Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
J.M.J.
St. John the BAPTIST was called by God to be the forerunner of his Divine
Son, to usher him into the world, and to prepare mankind by penance to
receive their great Redeemer whom the prophets had foretold at a distance
through every age from the beginning of the world; never ceasing to excite
the people of God to faith and hope in him, by whom alone they were to be
saved. The more the sublime function of this saint surpassed that of the
Jewish legislator and of all the patriarchs and ancient prophets, the
greater were the graces by which he was fitted for the same. Some of the
prophets had been sanctified from their birth, but neither in so wonderful
nor in so abundant a manner as the Baptist. In order to preserve his
innocence spotless, and to improve the extraordinary graces which he had
received, he was directed by the Holy Ghost to lead an austere and
contemplative life in the wilderness, in the continual exercises of devout
prayer and penance, from his infancy till he was thirty years of age. How
much does this precaution of a saint, who was strengthened by such uncommon
privileges and graces, condemn the rashness of parents who expose children
in the slippery time of youth to the contagious air of wicked worldly
company, and to every danger or, who, instead of training them up in
suitable habits of self-denial, humility, devotion, and reasonable
application to serious duties, are themselves by example and pernicious
maxims the corruptors of their tender minds, and the flatterers of their
passions, which they ought to teach them to subdue.
St. John cannot be commonly imitated by youth in his total
retreat from the world; but he teaches what are the means by which they must
study, according to their circumstances, to sanctify that most precious age
of life; what they must shun, in what maxims they ought to ground
themselves, and how they are to form and strengthen in themselves the most
perfect habits of all virtues. Let them consider him as a special pattern,
and the model of innocence and of that fervor with which they must labor
continually to improve in wisdom, piety, and every virtue. He is
particularly the pattern which those ought always to have before their eyes,
who are called by God to the ministry of his altar, or of his word. Let no
one be so rash as to intrude himself into the sanctuary before he has
labored a long time to qualify himself for so high an office by retirement,
humility, holy contemplation, and penance, and before the spirit of those
virtues has taken deep root in the wilderness, conversing only with God,
till, in the thirtieth year of his age, he was perfectly qualified to enter
upon the administration of his office; that being also the age at which the
priests and Levites were permitted by the Jewish law to begin the exercise
of their functions. The prophets had long before described the Baptist as
the messenger and forerunner sent to prepare the way of the Lord, by
bringing men to a due sense of their sins, and to the other necessary
dispositions for receiving worthily their Redeemer. Isaias and Malachy in
these predictions allude to harbingers and such other officers whom princes
upon their journeys sent before them, to take care that the roads should be
leveled, and all obstructions that might hinder their passage removed.
God, by a revelation, intimated to John his commission of
precursor in the wilderness, and the faithful minister began to discharge it
in the desert of Judaea itself near the borders, where it was thinly
inhabited, upon the banks of the Jordan, towards Jericho. Clothed with the
weeds of penance, he announced to all men the obligation they lay under of
washing away their iniquities with the tears of sincere compunction; and
proclaimed the Messias, who was then coming to make his appearance among
them. He was received by the people as the true herald of the most high God,
and his voice was, as it were, a trumpet sounding from heaven to summon all
men to avert the divine judgments, and to prepare themselves to reap the
benefit of the mercy that was offered them. All ranks of people listened to
him, and amongst others, came many Pharisees, whose pride and hypocrisy,
which rendered them indocile, and blinded them in their vices, he sharply
reproved. The very soldiers and publicans or tax-gatherers, who were
generally persons hardened in habits of immorality, violence, and injustice,
flocked to him. He exhorted all to works of charity, and to a reformation of
their lives, and those who addressed themselves to him, in these
dispositions, he baptized in the river. The Jews practiced several religious
washings of the body as legal purifications; but no baptism before this of
John had so great and mystical a signification. It chiefly represented the
manner in which the souls of men must be cleansed from all sin and vicious
habits, to be made partakers of Christ's spiritual kingdom, and it was an
emblem of the interior effect; of sincere repentance; but it differed
entirely from the great sacrament of baptism which Christ soon after
instituted, to which it we, much inferior in virtue and efficacy, and of
which it was a kind of type.
