Johanan, “Il Signore fa grazia”

24 June 2008

Birth of St John the Baptist

Summer has just begun, and here we have the feast of the birth of John the Baptist, a very old feast, already celebrated by St Augustine in Africa. Besides Mary, the mother of the Lord, John the Baptist is the only saint of whom the Church celebrates not only the day of death, the dies natalis to eternal life, but also the dies natalis in this world: in fact, John is the only witness whose birth, so intertwined with that of Jesus, is noted in the New Testament. That very intertwining of the two births has le to the choice of 24 June: if the Church recalls Jesus’ birth on 25 December, then it was bound to recall that of John on 24 June, since, as Luke’s Gospel records, it occurred six months earlier. The parallelism of these dates is also symbolic, at least in the Mediterranean basin, which was the crucible of the Jewish-Christian faith: while 25 December is the feast of the sun-victor, which begins to increase its declination to the earth, 24 June is the day when the sun begins to decrease its declination, just as it happened in the relationship of the Baptist with Jesus, according to John’s own words: “He must increase and I decrease” (Jn 3, 30). John is the lamp that declines before the victorious light, he is the lamp prepared for the Messiah (cf. Ps 132,17 and Jn 5,35), he is his precursor in birth, in mission, and in death, he is Jesus’ teacher, his disciple who follows him, he is the friend of Jesus who is the approaching Spouse, as the fourth Gospel justly says.