June 24: Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist

 

To see the readings from the Mass lectionary for today, click here.

He must increase and I must decrease. John 3:30

Today we remember the birth of John the Baptist, host of Jesus’ first public appearance as an adult.  The story is rich in a humor we don’t readily associate with the fierce Baptist, as everyone resorts to pantomime to get the baby’s name clear, even though the Gospel reports his father Zechariah as mute, not deaf.  The child’s mother has to step in and settle the question with the sort of common sense matter-of-factness we will not see again in her son’s dramatic life story. The story is even richer in promise, as John’s father sketches the power of God’s extravagant promise of salvation wrought by the Messiah, whose coming John will announce to a world far broader than the shepherds’ fields outside Bethlehem. 

 

John the Baptist’s self-description appears in a much later passage of the gospel when the two children, Messiah and Baptist, are adult.  The time has come when John will step back and let Jesus step to the fore.  So the words “He must increase; I must decrease” belong to his own more or less farewell discourse to his disciples, far simpler than Jesus’ would be at the last supper. They are hardly the claim of an over-achiever.  But John, for all his apparently self-sufficient ferocity, silently accomplished a goal far greater than any of us can manage without large infusions of courage and strength from the Holy Spirit.  He accepted his own truth in God’s plan and renounced all attempts to promote himself to stardom. St. Benedict would have approved of it. Here he was simply sketching the life he was called to live, a life of both obedience and humility, however unlikely it looks clad in camelhair and leather.

 John’s statement can be turned into a question to us:  “And you?  Are you willing to live the same life?”  Because we are called to.  Not in a public forum like John’s, but in the privacy of our own interior life.  One of the hidden dangers of immersing ourselves too exclusively in monastic literature, from the Rule of St. Benedict to contemporary authors like Michael Casey, OCSO, is that we can become extremely self-preoccupied, too often measuring our own success or failure in living the principles we aspire to follow.  Am I doing lectio well enough?  Am I humble enough? Am I growing in my commitment to Christ? Am I living well with others.  You probably have your own list of values on which you question yourself.  A good dose of honesty about our own fidelity to Benedictine principles is healthy, but an overdose can become deadly.  This danger has been the subject of concern for centuries, so it is not new. 

 The antidote is found in St. Benedict’s core principle:  Prefer nothing to the love of Christ.  Christ, not the state of our own souls, is what St. Benedict intends for us to make our focus.  We see in the well-known story of St. Peter’s attempt to walk on water the shift of perspective we are constantly called to: when St. Peter got out of the boat at Jesus’ invitation, he did fine till he started looking at his own feet sinking into the stormy waters.  He had to lift his eyes to Jesus’ outstretched hand to get him out of his predicament.  He was never in any real danger.  Jesus was right there, himself entirely secure on the sea.  But Peter lost sight of that essential truth, as we sometimes do.  That’s when he got in trouble. (See Matthew 14:22-31)

 Keeping our eyes on Christ in whatever situation we find ourselves takes a lifetime of prayer and practice.  The Baptist offers us the right advice:  even in our own minds, “he must decrease and I must decrease.”   The words “decrease” and “increase” are the key: it’s not a matter of thinking of this but not that.  It’s a matter of proportion.  What John the Baptist allows us to see is that an important dimension of our growth in Christ is: less me, more him!