Baptist risen from the dead”, nor that the disciples report to Jesus the views of some contemporaries who said about him “it is John the Baptist” (cf. Mt 16,14 and par.).

When John will die, he will anticipate Jesus’ death and will prefigure it as the passion of the prophet persecuted and killed in his own land, but just as in his death Jesus too dies, so in Jesus’ resurrection John the Baptist also rises.