The Nativity of St John the Baptist falls on June 24. Almost every sermon on this occasion remarks that it is an unusual thing to celebrate a saint’s birthday. Most saints’ days are on or around the date of death of the saint; apart from Our Lord and Our Lady, only John the Baptist gets an explicit birthday feast.
Why should this be? Surely, because it is how the Gospel begins! At least, the annunciation of the pregnancy of Elizabeth to Zechariah is how the narrative of St Luke’s Gospel starts, after the dedicatory prologue. This annunciation is the first of seven episodes within Luke’s infancy narrative, followed by the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Visitation, the Nativity of John, the Nativity of the Lord, the Presentation in the Temple and the Finding of the Child Jesus in the same temple 12 years later.
Scholars like to argue about exactly how St Luke intended to structure these first two chapters of his Gospel. They like to talk about “diptychs”, especially when two episodes are adjacent, and it is clear enough at least that the two annunciations and the two nativities form two matching pairs. We can argue about the Visitation – is it part of the John the Baptist “cycle”, or a sort of appendix to the Annunciation, or is it a connecting passage? Why do the Presentation and the Finding in the Temple not have parallels in the John the Baptist section? Indeed, does the latter of these passages really belong at all?
There is much more that can be said about all of this, and indeed if you would like to come to my regular lecture on this topic at Blackfriars, Oxford, it takes place each year some time in the third week of Hilary Term. I’m sure that readers of the Catholic Herald can negotiate preferential rates, and you’ve plenty of time to book ahead.
For now, what is clear is that St John the Baptist is celebrated uniquely because he prepares the way of the Lord uniquely. If, as seems very likely, St Luke knew at least some version of St Mark’s Gospel when he was writing, then he may well have taken his cue from there: although Mark does not have anything about the infancy or childhood of Christ, he too begins his Gospel with John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness and baptising in the Jordan.
But St Luke’s important insight is that it is not just in his ministry but in his person that John acts as the herald of Christ. This is demonstrated by the parallels between the two pairs of stories; by his leaping in Elizabeth’s womb at the Visitation, which must be put down to some awareness of the status of Christ and His mother that is instilled in him long before he has any consciousness of his own role as the forerunner of the Messiah; and by the story of his father’s acquiescence in the naming of his son. This is clearly presented by St Luke as Zechariah’s moment of redemption, gained by his willingness to allow John to be not just his father’s son, but his own man – or rather, the man that God intends him to be.
Another thing that pretty much every sermon on John the Baptist will say is that he represents the bridge between the Old and the New Testaments. He is indeed a very Old Testament figure, with his pious Jewish parents – one a priest serving in the temple. His miraculous conception is reminiscent of that of Samuel, among others; in his Elijah-style dress and comportment in the wilderness he makes thunderous demands for repentance. Moreover, his emphasis on baptism in the River Jordan makes it clear that he is recapitulating the conclusion of the wilderness wanderings and the return from exile.
But if he does represent the Old Testament in this way, and it is right that it is in his very person that he acts as a forerunner of Christ – we might say that he is not just called, but constituted as Christ’s herald – then surely St Luke is telling us that the whole of the Old Testament is and always was constituted to be the herald of Christ.
All of salvation history takes its meaning from the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. With the Nativity of John the Baptist we celebrate the coming of the one who, we may say, represents the whole of the history of Israel pointing us to Christ.
