Preached at St John’s, Devizes
Readings – Acts 13.14b-26; Luke 1.57-66, 80
“What then will this child become?”
That’s what the neighbours asked when confronted by the strange circumstances of the birth of St John the Baptist. His father, Zechariah, had been struck dumb by God for refusing to believe he had fathered a child at his advanced age. Then he and his wife, Elizabeth, broke all custom by giving their son a name, John, not already used in their family. Immediately after that break with custom, Zechariah’s speech was suddenly restored. Elizabeth and Zechariah were delighted with their bonny boy whose name means ‘God is gracious’, but the neighbours found these weird experiences frightening.
“What will this child become?”, they asked, in their fear.
The Birth of St John the Baptist by Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1635), now in the Prado Museum, Madrid.
He became a great man, a man who changed history, but not one who enjoyed success in his life by conventional standards. He lived a wild life, eating insects and wild honey, and dressing in animal hides. Yet more than a thousand years after his death the Norman conquerors who had recently set up a castle thousands of miles away in Devizes named their church after him, and almost a thousand years after that, we meet in the same church and commemorate John as our patron saint today.
Although he was later celebrated by conquerors, John was far from a conqueror during his life. Instead, he came to the attention of the authorities as someone who refused to collude in their lies, was imprisoned, and later brutally executed. The régime that put him to death remained in power. On the surface, he achieved nothing in his life.
We can’t reduce Christianity to a formula for a successful life by the conventional standards of the world. Worldly success may be a blessing that God grants us; but equally, to live a godly life may require us to renounce comfort and instead live a life of deprivation and physical risk. Not just in Christianity: a deep ambivalence about worldly success was also present in the Jewish thoughtworld which remains part of our scriptural inheritance.
That’s clear when we listen to this morning’s first reading, from Acts. This is part of St Paul’s speech at the synagogue in Antioch. Here, Paul locates John the Baptist in the long sweep of Jewish history. So, he says that God “made the people great” – isn’t that a phrase to conjure with in our time – God “made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt.” So, God made the Hebrew people great when they were living as slaves in a foreign land ruled over by often despotic pharaohs. Isn’t that a strange idea – whatever it means to be great here, it isn’t greatness in the eyes of the world.
Later on, St Paul recounts, the Hebrew people, by then settled in a country of their own and living under the rule of judges, asked for a king. So, God gave them one. In fact, he tried to warn them off the idea, telling them that they were likely to place themselves under the rule of a tyrant – but they persist in nagging him so he gives in. That king, Saul, indeed went badly wrong in office. He in turn was succeeded by David, remembered even three thousand years later as a great king, but also a complex and contradictory character, capable of great wickedness as well as great good.
This was the narrative in which St Paul, a man deeply learned in Jewish history, located John the Baptist – a strange tale in which people are made great by their weakness, where they often act against their own interests, and where people with very dark sides play a key role in the story. St Paul, of course, had some dark aspects to his character, as we know, and as he himself acknowledged, and like John the Baptist he too would be put to death by a despot.
Being faithful to God seems to be bad for your health in these stories, so much so that one wonders why anyone would bother with it.
Here is perhaps why: all these people are playing a role in a much bigger story, one that isn’t all about them, one of cosmic significance. Their trials and tribulations, their failures and triumphs, are woven through faith into something far greater than any of them could achieve individually.
Jesus himself described John the Baptist, with his weird lifestyle and early death, as the greatest of all human beings. John points to Jesus, and John’s sacrifice of his life for the sake of truth points towards Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross – which opened up forgiveness for our failures, an escape from the limitations of our earthly existence, and the redemption of the whole of creation.
So we too are part of that bigger story, perhaps most of all when we share in Christ’s body and blood at the Eucharist, something that unites us with people across space and time; something that unites us with Christ and the twelve apostles at the Last Supper, and with all those gathered at the great heavenly feast that we will, by God’s grace, share in forever. In Holy Communion, the lens of faith allows us to see beyond what is physically present here this morning, to perceive our connectedness with all those who have gone before us in the Faith, with all those who will follow us, and with Jesus Christ – for it is through the lens of faith that we perceive that we are truly fed with the body and blood of Christ.
That might seem a silly idea at a time when most people’s worldview is entirely materialistic; one which is, for all our complaints, also one of material prosperity and physical health that would have astonished almost anyone until very recent times. Why risk anything for a far-fetched myth that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and that when Gerry does the priest thing in a few minutes time, Jesus will be actually present in some wafers and a bit of watered down wine? It seems silly.
Yet our prosperous and materialistic era is also one of loneliness, nervousness, and depression. We feel disconnected from one another and from any wider story. Despite our civil liberties, far from standing up boldly for truth, we often censor ourselves, looking the other way or colluding with things we know to be lies, all for the sake of a quiet life. The fragility of our prosperity and indeed our entire civilisation is obvious in myriad ways: plague and war continue to bedevil us, while new threats like climate change have emerged. We bet that a combination of our cleverness, and the way we can harness physical power on a scale unimaginable for most of history, could liberate us from the frailties and fallibility of human nature. But we were wrong.
The truth of our modern existence is that our power greatly exceeds our wisdom in using it. Beyond that, the more we have, the more we fear losing it; the more comfortable we are, the more we fear even the slightest discomfort, including the discomfort of having too live to closely with other people who might impinge on our absolute freedom to govern ourselves. In a quest to make ourselves perfectly happy, we seem to make ourselves unhappy.
John the Baptist points to a different possibility – not, for most of us, one of martyrdom, but one where we live as if God was real and Jesus Christ was God incarnate – because that is the Truth. It is a way of life that calls us to risk losing everything, but it weaves us into the greatest story ever told, one where we are united already with those whom we will share eternity in heaven with. It frees us to risk everything, knowing that we can never lose anything that actually matters.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
