Here's my reflection for yesterday's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields, on the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1. 57-66, 80):
Our eldest daughter is expecting and she and her husband can’t agree on a name for their son. It’s not an unusual situation for the parents of a new born child. For Zechariah and Elizabeth it should have been relatively straightforward, as the culture of the time was for the child to be named after the grandfather.
Names were kept in the family and handed down from grandfather to grandson. This was part of a culture where the firstborn son inherited all that the family owned, whilst also being responsible for maintaining the family unit. That included the role or work undertaken by the father and grandfather before him, in this case as one of the priests at the Temple.
The naming of John was problematic because it signified something different was happening; a break with tradition. The name John was not in the family line and he would not become a priest like his father and grandfather before him; instead becoming a prophet preparing the way for the new thing that God was doing in the world in sending his Son to be one of us and save us from ourselves.
The new thing that God was doing in the world entailed a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit so, in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel we read of Gabriel promising that John will be filled with the Holy Spirit from before his birth and of his growing up strong in the Spirit. The Spirit comes upon Mary at the Annunciation, Elizabeth is filled with the Spirit at Mary’s arrival (and blesses her as a result), and Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit at John’s circumcision, prophesying about John and Jesus.
This fresh move of the Holy Spirit comes after a period of over 400 years during which there was no revelation from God by the Spirit. That had fulfilled the prophecy of Micah: “Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without revelation. The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them” (3:6). The new thing that God was about to do was not possible without the preparatory work of the Holy Spirit or without there being a working together of the principal characters with the Holy Spirit.
Preparation is also seen in the upbringing of John through his separation for God’s service which involved the rejection of wine and other strong drink and time spent in the wilderness, where he wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. His calling as the one preparing the way for Jesus involved a particular kind of preparation, which may or may not have been individual to John, but which was the right preparation for the calling on his life.
What can we take from these reflections on the early life of John the Baptist and how might they bite for us? First, we can reflect on the call on our lives. That is not so dissimilar to that of John. He was preparing others to encounter Jesus. We are essentially called to do the same. When I was a young Christian I read writers like Francis Schaeffer who talked about the importance of pre-Evangelism. This involves discussion of our worldviews and the extent we live according to our beliefs, whatever those beliefs may be. Exploring inconsistencies in our lifestyles or inadequacies in our beliefs opens people to the possibility of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. None of us are evangelists. It is only God the Spirit who can bring people back into relationship with God through Jesus. Yet, like John, we can prepare people to encounter Jesus for themselves.
Second, the Holy Spirit was moving in a new way through the birth of John and Jesus, and Elizabeth, Zechariah and Mary were among those who discerned it and responded. Like them, we can seek to discern what the Holy Spirit is doing and how the Spirit is moving within our own day and time. When Jesus opened the scriptures and read ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me’ that anointing was for the bringing of good news to the poor, release for captives, recovery of sight for those who were blind, freeing of the oppressed and proclamation of the Jubilee when land and property was returned to those in debt. Where we see these things happening today, we can discern the work of the Holy Spirit.
Third, John needed a specific form of preparation for his ministry which involved him making commitments, not generally made by others. That is the approach we use here within the Nazareth Community as its members commit themselves for a year at a time to silence, sacraments, study, sharing, service, Sabbath and staying with. This kind of commitment, whether the Nazareth rule of life or something different can be a helpful practice and discipline enabling us to live out and deepen the calling on our lives.
As we reflect on our calling, the needs of our world and our practices as Christians, it may well be that John the Baptist is the role model in the Gospels to whom we most need to turn.
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Godspell - Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord.
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