St. John's baptism was a temporary by which men who were under
the law were admitted to some new spiritual privileges, which they had not
before, by him who was the messenger of Christ, and of his new covenant.
Whence it is called by the fathers a partition between the law and the
gospel. This baptism of John prepared men to become Christians, but did not
make them so. It was not even conferred in the name of Christ, or in that of
the Holy Ghost, who had not been as yet given. When St. John had already
preached and baptized about six months, our Redeemer went from Nazareth, and
presented himself, among others, to be baptized by him. The Baptist knew him
by a divine revelation, and, full of awe and respect for his sacred person,
at first excused himself, but at length acquiesced out of obedience. The
Savior of sinners was pleased to be baptized among sinners, not to be
cleansed himself, but to sanctify the waters, says St. Ambrose, that is, to
give them the virtue to cleanse away the sins of men. St. Austin and St.
Thomas Aquinas think he then instituted the holy sacrament of baptism, which
he soon after administered by his disciples, whom doubtless, he had first
baptized himself.
The solemn admonitions of the Baptist, attended with the most
extraordinary innocence and sanctity, and the marks of his divine commission
procured him a mighty veneration and authority among the Jews, and several
began to look upon him as the Messiah, who, from the ancient prophecies was
expected by all the nations of the East to appear about that time in Judaea,
as Suetonius, Tacitus, and Josephus testify. To remove all thoughts of this
kind, he freely declared that he only baptized sinners with water in order
to repentance and a new life; but that there was one ready to appear among
them, who would baptize them with the effusion of the Holy Ghost, and who so
far exceeded him in power and excellency, that he was not worthy to do for
him the meanest servile office. Nevertheless, so strong were the impressions
which the preaching and deportment of John made upon the minds of the Jews,
that they sent to him a solemn embassy of priests and Levites from Jerusalem
to inquire of him if he was not the Christ. True humility shudders at the
very mention of undue honor; and, the higher applause it meets with among
men, the lower it sinks in a deep sense and sincere acknowledgment of its
own baseness and unworthiness, and in the abyss of its nothingness; and in
this disposition it is inflamed with a most ardent desire to give all praise
and glory to the pure gratuitous goodness and mercy of God alone. In these
sentiments St. John confessed, and did not deny, and he confessed, I am not
the Christ. He also told the deputies that he was neither Elias nor a
prophet. He was indeed Elias in spirit, being the great harbinger of the Son
of God; and excelled in dignity the ancient Elias, who was a type of our
saint. The Baptist was likewise eminently a prophet, and more than a
prophet, it being his office, not to foretell Christ at a distance, but to
point him out present among men. Yet, far from pluming himself with titles
and prerogatives, as pride inspires men to do, he forgets his dignity in
every other respect only in that of discharging the obligations it lays upon
him, and of humbling himself under the almighty and merciful hand of Him who
had chosen and exalted him by his grace. Therefore, because he was not Elias
in person, nor a prophet in the strict sense of the word, though, by his
office more than a prophet, he rejects those titles.
Being pressed to give some account who he was, he calls himself
the voice of one crying in the desert, he will not have men have the least
regard for him, but turns their attention entirely from himself, as unworthy
to be named or thought of, and only bids them listen to the summons which
God sent them by his mouth. A voice is no more than an empty sound; it is a
mere nothing. How eloquent does sincere humility render the saints to
express the sentiments of their own nothingness! Like the Baptist, every
preacher of God's word must be penetrated with the most feeling sense of his
own baseness; must study always to be nothing himself and in his own eyes,
whilst yet he exerts all his powers that God, the great All, may be known,
loved, served, and glorified by all and in all; he must be himself merely a
voice, but a voice of thunder, to awake in all hearts a profound sense of
their spiritual miseries, and of the duties which they owe to God. This
maxim St. Austin illustrates by the following simile drawn by the pagan
mythologists: "It is related in the fables," says he, "that a wolf thought,
from the shrillness of the voice, that a nightingale was some large
creature, and, coming up and finding it to have so small a body, said Thou
art all voice, and art therefore nothing. In like manner let us be nothing
in our own esteem. Let the world despise us, and set us at nought, provided
we only be the voice of God, and nothing more."
