Did St John the Baptist succeed in preparing for Christ's advent?
St. John Baptist was sent by God as the instrument for preparing hearts for Christ's advent—and his coming was absolutely necessary as a preparation for the Messias.
St. John Baptist was sent by God as the instrument for preparing hearts for Christ's advent—and his coming was absolutely necessary as a preparation for the Messias.
Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
In the next passage, Fr Coleridge will tell us...
How the hearts of men were not ready for the Advent of Christ
Why St. John the Baptist’s extraordinary sanctity and mission were divinely chosen to prepare men’s hearts for Christ.
How two central truths to St. John’s preaching and their universal resonance in stirred souls to repentance.
… and how the mission of St. John successfully awoke consciences to receive the Christ the Lord.
This Gospel is read on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It is curious that the Advent Gospel readings appear in reverse chronological order:
The last witness of St John the Baptist (and Our Lord’s witness to him)
St John the Baptist’s declaration of his mission under inquiry
This reverse chronological order of these readings also recalls the curious mnemonic ‘ERO CRAS,’ spelt out by a reversal of the ‘O Antiphons’ from the 17th December. It is as if the Roman liturgy is engaging in a kind of “countdown” to Christmas.
These readings also show how central the Forerunner of Christ is in this period; a greater appreciation of this centrality may go some way to reawakening devotion to St John the Baptist, of whom Our Lord said:
“There hath not risen up among them that are born of women a greater than John the Baptist.”
St John the Baptist's preparation
From
The Ministry of St. John the Baptist
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1886, Ch. I
St. Matt. iii. 1-12; St. Mark i. 2-8; St. Luke iii. 8-16
Story of the Gospels, § 16
Sung on the Fourt Sunday of Advent
Men generally unprepared for Jesus Christ
We cannot doubt, that notwithstanding all the long preparation of the world and of the chosen people for the coming of our Lord, men’s hearts were in general altogether unready for Him when He came.
At the time of His Birth that characteristic feature of His treatment at the hands of men which St. John has expressed in the words, ‘He came unto His own, and His own received Him not,’ was figured in the poor welcome with which His Blessed Mother in her hour of need was met by the people of Bethlehem. ‘There was no room for them.’
The few who received Him and acknowledged Him, as the shepherds, the Eastern sages, Simeon, Anna, and the like, were all simple unworldly hearts which had been prepared for Him by the grace of God.
To others the Star shone in vain in the heavens, nor could the songs of the Angels penetrate their ears. No class was exempt from this blindness. Herod on his throne, and the Priests and Doctors at Jerusalem, could help others on their way to Him, but they felt no need of Him themselves. Their hearts were not ready—and we have no reason for thinking that the great mass of mankind or of the Jews were more ready for Him than their Rulers, lay and ecclesiastical.
Fitness of St. John for his work
In the mission of St. John Baptist, God mercifully chose the most fitting way for that preparation of the heart for our Lord, without which His manifestation would be in vain.
In the first place, it is a part of the Providence of God that when He is to do a great work in the world, He sends a great Saint, or a number of great Saints, to do it. They receive their gifts, in proportion to their mission, out of His inexhaustible treasures, and thus it is that at any crisis He is able to revive and reinvigorate His Church.
St. John was himself a person of the loftiest sanctity. The process of his sanctification had been begun, as has been said, in the womb of his mother at the time of the Visitation, and it is the common feeling of the Church that it went on from that moment with steady and ever-increasing rapidity.
The Fathers, as well as the Church in her services, apply to him the words which properly belong to the Prophet Jeremias:
‘Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.’1
In the same way, Christian theology puts together the several scattered sayings of our Lord and of the Evangelists concerning him, and thus peering, as it were, through the veil which half conceals the great Forerunner of our Lord, forms to itself an idea of his perfection and of the graces vouchsafed to him to enable him to fulfil his lofty office.
Sanctification in his mother’s womb
Original sin, as has been said, he had, but it was washed away through the merits of our Lord at the moment of the Visitation. His leaping in the womb for joy shows the existence of another gift, the acceleration of the full use of his reason and intellectual faculties, and a corresponding endowment of sanctifying grace and illumination.
If he was not entirely free from that infirmity of our nature which theologians call the ‘fomes peccati,’ at least he was always preserved from mortal sin, and confirmed in grace, though he may have been liable to imperfections and distractions not fully voluntary. His continual growth in grace and in divine knowledge is witnessed to by St. Luke.2
His knowledge of divine things, discernment and glory
His abstinence, mortification, and solitude were the external conditions of an existence which was in constant and close union with God, Whose Holy Spirit, rather than any outward instructor, was the teacher and guide of that privileged soul.
His great mission was one of enlightenment,3 and so he must be supposed to have had wonderful communications of divine knowledge granted to him in his long years of preparation in the desert, because, as Suarez says:
‘He was a prophet and more than a prophet, sent by God to bear witness to Christ.
“Therefore, he had whatever was necessary to be a witness worthy of belief; but for this, it is necessary not only to have innocence and goodness of life, but also knowledge of those things concerning which testimony is to be given.
“Therefore, since St. John was to bear witness concerning Christ, the kingdom of heaven, and the grace of the Holy Ghost which was to be poured out upon men, and as he was to show them the straight path to God, it was due that he should have perfect knowledge of all these things.’4
He possessed therefore sanctifying grace in the highest degree, the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
Of the graces which are known to theologians as ‘gratiae gratis datae,’ he had those which were necessary to fit him for his office, such as that of prophecy, a gift distinctly attributed to him by our Lord Himself, of interpretation of Scripture, of discernment of spirits, enabling him, not indeed to read all hearts with that clearness of sight which belongs to God, but to help those who came to him in a pre-eminent degree, as well as the faith, knowledge, and wisdom which were among the graces required by him as a teacher and preacher.
Miracles, as we know, he never worked, that grace being reserved, as it seems, for our Lord, as one of the great evidences of His divine mission, to which St. John himself would refer when the time came to send his own disciples to Him.5
And the Church has always believed that these wonderful gifts of St. John on earth corresponded to a singular exaltation of glory in heaven, enhanced by the triple aureola of virgin, doctor, and martyr, which he has won in so eminent a degree.
But what about the personality and spirit of St John the Baptist? How did they affect his mission?
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