Isaiah 49:1-6
Acts 13:22-26
Luke 1:57-66

Bishop Untener's Homily

John the Baptist should be the patron saint of all of us whenever we do our best and things don't work out the way we wanted them to. Or... the patron saint of those whose whole life doesn't work out the way they wanted.

When the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah in the Temple and told him that he and Sarah would have a son, great things were foretold about this child: "He will be great in the sight of the Lord... He will be filled with the holy Spirit even from his mother's womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God."

And when John was born, great things were expected of him. In today's Gospel we just heard the reaction of the friends and neighbors: "Then fear came upon all their neighbors, and all these matters were discussed throughout the hill country of Judea. All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, 'What, then, will this child be?' For surely the hand of the Lord was with him."

When John grew up he was a fiery preacher, and apparently a very good one. Great crowds came out to hear him. He had great expectations, but nothing seemed to go right. Just when he was at his peak, he began to lose some of his closest disciples - he lost them to Jesus.

Then he started losing the crowds.

Now, this wasn't all bad. John had preached about and promoted Jesus as an up and coming fiery preacher, as one who was going to lead a great revolution. But then Jesus turns out to be a gentle, kind, forgiving person who ate and drank with sinners. Instead of gathering a mighty force for political change, Jesus was "wasting his time" curing the crippled, the lepers, the blind and the deaf.

Worst of all, John gets thrown in jail and is languishing there while Jesus continues to do nothing about the Roman occupation of Israel. You can sense John's frustration when, from jail, he sends some of his disciples to go and talk to Jesus. Listen to Luke's account of this:

John the Baptist summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask, "Are you the one who is to come or should we look for another?"  Jesus said to them in reply: "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me."

Then there was John's death. It seemed about as senseless as a drive-by shooting. He was killed late at night in prison... killed for the price of a dance, because of a small-time king who got drunk at a party and made a promise to a teenage girl who had done a dance he liked. The prison guard sent to kill John no doubt grumbled when he got the message because he had to get up late and go cut off the head of someone whose name he probably didn't even know.

That was John's life, and it doesn't appear to be the stuff of greatness. Yet, Jesus said that John was one of the greatest people who ever lived. John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord. That was his task and he accomplished it simply by doing his best according to the light that he had.

True greatness is to do what it is that God created us to do in the circumstances of our own life. We don't fully understand it this side of the grave, but after we die we will see it as God sees it. 

I close with a prayer that was written by Cardinal Newman 200 years ago:

 Originally given on June 24, 2001