I’ve been thinking this week about St. John the Baptist, whose feast we celebrated on Monday. The Forerunner of Christ, John the Baptist is “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’”(John 1:23) His call to conversion disturbed or inspired, depending on his listeners, but he spoke out fearlessly to all, even to King Herod himself, who had taken his brother’s wife in contravention of God’s law.
It can be a challenge, at any time, to speak up in defense of the Truth, and St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom is a sobering reminder of why. But Monday’s feast, June 24, doesn’t commemorate his death, the way such days usually do. (For that we have another feast on August 29.) Instead, this week we celebrate John the Baptist’s birth, and this unusual circumstance reminds me: there’s another side to our call to speak the Truth, a side that doesn’t diminish the risk or the danger but instead shows us why it’s worth facing.
After all, Christ Himself was present at the birth of John the Baptist, within the Blessed Mother’s womb. The unborn John leapt in recognition within Elizabeth when Mary arrived, ready to tend to her cousin in the last months of pregnancy. And the purifying joy John expressed in that moment, even before his birth, evokes the joy of a call that is more than a call – that is a Person – and reminds us just how profoundly our human calling embraces who we are in our divinely created selves, even before we take our first breath.
The One for whom we help “prepare the way” in each other’s lives actually precedes us, offering the joy of His promised salvation long before we are conscious of our need for it. He accompanies us from the beginning.
Our God is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, so proclaiming Truth at all costs means proclaiming Him, truly. It can be easy to distract ourselves with fear and anxiety at all the obstacles to speaking up, but St. John the Baptist reminds us, at his birth, that embracing this call is embracing the deeply personal Love of Christ, enduring forever and worth the cost.
