Sermon of Fr. Richard Cipolla on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, 26 June 2010

Last Thursday we celebrated one of the great feasts of the Church. In the traditional calendar it is a first class feast. One can’t get much more first class than first class. In the Novus Ordo calendar it is a solemnity, the highest ranking of feasts. Do you know what this feast was? You would know if it were Christmas or Easter or the Ascension or the Assumption of Mary. You would know because these are all holy days of obligation and you would have had to come to Mass on those days. The feast we celebrated last Thursday was the feast of the man about whom Jesus said: no man born of a woman is greater than he. Last Thursday was the feast of the Nativity of S. John the Baptist. St Augustine points out in his sermon for the feast day at Matins in the Roman breviary that we mark the feast day of a saint usually by the day that the saint died and entered into heaven. But this is not the case with John the Baptist. He is the only saint other than Mary whose birthday we celebrate, and we celebrate his birthday with a higher solemnity than even that of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Why so? My seventh grade CCD students could give you the stock answer, which is also the proper answer: because he is the precursor of Christ, he is the forerunner of Christ. Both of those words: “precursor” and “forerunner” do not come lightly off the tongue of my CCD students, and they should not do so, because there is no one like John the Baptist in history: he comes before, he prepares the path, he announces the most important event in all human history: the coming into this world of the Word made flesh, the person of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. He is the link between the Old Testament prophets and the Gospel. He is the bridge over the law to the gospel. Even his naming is an awesome event. Most first born boys of that time were automatically named after their father. And in that dramatic and amazing moment when his father, Zechariah, struck dumb because of unbelief, writes on the tablet: his name is John: in this moment the very universe trembles with the anticipation of radical change. His name is John, and this name contains the names of Moses and Samuel and Isaiah and above all Jeremiah: from your mother’s womb I called you. And his first witness to Jesus is even before he is born as he leaps in his mother’s womb at the presence of Mary who is carrying Jesus in her womb. One of the great scenes of the New Testament, as heart speaks to heart, as womb speaks to womb, as child in the womb speaks to child in the womb.

John is at the pivot point of salvation history. And so he goes into the desert to prepare himself for his peculiar and unique role. He goes there to do what has to be done, for it is only in the desert, where there is nowhere to hide from oneself, there is no where to hide from one’s demons, only in the desert can one prepare for being John the Baptist. And he comes out of that desert in the fullness of time dressed in animal skins, looking fierce, and sounding even fiercer with his call to repentance, for he knows the time is short, he knows that all he can do is to baptize people as a sign of repentance. He can do nothing else than the sign: this is a lot in fact, but it is only the sign, because he knows that he who comes after him, whose sandals he is unfit to untie, is the forgiveness of sins, for he is God who has come into the world to die that sins may be forgiven.

John is imprisoned by Herod, and he sends his disciples to Jesus to ask the question: are you the one who is to come or should we look for another? John, in prison because of the injustice of the law, sends his disciples to the gospel: the law is sent to the gospel says St Augustine. And the answer: the lame walk, the blind see, the sick are healed, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of forgiveness of sins because of the love of God, has irrupted into the world and things will never be the same. And so John points his bony finger like in the Isenheim altar piece: Ecce Agnus Dei , ecce qui tollit peccata mundi: behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. And it is this John who will be beheaded by the corruption of the law, by the law that cannot tolerate the horrible nakedness and starkness and blinding light of truth. And so John becomes the first martyr for the Truth who is Jesus Christ.

But you notice: John is a martyr for the truth in a moral situation. He refused to acknowledge the morality of the marriage between Herod and Herodias. That marriage was unlawful according to the moral law and John said so publically. and he incurred the wrath of the queen. In that famous scene involving Salome and her dance, depicted in so many artistic renderings, the king, because of a drunken promise, had to order John’s head to be cut off. John’s martyrdom, the martyrdom of the precursor of the Christ, the herald of the Gospel, is not, unlike the rest of the martyrs, because he refused to denounce Jesus Christ as the Son of God but rather, (and this is not contrary in the end at all,) because he refused to speak against the truth within a moral situation. But you see, this moral truth cannot be separated from his cry: ecce agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The foundation of moral truth cannot be separated from the person of Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth and the life.

So many Christians today, including Catholics, think that they can separate their belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, as the Word made flesh, as God of God, light of light, and so forth and still live their lives not in accordance with the moral law that is taught by the Church of that same Jesus Christ whose Spirit guides her infallibly in matters of faith and morals. The cause of the death of mainline Protestantism is precisely because of the refusal to see that belief in the person of Jesus Christ demands adherence to the moral law that is based on that love shown by Christ on the cross. They have confused love with sentimentality; they have confused knowledge with intellectual reasoning. But there are all too many Catholics who are ready to jump on the same popular bandwagon that leads to unfaithfulness and death. And they are ready to jump on the religious bandstand of the American idol, because there are no men today like St John the Baptist who have done their time in the harshness of the desert, there are no men with bony fingers to point to the truth, there are no men who will put their lives on the line for the truth that the world refuses to hear and will do everything it can to kill those who speak that truth.

John the Baptist was a man of truth. He was a man. And that is what we need today: men who will defend and stand up for the truth, not in a fanatical and self-righteous way but because they are men who love above all: we need popes and bishops and priests and deacons in the Church who are men in this way, who will do what needs to be done to be a man for Jesus Christ for his Church. But more basically, for the clergy are in the great minority in the Church,(thanks be to God!), the question is this: are there men here today who are husbands and fathers and young men and old men who will do what it takes to be champions of the truth who is Jesus Christ, who will live their lives according to that truth and be willing to suffer for that truth? And are their women who will not only support these men but show in themselves that manliness that the mother of the Maccabees showed in her glorious defense of the specificity of the truth, urging her sons to death rather than break the law of their faith?

In a few minutes we will hear those words of St John the Baptist: ecce agnus dei, behold the Lamb of God, as the invitation to Communion. Resist the temptation to treat this invitation as just a knee jerk motion of the Mass. Ask yourself: have I prepared myself for this encounter with the living God, have I gone into the desert of confession to do what has to be done, do I want to live my life empowered by the holy incarnation of the man of God, the Son of God, am I the man who has the courage to witness to the truth, am I the woman who has the courage to respond, ecce ancilla Domini, behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word? St John the Baptist, ora pro nobis, pray for us.