The Baptist proclaimed Jesus to be the Messias at his baptism;
he did the same when the Jews consulted him from Jerusalem whether he was
not the Messias; again, when seeing him come towards him the day following,
he called him The Lamb of God; also when his disciples consulted him about
the baptism of Jesus, and on other occasions. He baptized first in the
Jordan, on the borders of the desert of Judaea; afterward, on the other side
of that river, at a place called Bethania, or rather Bethabara, which word
signifies House of the Passage or common ford; lastly at Ennon, near Salim,
a place abounding in waters, situated in Judaea near the Jordan. In the
discharge of his commission he was a perfect model to be imitated by all
true ministers of the divine word. Like an angel of the Lord he was neither
moved by benedictions nor by maledictions, having only God and his holy will
in view. Entirely free from vanity or love of popular applause, he preached
not himself, but Christ. His tenderness and charity won the hearts, and his
zeal gave him a commanding influence over the minds of his hearers. He
reproved the vices of all orders of men with impartial freedom, and an
undaunted authority; the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the profanity of the
Sadducees, the extortion of the publicans, the rapine and licentiousness of
the soldiers, and the incest of Herod himself.
The tetrarch Herod Antipas going to Rome in the sixteenth year
of Tiberius, the thirty third of Christ, lodged in his way at the house of
his brother Herod Philip, and was smitten with love for his wife Herodias,
who was niece to them both. He discovered to her his criminal passion, and
she consented to leave her husband and marry him, upon condition that he
first divorced his wife, who was daughter of Aretas, king of the Arabs. To
this he readily agreed, and being returned from Rome in the following
autumn, he considered how to rid himself of his wife. The princess having
got intelligence of his resolution, made her escape, and fled to her father.
By her voluntary retreat Herod Antipas saw himself at liberty and, by a
notorious infringement of all laws divine and human, married Herodias his
sister-in-law, though she had children by her own husband Philip, his
brother, who was yet living. St. John Baptist boldly reprehended the
tetrarch and his accomplice for so scandalous an incest and adultery, and
said to that prince: It is not lawful for thee to take thy brother's wife.
Herod feared and reverenced John, knowing him to be a holy man, and he did
many things by his advice; but on the other hand, he could not bear that his
main sore should be touched and was highly offended at the liberty which the
preacher took in that particular. Thus, whilst he respected him as a saint,
he hated him as a censor, and felt a violent struggle in his own breast
between his veneration for the sanctity of the prophet and the reproach of
his own conduct. His passion still got the better, and held him captive, and
his flame was nourished by the flatteries of courtiers, and the clamors and
artifices of Herodias, who, like an enraged infernal fury, left nothing
unattempted to take away the life of him who dare impeach her conduct, and
disturb her criminal pleasures and ambition. Herod, to content her, cast the
saint into prison. Josephus says the servant of God was confined in the
castle of Macherus, two leagues beyond the lake Asphaltites, upon the
borders of Arabia Patraen. St. John hearing in prison of Christ's wonderful
works and preaching, sent two of his disciples to him for their information,
not doubting but that Christ would satisfy them that he was the Messias,
that by his answers they would lay aside their prejudices, and join
themselves to him.
Herod continued still to respect the man of God, frequently sent
for him, and heard him discourse with much pleasure, though he was troubled
when he was admonished by him of his faults. Herodias, on the other hand,
never ceased by her instigations to endeavor to exasperate him against the
holy man, and to seek an opportunity to compass his destruction. An occasion
at length fell out favorable to her designs. It was about a year since John
the Baptist had been committed close prisoner, when Herod upon the return of
his birthday, made a splendid entertainment for the principal nobility of
Galilee, in the castle of Macherus. The dancing of Salome and other
circumstances of this banquet are sensible proofs to what an infamous pitch
of impudence debauchery was carried in this impious court. To dance at
banquets was looked upon among civilized patrons which had any regard to
rules of decency and temperance, as a base effeminacy and an excess of
softness and voluptuousness, as it is called by Cicero, who clears the
reputation of king Deiotarus from the aspersion of such an indecency,
because, being a man remarkable from his youth for the gravity of his
manners, he was incapable of such an extravagance. That orator had before
endeavored in the same manner to justify Muraena from a like imputation.
