Preached on Sunday 25th June 2023, kept as the Patronal Festival of the Minster Church of St John the Baptist.
Luke 1.57-66,80
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I wonder if you can tell me what you will be
doing exactly six months from today, to the minute?
I’ll give you a clue. It will be Christmas
Day!
So, I hope your answer is that you’ll be in
church, and if not, I hope it is because you will have been to the Midnight
Mass!
Why, you might ask, is he talking about
Christmas Day today, in the very middle of summer and on our Patronal Festival?
It is because both today and Christmas Day
centre on a birth; two intimately linked births.
On Christmas Day the birth of Our Lord and
Saviour, Jesus Christ; today the birth of his cousin and the one who prepared
the world for Christ’s first coming, John the Baptist, patron saint of this
church.
Two miraculous births.
John’s mother, Elizabeth, was past
childbearing age, yet still she was blessed with the gift of a child.
Jesus’ mother, Mary, was a very young woman
not married, not ‘sexually active’, as we might say, yet she too became a
mother.
Both births, heralded by the Archangel
Gabriel, are of God and integral to our salvation.
John came to prepare the way of the Lord;
Jesus Christ, the Lord, came to save us from our sins by his life-giving death
and his resurrection.
From all we know of John in the gospels, he would
want our focus today, as always, to be on Christ, and rightly so.
His consistent message can be summed up like
this: ‘look away from me and behold Jesus Christ who is the Lamb of God who
takes away the sins of the world’.
That’s the message every Christian should
promote and live out.
So all we say of John actually only ever leads
us back to Christ.
In that regard John is like the other great
saint of the Incarnation, the Blessed Mother, Mary herself.
The honour and regard we give to both Mary
mother of the Lord, and to John, is always and only inasmuch as they lead and
point us to Christ.
*
As I have been pondering St John the Baptist
for today – and I think about him a lot – I was struck by something in the
Gospel of St John, John the Evangelist.
There is a really significant title that often
gets overlooked: John the Baptist identifies himself as the ‘friend of the
bridegroom’ (John 3.22).
Sometimes John comes across as harsh, austere
and without joy or celebration, but he is also a friend: friendship is always a
cherished relationship between two people.
Yes, John is a witness to Jesus, forerunner of
Jesus, the one who cries out in the wilderness – all those things but he is
also a friend: a relationship of joy and trust.
So, John is also a friend; specifically, the
‘friend of the bridegroom’.
*
I was officiating at a wedding yesterday, and
of course the best man, the friend of the bridegroom, had a particular role.
Nowadays the Best Man arranges the Stag do,
looks after the wedding rings, gives some Dutch courage to the groom, and makes
a speech at the reception and toasts the bridesmaids and the happy couple.
In first century Palestine the ‘friend of the
bridegroom’ was responsible for the equivalent things no doubt, but also for
arranging the match with the bride.
The friend of the Bridegroom was a sort of
fixer, as well as ensuring the wedding feast went well.
John the Baptist is the ‘friend of the
Bridegroom’, the Best Man.
This points us to something really important.
Marriage is one of the deep themes of the
Bible: arguably the whole of Scripture sees the relationship between God and
humanity in marital terms.
In the Old Testament Israel is spoken of as
the bride of God (Isaiah 62.4-5; Jeremiah 2.2; Ezekiel 16.8; 23.4; Hosea
2.19-20).
In the Gospels the first of Jesus’ signs is
set at the heart of a marriage, at Cana in Galilee (John 2.1-11).
The sign at Cana is of the refreshed
relationship of God and his people, like bridegroom and bride, a marriage with
the True Bridegroom present.
St Paul reflects deeply on this in his letter
to the Ephesians saying that the marriage of a man and a woman, bridegroom and
bride, prefigures and echoes the marriage of Christ, the bridegroom, and the
Church, his bride, so that Christ and the Church are one flesh, just as husband
and wife mystically become one flesh in marriage: as Paul says, ‘this mystery
is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church’
(Ephesians 5.32, cf also vv.22-33).
What Cana shows is that Jesus Christ brings
transformation to renew the relationship between humanity and divinity through
the marriage sign, reconciling two different bodies as one flesh, which is why
we can say we are one body in Christ.
And John is the ‘friend of the bridegroom’:
the one prepares the way for the union of divinity and humanity in the
Incarnation; the marriage of Christ, the Bridegroom, and his Bride, the Church;
of Christ offering to you in his body for you to receive in the Eucharist:
‘though we are many we are one Body, because we all share in the one bread’ (1
Corinthians 10.17).
We celebrate the birth of our patron saint
today, John the Baptist; in sixth months’ time we celebrate the birth of the
Saviour.
In the spirit of the ‘friend of the
bridegroom’ may we, every day, rejoice in our being united with Christ in
baptism.
The wedding at Cana points to a banquet, the
banquet the Eucharist anticipates: in the words of the Revelation to John, ‘blessed
are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19.9)
May each one of us, for better for worse; for
richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; love and cherish Christ the
Bridegroom till death do us unite in heaven when we are born to eternal life
with him. Amen.
