Daily Gospel Reflection
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January 12, 2019
Jesus and his disciples went into the region of Judea,
where he spent some time with them baptizing.
John was also baptizing in Aenon near Salim,
because there was an abundance of water there,
and people came to be baptized,
for John had not yet been imprisoned.
Now a dispute arose between the disciples of John and a Jew
about ceremonial washings.
So they came to John and said to him,
“Rabbi, the one who was with you across the Jordan,
to whom you testified,
here he is baptizing and everyone is coming to him.”
John answered and said,
“No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven.
You yourselves can testify that I said that I am not the Christ,
but that I was sent before him.
The one who has the bride is the bridegroom;
the best man, who stands and listens for him,
rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice.
So this joy of mine has been made complete.
He must increase; I must decrease.”
“He must increase; I must decrease.”
John the Baptist’s consolation to his disciples, who insinuate Jesus is poaching their followers, tees up an easy shot at false idols: space for God must increase in our lives, even and especially at the expense of personal exploits.
But John’s wisdom also specifically addresses a vice that I grapple with every day, especially around the new year: jealousy.
John’s followers, threatened by this successful new rabbi, fear irrelevancy as Jesus’ ministry eclipses their own. As these disciples compare themselves to Jesus’, so I compare myself to others, fairly or unfairly, even when it induces self-loathing, even though it hurts my relationships with friends and family when I begrudge their success.
John the Baptist has this bonus lesson for us jealous types: comparisons like this are meaningless. My Notre Dame classmates are moving, traveling, getting married and promoted. We all chose different paths, so successes look and occur differently for each of us. In reality, none of us has checked off all of our lifetime personal and professional boxes. Rather than respond with jealousy or even merely accept these differences, John tells us to celebrate them, like a best man for the groom (a poignantly apt metaphor for us unmarried twenty-somethings).
Today’s Responsorial Psalm only confirms John’s advice:
“Sing to the Lord a new song
of praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in their maker,
let the children of Zion rejoice in their king.”
Being happy, truly happy, for others demands selflessness, humility and loving kindness. Personally, I’m working on it. But, lest we worry the success of others will, as John’s followers feared, diminish our own worthiness, the response to today’s psalm is, “The Lord takes delight in his people.” The Lord knows our struggles and still takes delight in us. As we learn to decrease, he will increase—and will continue to rejoice with us.
Prayer
Loving God, send us your Spirit so we may recognize your works. Enable us to hear and see your Son and our Brother Jesus in our daily encounters in school, home, workplace and everywhere. Help us to be like John the Baptist as we proclaim, “He must increase; I must decrease.” Amen.
Saint of the Day
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys was a French missionary who educated native people and settlers in Montreal and Quebec—she is one of Canada’s first saints.
She was born in 1620 in France to a middle-class family. When she was twenty, Marguerite attended a procession on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. During the procession, she looked at a statue of Mary that seemed to be looking back at her with a living, loving gaze. Marguerite was profoundly touched by this event and dedicated her life to God by trying to emulate Mary in all she did.
A cloistered religious community of sisters, the Congregation of Notre Dame, lived in Marguerite's hometown. They had an educational mission and ran a boarding school to teach girls within the cloister. To reach girls from poor families who could not attend the boarding school, the cloistered nuns sent women associated with their community through a “confraternity” out to village and city schools to teach the poorer families. Marguerite joined this confraternity and, over time, became the leader of the confraternity.
The governor of a colony in New France had family in Marguerite’s hometown and returned for a time to recruit workers and educators. The rough life of a New World colony could not support a cloister, but the women of the confraternity would be able to travel and engage colonists and native peoples. Thus, in 1653, Marguerite decided to travel to New France as a missionary.
Marguerite landed in Quebec and traveled to the countryside around Montreal. She was disappointed to find few children living there, due to high rates of infant mortality, but Marguerite set about working alongside the French settlers. Marguerite arranged for the construction of a new church and was given a stone barn in which she began the first public school in Montreal.
Marguerite slowly began to gather other young women to help with her work, and they assembled into a community. Non-cloistered religious sisters were a rare thing in the seventeenth-century Church, but Marguerite fought for an active status for her community so that they could continue to live among settlers and reach out to people of all walks of life, rather than depend upon people coming to them. Marguerite had to contend with a bishop intent on regularizing her community into a cloister, and even went back to France to get a letter from the king in her defense. Marguerite's determination paid off and her Sisters of Notre Dame became known as “secular sisters."
As the colony of New France grew, so did the educational needs of its people, and Marguerite and her community responded by building schools for both settlers and native people. They struggled with many obstacles—poverty, tensions with the native Iroquois, and a fire that burned their convent and killed two sisters—but Marguerite led her community with courage and faith in God's providence.
In her old age, Marguerite turned to attention to a more contemplative life of prayer and writing of her autobiography. When a young sister in the community fell gravely ill, Marguerite prayed for God to exchange her own life for the sick sister’s. Within a few days, the young sister recovered, and Marguerite fell sick—she died soon afterward on January 12, 1700. The people of Montreal and New France had long recognized her holiness, but Marguerite was not formally canonized until 1982.
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys is represented in this stained glass window to the left that was installed in the chapel of the Stayer Center for Executive Education on Notre Dame's campus; some of Marguerite's relics are housed in the reliquary chapel in the Basilica.
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, who brought education to the poor of New France—pray for us!