Homily for the Solemnity
of
the Birth of St. John the
Baptist
June 24, 2024
Collect
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“You
raised up St. John the Baptist to make ready a nation fit for Christ the Lord…”
(Collect).
We
thank the Lord for having called us to be his people, partly thru the ministry
of John the Baptist. God’s people is in
fact the object or purpose of John’s life, according to our Collect.
Every collect begins with a statement of the mystery or saving event being commemorated on a given day, or a tribute to some divine attribute. Today we note—and by implication praise God for—his having “raised up St. John the Baptist to make ready a nation fit for Christ the Lord,” and immediately move on to the petition part of the prayer: “give your people, we pray….” Thus the Collect identifies us—“God’s people”—with that “nation fit for Christ” which “John the Baptist made ready.”
Here
we acknowledge John as the forerunner, as the lamp shining (John 5:35) in a
dark place, as the one who points out the Lamb of God (John 1:29-36), as the
one who steers his own disciples toward the One who is to come (John 1:19-40). In his lifestyle, his preaching, his
spiritual direction (if we may call it that), and finally his martyrdom John is
at the service of Someone greater than he—a service consisting largely in
helping people get ready for that Someone, preparing the way.
That’s
our own aspiration. None of us is the
Expected One—not even those called alter Christus.
Rather, we’re the servants of Christ, or his friends, as he said at the
Last Supper (John 15:15), and as John the Baptist referred to himself in a
little parable about a bridegroom and best man (John 3:28-30). In all the varied forms of our ministry, in
our prayer, in our relationships, in our openness to God’s direction in our
lives—in all this, we imitate John the Baptist and point to the Lord Jesus as
the true Lamb of God, the one who redeems the world from its sins. We have the mission of making ready a
nation fit for Christ the Lord as much as John the Baptist did. We may do that in a school, a camp, an
office, thru retreats. Every setting is
a divine opportunity to point to Jesus.
Maybe
you remember Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech in As You Like It,[1]
which credits each person with playing many parts in a lifespan. We play many parts too—imitating now this
saint, now that one. We might imitate
the Virgin Mother in how we treasure God’s Word and meditate upon it; imitate Don
Bosco in how we relate to youngsters; imitate the fearless heart of John
Chrysostom in our preaching; imitate Francis de Sales in our gentleness;
imitate Francis of Assisi in our appreciation for Mother Earth. And in John the Baptist we have a model of
pointing always to Jesus in whatever we say and do—if not in words, which we
can’t always do or shouldn’t always do, then in our character, our manner, our
actions.
The
Collect asks God to “direct the hearts of the all the faithful into the way of
salvation and peace.” That’s what John
strove to do. That’s what each of us can
do: direct our own hearts, direct the
hearts of our brothers, friends, pupils, and co-workers into God’s saving ways,
the pathways of Christ—with God’s help, of course, which is why we make it our
prayer.
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