Daily Gospel Reflection
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June 24, 2020
Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.
On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.”
They said to her, “None of your relatives has this name.” Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God.
Fear came over all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. All who heard them pondered them and said, “What then will this child become?” For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.
The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.
“What then will this child become?” The neighbors and relatives of Elizabeth and Zechariah openly wondered this when John the Baptist was announced as “John” after his birth. They wondered this because it was clear that he was no ordinary child: “For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.” What is most striking to me is that “fear came over all their neighbors.”
Today, on the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, we celebrate the strange beginning of this strange yet pivotal character in the drama of our salvation. As Christians, we already know how John’s story will end. He will be the voice that cries out in the wilderness. He will prepare the way of the Lord. Like the Messiah he announces, he will speak out against the powerful and he will pay for his convictions with his life.
This unsettling reading is a fitting way to celebrate John the Baptist. He is, for me, the personification of the strangeness of the Gospel. Whenever I become complacent in my discipleship or too comfortable with my reading of the Bible, John calls me back to the discomfort and even fear that I know I should feel if I truly want to follow in his footsteps as a prophet of the Most High.
2020 has been nothing if not a year for me to reflect on discomfort. With all we are facing right now, it is normal to wish that it would all go away, that everything would go back to “normal.” But I know that John would not have hidden from these challenges. In the midst of great adversity, John commands us: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
Prayer
Lord, we hear in today’s Gospel about the birth of John the Baptist. He was to go before you, clearing the way and lighting up the path you were to follow. Now it is our turn to prepare the way for others to find you by the way we lead our lives. Give us the courage and zeal of John to do so. Amen.
Saint of the Day
Nearly every saint has a feast day on the calendar that marks the date of their death because that is the day on which they entered eternal life in heaven. Mary and John the Baptist are both exceptions to this rule. We have feast days for both their births and entry into eternal life because of their proximity to the most important events in human history—the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Today, we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist because he came to announce to the world the coming of our savior.
John the Baptist falls under many of the familiar categories of holiness that are found among the saints: he was a great teacher and a martyr; he was chaste for his whole life; he was also a prophet—the last prophet, in fact.
His birth was foretold to his father, Zechariah, who was a priest, when an angel appeared to him while he was offering sacrifice and prayers before the altar. Though his wife, Elizabeth, was infertile, and they were both approaching old age, she conceived and bore a son and they named him John.
John became a hermit and lived in the desert, fasting and praying. When he was 30, he began preaching and encouraging people to repentance and conversion, and he used the ritual washing of baptism to symbolize spiritual cleansing.
When Jesus began his ministry, he came to John, who baptized him and submitted to his authority. John continued to preach as Jesus went through Galilee. When John spoke out against King Herod’s adultery, the king had him arrested, and he was eventually beheaded.
The feast of the birth of John the Baptist is one of the oldest feasts in the calendar. It falls just after the summer solstice, at a moment when the days start to get noticeably shorter (until the return of the sun at the birth of Jesus at Christmas). St. Augustine thought that this was appropriate because when John’s followers were disturbed that people were following Jesus instead of him, he replied, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
John the Baptist is often depicted with a lamb because he identified Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). A number of relics of John the Baptist rest in the reliquary chapel in the Basilica, including a piece of the house he grew up in. He is depicted in the Basilica in a stained glass window shown here and in a wall mural. He is also shown baptizing Jesus in a tapestry that hangs near the baptismal font in the Basilica.
St. John the Baptist, you pointed the world towards the coming of Jesus, our savior—pray for us!