NATIVITY OF JOHN

Celebrating the Nativity of the Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist of the Lord John, the Church, as a Society of Believers, is called to reflect on the biblical prophets. Many of them were great, mysterious, proclaiming the divine word unquestioningly and indisputably. Moses led his people out of Egypt across the sea. The Lord accompanied King David on his paths and delivered him from all disasters. Solomon was the wisest of all men. The biblical prophets are also the three youths delivered by the Lord from the fiery furnace. This is Daniel, who by the grace of his faithfulness and the power of the word of God overcame the Babylonian Captivity.

On the day of the birth of John the Baptist, the Church faces the greatest of the biblical prophets (cf. Matt. 11:11). But his very birth comes from hopeless weakness. According to the Gospel of Luke, his parents were barren (Luke 1:7). His birth occurred at a very old age, contrary to all parental hopes. John’s preaching was not accompanied by signs or wonders. And, unlike the biblical prophets who preceded him, he did not begin his address with the words: “Thus says the Lord” (cf. Is. 48:17). John rebuked those who came to him (cf. Matt. 3:7). But his appearance was characterized by divine “barely audible.”

John’s words are extremely simple. These are “merely” calls for change and repentance. His gestures are unambiguous. John immerses those who come to him in water, which in the original language means the word “baptism.” It was an immersion in the waters of the sacred, but, in comparison with the great rivers of Middle Eastern civilization, the Tigris and Euphrates, the insignificant Palestinian River Jordan. The end of John’s journey is extremely sad. But it is precisely this that marks the completion of the Covenant between man and God. After all, this is how the line of biblical prophets who proclaimed the Victory of God, passing through millennia of biblical history, ends. It ends with John the Beheaded.

By calling John the greatest of those born of women (Matthew 11:11), the Lord Jesus reveals the true face of the Biblical God. Because He Himself, the Coming One, expected in glory, comes in obscurity and triumphs in ignominy. Expected in the liberation of the people, He is revealed in His own captivity from the people. Our Lord ascended the Cross of Infamy. In the greatest culmination of the Event of the Cross, by which the world was saved, the true face of the Father was revealed. Therefore, the proclamation of John is not only and not so much in his words about the Coming Messiah, but in the image of dishonor, humiliation, humility and meekness of the Lord, which he reveals in himself.

Thus foreshadowing what will happen to Him whom he foretells, John and His God are visible in an amazing divine-human identity. The only Lord Jesus and His blessed Prophet stand before us in their sorrows and ignominy, in the greatness of what is called “divine exhaustion,” sung by Paul in the Epistle to the Philippians (Phil. 2:6-11). God brought John closer to Himself in a special, unique, inimitable, mysterious way. After all, completing the History of the Testament, God made man a friend of His last minute and a companion of His sorrow.