The
Church celebrates only three birthdays in the course of the liturgical year:
first obviously is the birthday of Jesus, December 25, and then the birthday of
Mary, September 8th, and thirdly the birthday of John the
Baptist. It’s also interesting to note
that only a very important feast replaces the celebration of the Sunday if it
should land on a Sunday. The Feast of the Birthday of John the Baptist (June 24th)
replaces this Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time (6/24/2001), because the role he
played in the story of salvation was and is still very important.
That role was to point out Jesus as the one for whom the world was waiting. In the second reading from Acts, Paul, speaking of John, says, “As he was completing his course, he would say, `You think that I am the one you’re waiting for. I am not. But there is one coming who is greater than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to unfasten’” (Acts 13:25). When the Jewish authorities send priests and Levites to ask John who he is, he answers, “No, I am not the Messiah. No, I am not Elijah. No, I am not the Prophet.” Then he points to another greater than himself, saying, “I'm just the voice of one crying in the desert. `Prepare, ye, a path for the Lord'" (Jn 1:19-23). As Jesus is passing by one day, John points to him and exclaims, "There he is! There is the Lamb of God! He takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:30). John’s self-effacement and his affirmation of Jesus reach a N.T. high when he points to Jesus and says, “He must increase and I must decreased” (Jn 3:30). St. Augustine says of John (who was later beheaded): “Yes, indeed, John was decreased by a whole head.”
This
great Advent figure was who he was, and that's all he was. He had no need to be
anything more than he really was. He had no need to play the leading role in
the drama of salvation. He had no need
to cry out, "me, me, me." He
could point beyond himself and rejoice in another. John was like the Star of
Bethlehem: Scripture says it went before the Magi, then hovered over the stable
as though pointing and exclaiming,
“There he is!”
At the circumcision of the Baptist, relatives and
neighbors asked his father, "By
what name shall the child be called.”
His father, Zechariah, you will recall, was made speechless for doubting
the Angel Gabriel’s words that his barren and ancient wife Elizabeth would
conceive a son. Now when asked about the child’s name, the old man called for a
scroll and on it scribbled the words, "His name will be John" (Lk
1:57-63). And immediately the father’s
tongue was loosened and he broke into the Benedictus, his great song of
praise and thanks.
When Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice,
was elected pope in the papal conclave of 1958 in the Sistine Chapel in front
of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, according to ancient custom, the presiding
cardinal approached the pope-elect and asked, "Quo nomine vocaberis?"
"By what name shall you be called?" Angelo answered, "My name
shall be John“ after the great Baptist.
“Lumen
Gentium”: pointing to Christ
Then
this new John the Baptist, Pope John[1],
summoned the Church to the Second Vatican Council, and assigned it really but
one task: the Church in Council was to ask, “Who am I, and what should I be
doing? Good Pope John breathed his
great self-effacing spirit into the Council. He encouraged the Church in
Council to resist the temptation to point to itself. No easy task after
centuries of addiction to self-preoccupation, self-protection,
self-affirmation, even at times self-aggrandizement. (That’s no cantankerous
criticism – that’s simply par for the course when we’re dealing with human
beings. That’s why we have repentance.) After many convulsions and withdrawal
symptoms, the Church in council, like a good John the Baptist, like a good Star
of Bethlehem, managed to point (at least on the paper of its 13 documents)
beyond herself.
Two
of the 13 documents stand out both because of size and content. The first one[2]
entitled Lumen Gentium (from its
first two Latin word) attempts to answer the first question, “Who am I?”
Chapter
I of that document is entitled The Mystery of the Church. In it the
Church says, “I am a mystery.”(“Mystery” is a rich theological word; it
says, “There’s more here than meets the
eye, and so all your pat answers or definitions won’t do justice to it.”) Some bishops, especially the ones who liked
pat answers for everything, weren’t too happy with that. They complained: “What are our constituents
back home going to say when we tell them the Church is a mystery and that we
don’t have nice neat answers for everything anymore?”
Furthermore,
the original form of the document, used as a basis for debate, had Chapter II
entitled The Hierarchy (i.e. pope, bishops, priests) and Chapter III
entitled The People of God. That order of chapters stoked up a heated
debate, which was to produce the most important stroke of Vatican II. Some council fathers rose to the floor, and
complained asking, “Why is it that
whenever we, the hierarchy, speak about the Church, we immediately point to
ourselves, as though we were the Church. We are not the Church. The People
of God is the Church. Therefore the
chapter on the People of God should come first, before the chapter on the
hierarchy. And so Chapter III eventually became Chapter II, and Chapter II
became Chapter III.”
That
switch, that stroke, was and is called the “Copernican Revolution of Vatican
II” (“The sun doesn’t revolve around
us; we, the Earth, revolve around the sun”).
That switch made all the difference in the world. It changed and
continues to change the course of our Catholic lives (big ideas do that). John the Baptist pointed to someone greater
than himself: Christ. The hierarchy in Council pointed at least on
paper (and that’s a good start) to something
greater than itself: the People of God. Many of us remember how,
shortly after the close of the Council, the new expression “The People of God”
could be heard with increasing frequency in the weekly preaching of the Church.
