8 January: the Baptism of Jesus by the hand of the Baptist. A major feast for the Orthodox, I'm told—less observed among Catholics, or so it seems to me. Yet this year it became for me an occasion for new reflection.
The priest preaching spoke of John in an unusual way. This boy is the son of Elizabeth, that cousin to whom Mary hurries after the Angel's annunciation. This boy is that same child, barely conceived, who leaps in his mother's womb at Mary's arrival—in some sense, one of the first witnesses to the miracle of the Incarnation. This is the same child so often painted as a curly-haired, sweet, smiling figure beside Jesus and his mother.
This boy, son of an elderly priest, raised among the marble, gold, and incense of the temple, became a young man who abandoned everything. He rebelled against all that surrounded him. He dressed in skins and chose the desert as his refuge and place of witness. From there he denounced the hypocrisy and wickedness of the powerful. From there he called people to prepare the way for the Messiah who would come in justice and truth. And when Jesus heard that voice crying in the wilderness, he did not despise it. He wanted to know this strange prophet. He went to see and listen to him. He asked to be baptized according to this new rite. And then we know what happened to them both.
I had never thought of the Baptist as a rebel—as a son who turned away from the future his parents had lovingly and wisely imagined for him. Must Elizabeth and Zechariah have worried? Did they try to stop him, or did they understand and let him go toward so hard a destiny, so far beyond every rule and common sense? We know these feelings well. How often have we ourselves been forced to let a child choose their own path, against all our hopes and plans.
But there is something else to consider. Perhaps we too—parents, grandparents, teachers, believers, the respectable and rule-bound—should follow Christ's example. Why don't we go out, as he did, with courage to meet those who, by the accident of birth or by reasoned choice or by life's experiences, leave the old paths and walk new ones, refusing the schemes and rules we have always known? We might discover that far from all we have long held sacred and irreplaceable, these "different" ones who rebel against convention are driven, in ways we don't expect, by the same commitment that moves us. Pushed by a mysterious force, they bear witness—true, courageous witness—to the message of justice and love that Christ gave to every human being.
Pennablù, 2012