This week's sermon in advance...

January 7th, 2007
The Synaxis of St. John the Forerunner
Homily


This Sunday marks the feast day, the synaxis of St. John the Forerunner, the last of the Old Testament prophets and the bridge from the old covenant to the new.

For Orthodox Christians the word “synaxis” simply refers to a gathering together of a group of people or the people of God gathered for liturgy. Thus we will have a synaxis of saints where a group such as the Saints of America or a group of martyrs are venerated together or a special day, like today, when the people of God gather together to collectively venerate a Saint.

Today we call to mind St. John the Forerunner, popularly known in the west as John the Baptist although he has no specific connection as founder or theologian to the group of Christians who identify themselves as “Baptists”. He is also not to be confused with St. John the Apostle.

He was, instead, a prophet identified by Jesus in Matthew 11 as the greatest human born of woman and the person who embodied the spirit and ministry of St. Elias thus confirming the word of the angel recorded in Luke chapter 1 who appeared to Zacharias while he served in the temple and predicted the future ministry of his yet unborn son; the announcement of the arrival of the Messiah as predicted by the prophet Malachi.

St. John may have been a Nazarite all of his life. The first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke records that the angel Gabriel who announced his mission also said he was not to touch anything made of grapes, which was one of the ascetic practices required of those took the vow of purity and dedication to God as found in the book of Numbers that identified one as a Nazarite. In addition Nazarites did not cut their hair or touch the dead. After St. John the most famous Nazarite of the Bible was Samson, the judge of Israel and legendary strongman.

St. John’s family was Priestly and his birth was, like Samuel’s, the product of a supernatural intervention by God as his mother Elizabeth was past the normal childbearing years. As the words used to identify family members in the New Testament do not have the same precision as those we use we are certain that St. John was related to Jesus through Zacharias and Elizabeth’s family ties to Mary but we are not sure of the precise details. It is likely that St. John and our Lord were cousins.

At some point in his life St. John left his family and went to the wilderness where he urged people to repent of their sins and be baptized to purify themselves in anticipation of Christ’s return. We know he had wide influence and was known not simply by the people but by the religious leaders of his time and the political rulers, especially Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great who feared his condemnation of his illegal marriage even as he respected his prophetic ministry. St. John also had disciples including St. Andrew and some even thought he was the Messiah although St. John vigorously denied it.

After the baptism of Christ, which we celebrated on Theophany, St. John’s ministry begins to fade away. Numbers of his disciples begin to follow Jesus and in the final year of Jesus ministry St. John is jailed and then executed. The man who was born six months before Jesus, his task being fulfilled, dies, according to some traditions, six months before our Lord’s crucifixion. His small group of disciples take away his remains and bury them. Various Christian groups and even followers of Islam claim to have relics of the Saint in their possession.

The details, though, of his life are significant only to the extent they capture the spirit and the life long focus of St. John. He himself understood his mission when he said of himself in respect to Jesus “He must increase and I must decrease…” In that he shows the deep desire of his heart for Christ and a profound sense of humility which allowed him to lay aside his own renown.

The life of St. John the Forerunner also reminds us of one of the central teachings of our Orthodox faith, namely that our lives are supposed to be in a continual process of being transformed with a goal of being so filled with Christ that the line of separation between Our Lord and us grows smaller with each passing day.

Like St. John the Forerunner we must decrease and Christ must increase. In an age where self-fulfillment is the be all and end all of existence this call to die to ourselves and live for God is starkly countercultural and often places us at a radical discontinuity with the world around us. Yet it’s also the source of human fulfillment at its deepest and most basic level.

Every day a new thing comes into our world promising to fulfill the need we have inside and very few of us ever get the irony that whatever else this new thing is it is most certainly the replacement for the last thing that made the same claim and failed, an endless line of broken whatevers extending back to the dawn of human history and the first piece of forbidden fruit which promised much but left the bitter taste of death in our mouths.

The whole world has the jaded, tired, look of a race that’s “been there done that” and still finds itself hungry and thirsty and needy and broken at its very core. Yet as hard as it may be sometimes to swim against the current the secret is still the same “He must increase and I must decrease…”

We struggle with this, of course, because we fear the end of ourselves even as we wish for something better. But as in our prayers, our worship, our acts of mercy, love, and justice we take small steps towards the light we also begin to understand in some small way that the reality of Christ in us is what makes us most alive, most real, and most human in the best sense of the word.

The world has changed in many ways since St. John, looking rough, ready, and very prophetic wandered the hills of the Holy Land. But that truth remains. Jesus must increase. I must decrease. And as this happens I will know life beyond the illusions of this world.