The
first important document of Vatican II asks, “I, the Church, who am I?” Answer: “I am the People of God.” The
second most important document of Vatican II, entitled Gaudium et Spes,[3]
asks, “And what should I be doing?” The Council’s answer is as simple as it is
startling: “I should be loving the world.” In fact, the document’s English title is The Church
in the Modern world. Listen to the first line of that document: “The joy
and hope (Gaudium et Spes), the grief and anxiety of the world are the
joy and the hope, the grief and anxiety of the Church.” “The joy of the world
(it great thrust into inner space, its miracles of technology) is the joy of
the Church.” “The grief of the world
(its holocausts, school massacres, acts of terrorism, yes its postpartum
depressions) -- that grief is also the
grief of the Church.” How warm! How unitive! How affectionate! After centuries of addiction to
self-preoccupation, how startling it is to see the Church trying to point, like
John the Baptist, not to Itself but to another: the world. After ages of
hostility toward the world, how startling it is to hear the Church trying to
sing a new song.
It’s
difficult to stop singing the old
song. You’re beset with withdrawal symptoms, and before you know it, you’re
singing the old song again. That
happened sometime ago. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a
36-page document entitled Dominus Iesus
-- The Lord Jesus. The
document warned us to be careful when dealing with Buddhist and Hindus and the
like: we should not play down the unique role of Christ. The document also
warned us to be careful too when dealing with non-Catholic Christian religions:
we should not play down the unique role of the Catholic Church. The document was a relapse into the old
song. It’s difficult to sing a new song.
The
cultural song, i.e. the song which our culture has us singing, is the “me, me,
me” song. It’s the song that sings about how the “sun revolves around me.” That
song starts singing in us at a very very early age, when we are set down as
babes before the TV, and in the place of mother’s milk, we drink in the mighty
media’s main menu: “me, me, me.” That ranges from all different kinds of
fat-filled munchies with catchy tastes that feed our weight problem, right up
to our expensive tastes for Cadillacs, Porsches, and Alfa Romeo’s.
It’s
the “me, me, me” chant that’s alive and well in the person in front of you at
the checkout counter in the supermarket. She has an enormous mountain of items
in her grocery cart. You have only one or two in your hands. If she notices
you, and gives you an “in your face” look that says, “I am first because I got
here first,” it’s the “me, me, me” chant alive and well in her. If she doesn’t notice you, she should
have but didn’t, because again the “me, me, me” chant is alive and well in
her. So long after Copernicus, and the old theory about the cosmos is still
alive and well: The sun revolves around me!
Summer
arrived last week, and with its 15 hours of light and only 9 hours of darkness,
the days reach far into the night. One balmy evening this past week, as we were
all trying to sleep with windows opened to catch a summer night’s breeze, we
had to listen to a gang of kids (ranging, I suppose, from six to sixteen)
screaming and yelling till three in the morning. Not even the bullhorn of the
police could silence them. It’s the old
“me, me, me” chant alive and well. There are no “you, you, you’s” out there who
might be trying to sleep. So long after
Copernicus, and the old theory about the cosmos is still alive and well: The
sun revolves around me! Trivial and
insignificant? By no means. It’s all terribly serious, terribly dangerous,
terribly foreboding.
Kids
like that can turn into monsters like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who pulled
off the most “renown” school massacre in US history. Their sun too revolved around themselves and their own personal hurt,
visited upon them by their peers, who in turn had their sun revolving around themselves as they cast
these two kids out of their circle. Those kids chanting “me, me, me” throughout that warm balmy summer night can turn into monsters even like
Timothy McVeigh. His sun too revolved around himself and his intense personal
hatred of Federalism and Federal buildings.
He too chanted “me, me, me” and it put 168 you’s to death. His chant was so strong that it took a lethal injection to silence it.
Oh
blessed John the Baptist, you who said that, “He (Jesus) must increase and I
must decrease,” you invite us to point beyond ourselves and to rejoice in
others. Oh blessed John the Baptist,
you invite us to enter into a cosmos that revolves not around ourselves but
around Jesus, the bright “Sun of Justice” (Mal 4:2), who crafted for us that
great Parable of the Good Samaritan who pointed to the man waylaid by robbers
and left half-dead. Oh blessed John the
Baptist, in an age in which the cultural song has led us into a cultural
crisis, i.e. “the terrifying lack of compassion and concern that has settled in
upon us all,” you invite us to sing a new song No wonder the feast of your
birthday is so important that it has knocked out this 12th Sunday
of Ordinary Time. It is an
extraordinary song that you invite us to sing.
[1] Pope John (1958-1963), beatified last September, was exhumed on January 16, 2001 from the crypt under the Basilica of St. Peter’s, placed in a very thick glass covering, and moved to a new location on the main floor of the Basilica to accommodate the flow of pilgrims who come to pray at his tomb, and in anticipation of his up-coming canonization.
[2] It is entitled the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. It is called also by its Latin name Lumen Gentium (The Light of the Nations) from the Latin document’s opening words.
[3] It is entitled The Pastoral Constitution on the Church, or The Church in the Modern World. It is also called by its Latin name: Gaudium et Spes (The Joy and the Hope) from its opening words.