Hi, friends,
Happy Feast of St. John the Baptist’s Nativity. He is the only Saint to receive a Nativity feast, and liturgically, it mirrors the nativity of Christ in six months. From today onward, the days will grow darker; this feast quite literally enacts a proclamation that orients our bodies to perceive, through the Baptist, the looming darkness of which the Light will be born amidst.1
In what proceeds, I want to emphasise one theme that I think the Baptist illuminates: the Incarnation. I note that this might appear more palatable to my Eastern Orthodox friends (Happy Pentecost for yesterday!) who, in contrast to the West, have a long Iconographic tradition of the Baptist and Virgin Mother—a Diastis—accompanying Christ.
Recently, I’ve been doing much research (as part of my Master’s) into the visual history of Christ’s Baptism by John and juxtaposing it with historical theology’s language around the Incarnation.
A cursory glance at most general theology textbooks, say Alistair McGrath’s, will evidence a notable trend. When speaking of the Incarnation, we tend to focus on Christ’s sufferings, his being born of a Virgin, and his death; all are rightly so. However, I’ve come to believe that if we are to affirm Christ’s Humanity (not just his Divinity), a slightly broader account is required. Namely, to be human is to have a friend. Adam had Eve (however you interpret the Creation account), King David had Jonathan, and Mary had Elizabeth. While Jesus? He had John the Baptist—and then the Beloved, but that’s a different story.
If the greatest love is to lay one’s life down for a friend, then John is that Forerunner to Christ (as well as both of their Mother’s in the very act of childbirth). It is John’s proclamation of Christ’s messiahship that will lead him to his beheading. It is John who, in Elizabeth’s womb, will, upon hearing Christ in Mary’s womb, leap and ‘receive the Holy Spirit’; in other words, just as Mary conceives Christ ‘full of grace’ (aka, sinless), the Baptist, too, will be born sinless—yet both still in need of a saviour. Nonetheless, if Christ is fully Human and fully Divine, confessing the Incarnation is not as simple as emphasising the all-too-common condition of suffering but also treating the essential positive aspects—namely, friendship. John the Baptist expands our grammar of the Incarnation.
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Christ’s humanity is, first, affirmed through his being born and raised by a Mother. However, in Christ’s Baptism, as Sergii Bulgakov painstakingly attempts to illustrate, he encounters the one from the Wilderness who is his friend.2 At this baptismal moment, his mother’s friend’s son appears; I always imagine this moment as that annoying neighbour cycling up to your house and asking to play. However, as the Christian imagination so desperately desired, this friendship needed folktales to expand its vocabulary: the Golden Legend, Pseudo-Cavalca, and the Protoevangelium of James, to name a few. The relationship between these two—John and Jesus—was simply too irresistible not to speculate upon.
These legends circulate around a central idea: the one in the wilderness, John, lived alone pursuing God, knowing he needed to prepare himself to meet the Messiah and proclaim this relationship rightly. For example, Pseudo-Cavalca (written in the 14th century) speculates:
While [Elizabeth] waited she heard the voice of the child loudly singing the Magnificat: and she knelt down and gave thanks to God that her child had come home. With great joy the whole family gave praise and our lady Elizabeth said to him: Son, why did you do this and why did you come home so late? And the child immediately knelt before her and said: Forgive me my mother, but today I found the most beautiful things (I went further away than usual) and I want to tell you that I was in a place of insatiable beauty.
John, for those schooled in the imagination of Christianity, was tutored by the Angel of the Lord in the ways of proclamation and sensitivity to beauty. The one preparing himself in the wilderness finds his voice from two friends having a mother’s club (his mother, Elizabeth, and Mary at the Visitation). John’s proclamation, I suspect, was first intuited by hearing his mother’s friend sing her Magnificat. John’s proclamation is first learnt by his mother singing over Mary and her child—our Saviour. These mothers reveal the language of recognition and acts of friendship.
This discussion establishes what I proceed to suggest. At Christ’s baptism, the full affirmation on the part of humanity of Christ’s being human occurs—Christ’s Mother affirms his humanity, but he also needs a friend. Christ does not ask anyone to baptise him; he asks John to do so. Christ does not force John to say yes, but rather, like the Annunciation, there is the option for John to say ‘No’. Christ ‘bows’ to John, his friend. Thankfully, John returns this ‘bow’ and chooses to baptise the Messiah. In this moment, as Bulgakov is adamant about, John represents all of humanity; in John’s ‘Yes’ to his friend, he says, ‘You, Jesus, are my friend, and I will do as you’ve asked’. In doing so, John affirms Christ’s humanity in Christ’s willingness to receive John’s response. The hand is shaken, and friendship is a dialogue.
John’s proclamation culminates in a sprinkle of water on a friend's head, and yet, the result is a theophany. His childhood thirst for ‘insatiable beauty’ and holiness culminates in the language of Love – ‘You are my beloved, in whom I’m well pleased.’ John cannot say this for God, but he is the vessel for its instantiation.
Maybe we are invited to cultivate friendships that affirm the other’s humanity and spark something like a theophany, too. Perhaps, in doing so, our acts of friendship become a proclamation to the world of what it means to be fully human. We hunger for spaces of ‘insatiable beauty’, and yet we ought to bring our aromatic flowers as garlands for our friends, knowing that in the end, death will come knocking, but in the interim, it is a party. Only Love is Eternal; for us moderns, that might manifest through water fights and humble submission to each other.
Just as I pray for Mary’s intercession each day so that I might mimic her ‘Yes’, maybe St. John is our patron saint of interceding for our ‘Yes’ to friendship with the Lord? May we become people who spark theophanies in friendship.
“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” John 1:8-9 (NRSV)
And, to my Aussie friends, well, write some pious reason for the inverse for yourselves ;) ?
Sergii Bulgakov’s The Friend of the Bridegroom is one of the most profound meditations on the Baptist you will ever read.