Sent From God

Details: 09 December 2011

None Greater

In the beautiful cycle of the liturgical year, the Church’s official prayer arrangement gives us in each Advent Season a spiritual opportunity to encounter anew the person and message of Saint John the Baptist, about whom Jesus spoke saying, "...among those born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he" (Luke 7:28). The words and example of the great Jewish priest who was the precursor and cousin (Luke 1:36 & 76-79) of our divine Savior resonate down the centuries to help us annually to prepare for Christmas and for the coming of Christ at the end of the world as well for His intermediate comings to us, especially in our Eucharistic encounters with Him. John’s fearless words and his heroic martyrdom for the cause of God-given morality can have the effect, if we allow them, to inspire us before our celebration of the Solemnity of Christ’s Nativity to straighten out the pathways and roads of our lives if they might have become distorted and twisted by our cultural hedonism and materialism, to lower the mountains and hills of our overbearing pride in ourselves and our accomplishments, and to fill in the valleys of our culpable omissions and neglect. God’s providential economy of salvation arranged that John should be the last and the greatest prophet of the Old Testament with the mission to straddle the unification of the Old and New Covenants. Our Lord said, "All the prophets and the law have prophesized until John" (John 11:13).

It is clear that the story of Saint John the Baptist always occupied an important place at the beginning of the proclamation of the Gospel from the earliest days of the Church (Acts of the Apostles 1:22 & 10:37). This place of John the Baptist in the drama of human salvation appears to receive special emphasis in the magnificent words of the Prologue to the Gospel according to Saint John, which is the Gospel passage that is liturgically used for the Third Mass on Christmas Day, and which, in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, constitutes what used to be called "The Last Gospel". Saint John the Evangelist said of John the Baptist, "There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came as a witness to bear witness concerning the Light that all might believe through him" (John 1:6-70). Pope Benedict XVI notes that all four Gospels describe the (Baptist’s) mission using a passage from Isaiah (40:3): "A voice crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, etc. ....These Old Testament texts envisage a saving intervention of God, Who emerges from His hiddenness to judge and to save. It is for this God that the door is to be opened and the way made ready. These ancient words of hope were brought into the present with the Baptist’s preaching. (They indicate that) great things are about to unfold."

A Sect

There can be little doubt that John the Baptist had a powerful personality which made an enormous impact on many people. Although he might have been using hyperbole, Saint Mark noted that "All the country of Judea and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem went out to him..." (Mark 1:5). John’s words and manner of expression were attractive, it seems, even to those, like Herod, his eventual murderer, who were troubled by them (Mark 6:20), and his influence extended beyond the borders of the Holy Land, because Saint Paul, well after Pentecost, encountered twelve of John’s disciples at Ephesus (Acts of the Apostles 19:1-7). Like Apollos initially (Acts of the Apostles 18:25) , they did not yet know about the Holy Trinity and Christian Baptism.

It was most likely the continued existence of groups of disciples of John the Baptist still existing well into the Christian era which accounts for the repeated polemical elements in the Prologue regarding John the Baptist and his relationship to Jesus. The Evangelist says, "He himself was not the Light but was to bear witness to the Light" and "John bore witness concerning Him and cried: This was He of Whom I said: He Who is come after me has been set above me because He was before me" ( John 1:8 & 1:15).

Probably to call attention to the disciples of the Baptist who had not yet journeyed to Christianity, the Synoptic accounts of the ministry of the Baptist also emphasized, in addition to his heroic denunciations of evil, his profound and exceptional humility in relationship with the coming Messiah. "One mightier than I is coming, the strap of Whose sandals I am not worthy to loose" (Luke 3:16); "One mightier than I is coming after me..." (Mark 1:7); "But He Who is coming after me is mightier than I....His winnowing fan is in His hand and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but the chaff He will burn up with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:11-12).

Rival Baptisms?

Along the same line, Saint John the Evangelist recounts the incident of some Jews having a discussion about "purification" with some disciples of the Baptist in the course of which the Jews noted that Jesus’ disciples had begun baptizing down the way from where John was doing his work, and actually had been baptizing and making more disciples than John (John 3:22-30 & 4:1-2). It was on that occasion that Saint John the Baptist compared himself to the best man at a wedding in reference to the groom.

He said, "You yourselves bear me witness that I said I am not the Christ, but have been sent before Him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom, but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices exceedingly at the voice of the bridegroom. This my joy, therefore, is made full. He must increase, but I must decrease."

Although Jesus was the cousin of the Baptist and John must have had some suspicion that He was the Messiah, he seemed to be somewhat uncertain. Saint John notes that the Baptist initially "did not know" Christ’s messianic identity (John 1:30-33).. This appears corroborated by the deputation the Baptist sent to Jesus after his imprisonment (Matthew 11:1-19) to ask for a clear answer about the mission of Jesus, to which our Lord replied with a famous messianic passage from the Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 35). Then our Savior went on to praise John the Baptist and to identify him with Elijah, who, according to Hebrew tradition, was to return to earth to precede the arrival of the "Anointed One", that is, the Messiah. Jesus called John the Baptist "a prophet and more than a prophet."

Advent Preacher

Father Pius Parsch has often said that John the Baptist "par excellence" is "our Advent Preacher". His words "Prepare the way of the Lord" are intended by God "not just for the Jewish People of a bygone era, but for the Church, as long as she remains a pilgrim." Also the words of the Baptist, "In your midst stands someone you do not know" should be understood as directed to the whole world and also to all of us. The paradoxical reality of Advent is that we await the Lord, while at the same time realizing that in many marvelous ways we already possess Him.