When luxury and intemperance overran the Roman commonwealth, these maxims of
ancient severity still so far prevailed, that Tiberius and Domitian, who
will never pass for rigid reformers of morals, turned patricians out of the
senate for having danced, and the former banished all the professed dancers
and comedians out of Rome, so incompatible with purity of manners was a
passion for dancing looked upon. This reflection leads us to form a judgment
of the extreme degeneracy of Herod's court, in which the mirth and jollity
of this feast was heightened by dancing. Salome, a daughter of Herodias by
her lawful husband, pleased Herod by her dancing, insomuch that he promised
her with the sacred bond of an oath, to grant her whatever she asked, though
it amounted to half of his dominions. From this instance St. Ambrose and
other fathers take occasion to show the dangerous consequences of a passion
for dancing, and the depravity from which it often takes its rise. Salome
having received the said ample promise made her by Herod, consulted with her
mother what to ask. Herodias was so entirely devoured by lust and ambition,
as willingly to forego every other consideration, that she might be at
liberty to gratify her passions, and remove him who stood in her way in the
pursuit of her criminal inclinations. She therefore instructed her daughter
to demand the death of John the Baptist, and her jealousy was so impatient
of the least delay, for fear the tyrant might relent if he had time to enter
into himself, that she persuaded the young damsel to make it a part of her
petition that the head of the prisoner should be forthwith brought to her in
a dish. This strange request startled the tyrant himself, and caused a damp
upon his spirits. He, however, assented, though with reluctance, as men
often feel a cruel sting of remorse, and suffer the qualms of a disturbed
conscience flying in their face and condemning them, whilst they are drawn
into sin by the tyranny of a vicious habit, or some violent passion. We
cannot be surprised that Herod should be concerned at so extravagant a
petition. The very mention of such a thing by a lady, in the midst of a
feast and solemn rejoicing, was enough to shock even a man of uncommon
barbarity.
The evangelist also informs us that Herod had conceived a good
opinion of the Baptist as a just and holy man; also, that he feared the
resentment of the people, who held the man of God in the highest veneration
and esteem. Moreover, it was a constant rule or custom, that neither the
prince's birthday, nor the mirth of a public assembly and banquet, was to be
stained with the condemnation or execution of any criminal whatever; only
favors and pardons were to be granted on such occasions. Flaminius, a Roman
general, was expelled the senate by the censors for having given an order
for beheading a criminal whilst he was at a banquet. Nevertheless, the weak
tyrant, overcome by his passion, and by a fond complaisance, was deaf to the
voice of his own conscience, and to every other consideration; and studied,
by foolish pretense, to excuse a crime which they could only serve to
exaggerate. He alleged a conscience of his oath; though if it be one sin to
take a wicked oath, it is another to keep it; for no oath can be a bond of
iniquity, nor can any one oblige himself to do what God forbids. The tyrant
also urged his respect for the company, and his fear of giving them scandal
by a perjury. But how easy would true virtue and courage have justified the
innocent man to the satisfaction of all persons whom passion did not blind,
and have shown the inhumanity of an execution which could not fail to damp
the joy of the meeting, and give offense to all who were not interested in
the plot! But the tyrant, without giving the saint a hearing, or allowing
him so much as the formality of a trial, sent a soldier of his guard to
behead him in prison, with an order to bring his head in a charger, and
present it to Salome. This being executed, the damsel was not afraid to take
that present into her hands, and deliver it to her mother. St. Jerom
relates, that the furious Herodias made it her inhuman pastime to prick the
sacred tongue with a bodkin as Fulvia had done Cicero's. Thus died the great
forerunner of our blessed Savior, about two years and three months after his
entrance upon his public ministry about the time of the Paschal solemnity, a
year before the death of our blessed Redeemer.
