[I came across this old (2002) homily I gave on the feast of the Forerunner’s birth. I thought I’d share it here, since it offers a different perspective than the one I just gave (2009). Homilists are always trying to look at the mysteries from different angles so we don’t have to give the same homilies over and over. Sometimes it’s even possible!]
The Angel Gabriel said to Zachariah, speaking of John, that many will rejoice at his birth—and, today, we are called to be among the many who rejoice at his birth. It behooves us to rejoice on this feast for several reasons, especially because of the joyful nature of it and because the great manifestation of the working of God in salvation history, but there’s another and a practical reason for rejoicing, and that’s because if we don’t rejoice, something unpleasant might happen! Zachariah, instead of rejoicing over the words of the angel—because the angel said, “I came to bring you good
news!”—did a kind of logical analysis of the situation and came up short. He said, “Well, I’m an old man; my wife’s an old lady, and she’s also sterile. So how can any of this happen, these things you’re saying?” The angel said, “Well! OK, you don’t believe me? Don’t worry, you’ll see! Everything will happen, just as I said. But you—because you’re not rejoicing in the good news, but questioning and trying to reduce the mystery of God to some sort of logical syllogism—you have to shut up! You won’t be able to talk, until all these things come to pass.”
One of the lessons here is that the mystery of God is something bigger than what we can figure out. And the liturgy expresses that over and over in many different ways, showing how what God does, and has done, goes beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension, beyond the laws of nature, beyond what we expect could or should happen. God is greater than that, bigger than that—and that’s one of the causes for rejoicing.
John’s life began with prophecies about who he was going to be and what he was going to do. And we see, later on, of course, that the prophecies were fulfilled in his life. But, it’s not that the prophecies were determining, so to speak, his life. He still had to freely choose to cooperate with the grace of God, to respond with his whole life, so that what God willed and intended and expressed through these prophecies would in fact come to pass. Things don’t happen automatically—this is because of our freedom. We can say “yes” to God; we can say “no” to God. We can fulfill the prophecies, or we can thwart the prophecies. That’s that terrible privilege that we have: to cooperate or not with the grace and the will of God.
John did cooperate, and that’s what his life was all about. John, in today’s colloquial terms, “didn’t have a life.” John’s own personal life did not matter to him. He was all mission, all service, all consecration to God. He lived for his mission. As soon as he was old enough, he went into the desert to prepare for his mission. As soon as the word of God came to him in the desert, he went out and started fulfilling his mission. And that was it; he was just that “finger” pointing to Christ, and once he fulfilled his mission, once Christ was manifest, once he testified to Him, then he could back off. Then he could decrease and say, “Now my mission is fulfilled.” Now—as he says in John’s Gospel—his joy is complete, because he has seen and testified to the One whom he was called to reveal. He says, “The reason I came to baptize in the first place was to reveal Him: the Holy One of God. Now that I did it, my joy is full. Now I can decrease; now He can increase.” That’s an example for our own lives. I believe that for each of us, too, for our creation, our entry into the world, there’s a prophecy attached to our lives. Not only John comes into this world with a prophecy, but there’s a prophecy for each one of us. It’s inscribed somewhere in the halls of Heaven, and we may never see it or realize it till everything’s over (though we are meant to discover it), but there’s a plan of God—there’s a design, a destiny, something that God has chosen for each of us uniquely for the way that we are to express his will, to carry out a particular, unique mission in the world, that’s given only to us.
So there are prophecies that accompany us, and we, like John, have the choice of saying “yes” to that, of fulfilling the prophecy of our lives, fulfilling the destiny of our lives, or thwarting it, thwarting the will of God and saying “no.” We have to think about that, and consider that, and see where we stand and to what extent our life looks like the life of John, insofar as he was totally consecrated to God and to his mission. We can either say “yes” and be willing to sacrifice our lives to prepare the way of the Lord, or we can be selfish and disobedient and rebellious, and thwart the will of God, and not do what He wants us to, not fulfill the prophecy. We can just kind of crawl into our own, self-absorbed world, and sit there and gather moss and spider webs and just do nothing. And it will thus not come to pass—the great mystery, the great miracle, the great wonder, the bearing of fruit that God wants us to do will not happen.
But, on the other hand, we can realize, first of all, that there is a mission that we have, a plan, that we are created in the image and likeness of God and that there’s a nobility that God has communicated to us in our very being as well as in the mission that He has entrusted to us, to live in faithful service of Him. He wants us to sacrifice our lives and our own personal preferences and to let go of our fears or doubts or disappointments or anything that is too small for the great drama that He has placed us in, that He wants us to see. We are to realize that we have a place in a bigger picture, a picture that’s much bigger than our own little lives and our own little feelings and desires and whatever. We’re part of a great, glorious adventure. We have a role to play, like John had a role to play, and we, in our own way, have to prepare the way of the Lord.
So, let us strive to enter into that mystery, to embrace it, to discover the depths of it, the ever-greater reality of God and his calling in our life and the meaning of our life, and rise above all the pettiness and the stuff that’s beneath the dignity of the children of God. And then, someday, when we discover what that primordial prophecy of our lives was, we’ll look back and say, “How wonderful it is, that God fulfilled this prophecy in our lives, because we said ‘yes’ to Him.” We have to go on doing that. We’re celebrating something now that happened 2000 years ago, but each of us, in every age, has this role to play to prepare the way of the Lord, because God still wants to give knowledge of salvation to his people for the forgiveness of their sins. God still wants to come and visit his people, to turn our hearts from disobedience to the wisdom of the righteous. His word does not return to Him empty but fulfills that for which it was spoken. Let us be a conscious and faithful part of that fulfillment.
