The Birth of John the Baptist

I expect the first Christmas tree will appear shortly.  The year’s half gone; there’s only six months left and not a card sent...

We have a sense that things keep getting earlier and earlier.  Bertie Ahern said on the radio the other day that he began campaigning for this year’s election last summer!  Magazines advertise clothes for autumn and winter when summer is still a rumour.  And, yes, there are Christmas lights that never come down. 

A bit like high blood pressure, our anticipation pulses too quickly and we are anxious more than energised.

In the way that St Luke tells it, the birth of St John the Baptist has an almost repressed anticipation to it.  There has been no choice but to wait.  Elizabeth and Zechariah have lived in hope of a child for years, to no avail.  And in the story there seems to be a lot of silence: a mixture, maybe, of years of longing, resignation and finally promise but before that the silence at the heart of the Temple and the silence that overcomes Zechariah in the face of God’s faithfulness.  Elizabeth’s and Zechariah’s names mean ‘God has promised’ and ‘God has remembered.’  When their child is born, therefore, it seems just right to call him John because it means ‘God is gracious.’

St Luke tells us that St John the Baptist was born six months before Jesus and our tradition holds John is the last and greatest of the prophets, ‘the voice of the Consoler who is coming.’  The consolation of Christ for us could be the grace that enables us to see, in spite of all our anxieties, that God has promised; God has remembered and God is gracious.

Fr. Paschal Scallon, C.M.

24th June, 2007