Learning from John the Baptist

Yesterday we celebrated the feast of St. John the Baptist, the precursor of the Lord, the one who, in the desert, announced the coming of the Messiah.  You and I are also called to direct people to the Lord, to make Christ known to others.  Our greatness, like John’s, is Christ Jesus.  In Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17: 28): a discovery that unfolds, for all of us, throughout our lifetime until that final moment when we surrender everything to the Lord and are born into eternal life. 

The journey is a difficult one. Like John the Baptist, we begin with all of the attention placed on ourselves—what will this child become (Lk. 1:66)—to the realization that life is not about ourselves, that we are not the center of the universe as we were as infants.   As we mature, we learn also that the world itself is not an Absolute, that it disappoints more than it satisfied, that fullness of life occurs in giving it away, not hoarding it, not clutching it; in serving others more than oneself, in dying to self for the sake of others and to a Higher Good than in living selfishly, from “Behold me” to “behold the Lamb of God, (Jn 1:29) who takes away the sins of the world.”