John the Baptist
As the new liturgical year begins, we pick up Saint Luke’s Gospel. Luke gives a fair bit of space in his opening chapters to Mary, and a similar amount to John the Baptist. John the Baptist is one of my favourite saints, and I have always thought of him as the saint of Advent. Luke and Matthew both pay him some attention, and I have found his uncompromising, ‘get yourselves sorted out’, message appealing. Those near and dear to me might say that’s because I’m also good at telling others to sort themselves out…
Often, I think of John the Baptist’s message in similar ways to how I think of the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25 (‘whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me’) – that is, as Pope Francis has said, as the Christian’s identity cards. The messages are not complicated. Just very, very, challenging.
It’s been said that Luke’s Gospel pays particular attention to women. Certainly, the angel telling Zechariah that he and his wife Elizabeth, in their old age, were to have a son, can be read as a lovely story of God’s goodness. And Luke tells us that their neighbours shared their joy that ‘God had shown her so great a kindness’. But I can’t help wondering if those same neighbours had for years looked askance at Elizabeth, ‘whom men called barren’. This, alongside the Magnificat, is a story of liberation, and perhaps especially of liberation of and by women.
In his Angelus address, three years ago for this Sunday, Pope Francis noted that John’s message is that you bring the kingdom of God where you are. At a minimum, you do your job honestly and conscientiously, and you share what you have with those in need. But there is more. There is an urgency to John’s message. We have to change, now. We just cannot go on like this.
Our world is in crisis. All the evidence is that there are crises of climate change, of pollution, and of biodiversity – this last is a scientific word for the fact that human activity is compromising the rest of the natural world. As Pope Francis said of humans driving other species to extinction, ‘we have no such right’. Wars rage. Some few men command obscene wealth while many, even in ‘developed’ countries like Aotearoa, struggle to live from day to day.
John the Baptist can seem like an angry man. ‘Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the retribution that is coming to you?’. But we need such urgent voices, calling us to a change of heart and mind, so that the valleys will be filled in, the rough roads made smooth, and all the world shall see the salvation of our God.
Jim McAloon
