Good morning. If you’ve ever seen the musical ‘Godspell’ – and yes, it’s still in the repertoire for colleges and theatre companies round the world – you’ll remember the catchy opening chorus: ‘Pre…ee, pare ye, the way of the Lord…’ – I’m tempted but I’m not going to sing it – the point of the chorus is to accompany the arrival of John the Baptist, the herald, of Jesus.
Today, the 24th June, the Church celebrates the birth of this extraordinary figure of Jewish history, who appears not only in the Gospels but in the writings of the first century Jewish historian, Josephus. John’s birth is traditionally the 24th June, 6 months before Christmas, and it also comes just after the Summer Solstice – and that has symbolic meaning too, because John reportedly said of Jesus Christ. ‘He must increase but I must decrease’. However bright the sun is in today’s sky and however long the day, we’re on the way down to long nights and shorter days. John the Baptist is known as the forerunner, the one who, as the chorus insists, prepared the way of the Lord. Yet he did not see his hopes fulfilled, at least not in the way he expected. He was arrested by the local puppet King, Herod Antipas, and beheaded in prison in a macabre episode when Herod’s niece, Salome, danced so fetchingly before Herod that he offered her any reward she would like – and she asked for the prophet’s head on a platter. Yuk. Oscar Wilde wrote a one-act play about it, and I remember playing Salome’s evil mother who had prompted the request.
So John the forerunner, the herald, ended up disgraced, confused, betrayed – and was never quite sure whether Jesus was the one whose coming he had prophesied or whether it would turn out to be someone else.
John’s story makes me realise how little we understand the significance of our own lives. We’re all part of a stream of history, we come and go, but the stream goes on. There’s so much in society that tells us we can be who we like and achieve what we want, that our sole purpose is to maximise our own significance. The story of John comes as a corrective. We are not Messiahs, World Kings, or even as one world leader puts it, ‘Very Stable Geniuses’. Yet we all have some capacity for discernment. We can practise truthfulness and generosity and be humble before God and one another. What comes after us we cannot know but all of us we can hope and pray the days ahead will bring flourishing and peace to ourselves and our overheating planet.
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