Cookout!!! What a wonderful time we had . MANY Thanks to everyone who did the heavy lifting to get the environment set, the cooking, and putting together the wonderful baskets that were raffled off to support our Mission Trippers. And, boundless thanks to God for a picture perfect day!
This weekend we are up to our spatulas in Ordinary Time, BUT the calendar calls us to hear the Word and offer the Church’s prayers for the Solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist. Jesus and John are presented by the Scriptures as being in each other’s lives in a limited fashion, but with unlimited meaning! Luke records for us that John will leap for joy upon being in the Lord’s presence while each of them still is in the womb. In the world of Palestine, the roads each of these men trod in the pursuit of his own ministry would have criss-crossed more than once, but later in the Scriptural accounts we know that their great and significant meeting at the Jordan left John “wondering” even as he agreed to do as Jesus asked and baptized him.
But from the beginning of the Scriptural account of John’s life that we read and hear in our Gospel, the preparations God makes for John’s birth bear a certain resemblance to those made for the birth of Jesus. Human circumstances say this birth is impossible. A faith-filled man is called to ever deeper and stronger faith to believe in and trust the word from the Angel of the Lord. For, a birth, indeed, there will be! And a great, priestly service will be his!
Both John’s and Jesus’ lives are the unfolding fulfillments of prophecies in the Scriptures of Israel. John finds ultimate fulfillment in preparing the way of the Lord, in becoming the herald that calls God’s People and all people to embrace righteousness and so be made a people fit for the Lord. Jesus finds ultimate fulfillment in being the way, in revealing the righteousness we cannot attain on our own, in making us fit for God through his own cross and resurrection. John’s is the very human, fleeting call that might get our attention, might set us on a path of repentance and hope. Jesus’ is the human AND divine call which we hear for a lifetime to know the fullness of life!
Fr. Tom