A moody birthday

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 57-66, 80) sees the birth of St John the Baptist. Like all new mothers, Elizabeth’s joy was great, and greater still because she had given up all hope of ever having a child. Then comes a moment of tension: unnamed persons assume that John should be called Zechariah, but they do not see that with this child, a new age is dawning, and customs are about to be overturned. His mother protests: his name will be John. Dismissing her, they turn to Zechariah, and then the truly miraculous begins to unfold: Zechariah, this priest who stands for all that comes before and foreshadows the future Messiah, recovers his speech and pours forth his joyous praise of God in words that Christians throughout the centuries will sing every morning. For this is the dawn of the morning of our redemption, and even though there is work to be done, a way to be prepared that will lead the Messiah to His sufferings and death, we can but greet the morning with joy for the hand of the Lord is with us.

All these events are suffused with three moods that are necessary to sons and daughters of God.

When Zechariah told them that the baby’s name was to be John, his speech returned to him, and, as the gospel says, all their neighbours were filled with awe and the whole affair was talked about throughout the hill country of Judea. Awe is great respect that is filled with wonder. Religion that is so filled with awe it has no room for intimacy is at risk of being cold or servile. Religion that is so fixed on intimacy there is no room for awe is at risk of becoming selfish and manipulative. Awe reminds us that religion is itself a virtue, a part of justice, and it is especially owed to God and His great works. Yet awe is also connected to respect for the mystery of any other person – be they divine or human. Just as we sometimes write our desires onto our image of God, we often write them onto other people, and wonder why they cannot see things as we do. We lack awe and the humility it fosters.

Before the people felt this awe at God’s works, they were left first in a state of astonishment by Zechariah’s confirmation that the baby’s name was to be John; John was not a family name, and its use was, therefore, unprecedented. We too need to awaken our capacity for such astonishment, which likewise made the people speculate about what John would do when he grew up. For God and His ways are so different from our daily round. Astonishment is a capacity for surprise, but fundamentally, it requires a ready willingness for that surprise, an openness to the way of things that lie beyond my ken and beyond my conventions. Conventions are part of every society and are in fact very helpful, but not when they close down our freedom to the surprises of God. Not that God contradicts Himself; we must not confuse the humble feeling of astonishment with a rightful sense of absurdity, although there is a vice common these days of manipulating the rightful astonishment of the Christian soul into thinking that it simply needs to bow before every fashion and fad as if it were a divine surprise and not the work of the demon. The habit of sin too closes our eyes to what might astonish us; perhaps this is why we think of astonishment and innocence as being closely linked. John’s name was a surprise. Jesus’ incarnation was a surprise. Astonishment is, as I say, our readiness to be open to God’s wrong-footing us. G. K. Chesterton ends his essay Orthodoxy with these beautiful lines:

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

If only we were prepared to be astonished at God, perhaps we would perceive this mirth more readily.

And the last mood that suffuses this gospel is that of the joy of St Elizabeth; simple and enduring, unperturbed by the lack of astonishment and the slowness to awe that left her leaders and her neighbours so clay footed. Joy – a fruit of the Holy Spirit and one of the actions of love. Joy - that God had worked a miracle in her life and would subsequently call her son out into the wilderness until the day he appeared openly to Israel. The gospel records nothing of St John’s childhood other than that he grew up and his spirit matured. But can we imagine for a minute that his mother and the mother of his soon-to-be-born cousin never saw each other, especially given that the one had dashed to see the other as soon as she heard news of her pregnancy?

Mary too was filled with joy, and with astonishment and awe. For her joy came from a love so constant its like had never been seen; her astonishment came from an openness to God and His mirthful ways; and her awe issued from the depths of her Old Testament education which taught the Jews to cover their faces in reverence for God, like the Seraphim before the throne of the Almighty.   May Jesus grant us all astonishment, awe, and joy on this solemnity of St John the Baptist. O Mary, teach us to be joyful every moment of our life; teach us to be astonished every moment of our life; teach us to live in awe every moment of our life. Amen.