We commemorate three primary birthdays in the Christian year: Our Lord, Our Lady, and St. John the Baptist. St. John the Forerunner stands in a unique place in salvation history: on the cusp. For some 400 years, the voice of prophecy had been silent in Israel—since Malachi. Yet he had prophesied a coming messenger in the spirit and power of Elijah.
In the fullness of time, John comes upon the scene only several months before the One he will herald.
His mission: to prepare an Israel, some of whom were in fervent expectation of a political messiah who would cast off the Roman yoke and restore the “good old days”—the golden age of the Davidic/Solomonic monarchy. Yet what this Messiah came to innaugurate was even greater: the Kingdom of God itself.
When the religious leaders come to interrogate John, his answer to them comes from Isaiah: he’s not the Messiah, not Elijah resurrected, not the prophet foretold by Moses in Dt. 18, but a voice (Is. 40:3-5) proclaiming the coming manifestation of the glory of the LORD.
John’s primary mission was one of subjection: to bring a people back to a condition in which they might be subject again to their God, who, at John’s Nativity, had already come to them in human flesh but who was yet hidden in the womb of the Virgin, not yet manifest to Israel as their Redeemer. In holy Baptism and Chrismation, we too have subjected ourselves—to an unbroken line of Apostolic authority (through the holy Chrism) to the One, Holy, Catholic and apostolic Church; but most of all, by virtue of the seven-fold gift of the Spirit, subject to the life of the Holy Trinity Itself. Most people generally think of subjection in negative terms, yet each morning we pray to the God “whose service is perfect freedom.”
To be subject to God and to have our will increasingly conformed to His is not some kind of obliteration of our identity. The world thinks freedom consists of infinite choice, or just having my own way. Yet true freedom is to have only one choice, one way: the will and way of God.
John in the desert crucible of his preparation as the Forerunner is perfectly free, doing the one thing for which he was created. St. Seraphim of Sarov once said that “the highest perfection of a thing is to be subject to that which perfects it.”
St. John is the example for us of that kind of perfection, and our purpose is the same as his: to be subject to the One Who alone can perfect us; to be a voice crying in the wilderness of a world gone mad that it is choosing death instead of Life, calling evil good, and good evil; to point to the Messiah; to speak the word of God to all that they might be brought to repentance and to hearts prepared to receive the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, hearts prepared to see the Kingdom already present in Jesus, in His Body, in us, and awaiting its fulfillment in a transfigured new heaven and earth, the restoration of all things when God will be all in all.