Look carefully at today’s Gospel. Notice what is being said. John is revealing many truths about Jesus, the obvious question is: How did he know these truths about Jesus? It clearly says in the gospel that John did not know Jesus. Elizabeth and Mary knew each other, but John and Jesus did not grow up together. If you look carefully, John explains a lot about whom Jesus is, but it still takes a miracle for him to know the exact person who he was speaking about. Notice something else, John is then informing others about whom Jesus is and teaching them to follow Him. He is the Lamb of God who has come to take away the sins of the world.
This is a central part of what it means to be Catholic. John is working with a deeper knowledge than is apparent to the average person and he is imparting this knowledge on others so that they come to know the Savior and be saved. This role of John is part of what we do as Church. We are the Body of Christ, and we have the vocation to be prophets revealing Christ to the world. In fact, you enter into that role at Baptism. However, like John, we work with a deeper knowledge than is found by those who do not know Christ. This is the divine revelation that comes to us from the Holy Spirit through the Church.
However, look carefully at the whole mission. John did not receive these words one day magically in a book. He received them through his deep prayer life spent alone in the desert speaking to and listening to God. Tradition holds that John the Baptist’s parents died around the time that Herod killed the Holy Innocents. According to various sources, Zechariah died in the temple for refusing to give away the location of John the Baptist to Herod’s troops and Elizabeth died forty days later. So, as the bible says, John grew up in the wilderness eating locusts and wild honey. He spent his life being formed as what he was: the last prophet of the Old Testament. He was the last one to proclaim the coming of the Lord.
His formation leads him to know many things and then to go out and share them with others that they may repent and be open to meeting the Messiah. God’s revelation to John changes his life, does it change yours?
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What is the mission of the Church? It is to do exactly the same thing. There is a powerful song by one of the rock bands associated with Canção Nova, Banda Conexa. The song is Sou Jovem which means, I am young and talks about how the singer knows he is young but is aware of his mission. He is a messenger for Christ, he is a spiritual soldier for Christ and his message is that Christ will come again. The song is a call to each one of us, we have a mission and we have a message. We are called to live that mission and to deliver that message the more we are open to the action of the Holy Spirit and to the power of Christ.
We have a mission to know our faith and to share it, not only so that people will be saved from their sins, but will saved from the tyranny that is sin and the political structures that sin creates. When the greatest sin in the Old Testament is Idolatry, tyranny will be found in turning from our God to seek another who gives us what we want. What we will notice too late is that when we get what we want we are trapped in tyranny. It is story that repeats itself over and over again throughout human history.
Our mission is to teach people what divine revelation teaches, true freedom can only be found in Christ and in a relationship with Him. John knew this and he began the process of leading people to repent and to follow Christ. It was Christ who further freed people not only from their sins, but from the tyranny it creates.
I had an interesting interview this week with Michael O’Brien, a Catholic novelist. I asked him about some of his influences in writing and he mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. We discussed his powerful address to Harvard University in 1978 in which the Soviet exile was expected to praise American life, but he greatly criticized it. He warned we were headed down the same path as the Soviet Union. Michael O’Brien then touched on the similar theme of how secularism leads to the tyranny of statism which is the state runs everything. We are clearly well on that path today and I am not sure we are not with sight of that very end point reality.
True freedom is found in Christ not in the idolatry of comfort, we are called to know this, to live this and to teach this to a world that does not know or understand this truth. We can take St. John the Baptist as our model, who knew the urgency of the times and the message and proclaimed it powerfully to the world for we have the same task.
God’s revelation to John changes his life, does it change yours?
Translation of video above
I Am Young by Pitter DeLaura (Canção Nova/DAVI)
I may seem a dreamer
But I know who I am
I am going to fight until the end.
I want to proclaim
In every time and place
That Jesus one day will return (2x)
I know that I am young but I am also a soldier
I know that I am young but I am a messenger
It was God who called me and I said yes.