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.
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