Josephus, though a Jew, gives a remarkable testimony to the
innocence and admirable sanctity of John, and says, "He was indeed a man
endued with all virtue, who exhorted the Jews to the practice of justice
towards men, and piety towards God; and also to baptism, preaching that they
would become acceptable to God, if they renounced their sins, and to the
cleanness of their bodies added purity of soul." This historian adds, that
the Jews ascribed to the murder of John the misfortunes into which Herod
fell. For his army was soon after cut to pieces by Aretas, king of Arabia
Petraea, who, in revenge for the affront offered his daughter invaded his
territories, and conquered the castle of Macherus. When Caligula afterward
conferred on Agrippa the title of king of Judaea, the ambitious Herodias
being racked with envy, prevailed with Herod Antipas to repair to Rome, in
order to request like favor of the emperor. But Caligula had received a bad
impression against him, being informed by Agrippa that he was making a
league with the Parthians, and was provided with arms for seventy thousand
men. Whereupon instead of granting him a crown, he deprived him of his
tetrarchate, confiscated his goods, and banished him and Herodias to Lyons
in Gaul, in the thirty-eighth year of the Christian era, about four years
after Christ had appeared before him at Jerusalem, and been treated by him
as a mock king. Herod and Herodias died in great misery, as Josephus assures
us, probably at Lyons, though some moderns say they traveled into Spain.
What Nicephorus Calixti and other modern Greeks tell us, is not supported by
any ancient voucher, that Salome going over the ice in winter, the ice broke
and let her in up to the head, which by the meeting of the ice was severed
from her body.
The Baptist's disciples came and took away his body, which they
honorably interred. Rufinus and Theodoret inform us that in the reign of
Julian the Apostate, the pagans broke open the tomb of St. John the Baptist,
which was at Sebaste or Samaria and burnt part of his sacred bones, some
part being saved by the Christians. These were sent to St. Athanasius at
Alexandria. Some time after, in 396, Theodosius built a great church in that
city, in honor of the Baptist, upon the spot where the temple of Serapis had
formerly stood, and these holy relics were deposited in it, as Theophanes
testifies. But a distribution of some portions was made to certain other
churches and the great Theodoret obtained a share for his church at Cyrus,
and relates, that he and his diocese had received from God several
miraculous favors, through the intercession of this glorious saint. The
Baptist's head was discovered at Emisa in Syria, in the year 453, and was
kept with honor in the great church of that city; till, about the year 800,
this precious relic was conveyed to Constantinople, that it might not be
sacrilegiously insulted by the Saracens. When that city was taken by the
French in 1204, Wallo de Sarton, a canon of Amiens, brought part of this
head, that is, all the face, except the lower jaw, into France, and bestowed
it on his own church, where it is preserved to this day. Part of the head of
the Baptist is said to be kept in St. Sylvester's church, in Campo Marzo at
Rome; though Sirmond thinks this to be the head of St. John the martyr of
Rome. Pope Clement VIII, to remove all reasonable doubt about the relic of
this saint, procured a small part of the head that is kept at Amiens, for
St. Sylvester's church.
This glorious saint was a martyr, a virgin, a doctor, a prophet,
and more than a prophet. He was declared by Christ himself to be greater
than all the saints of the old law, the greatest of all that had been born
of women. All the high graces with which he was favored, sprang from his
humility; in this all his other virtues were founded. If we desire to form
ourselves upon so great a model, we must above all things, labor to lay the
same deep foundation. We must never cease to purge our souls more and more
perfectly from all leaven of pride, by earnestly begging this grace of God,
by studying with this saint truly to know ourselves, and by exercising
continual acts of sincere humility. The meditation of our own nothingness
and wretchedness will help to inspire us with this saving knowledge; and
repeated humiliations will ground and improve our souls in a feeling sense
of our miseries, and a sincere contempt of ourselves.
---------------
The above is from "Butler's Lives of the Saints on CD-ROM" (Harmony Media
Inc.)
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