THE PASSION OF JOHN THE BAPTIST – Memorial – Week 21 02

Prophetic consolation and desolation

(Jer 1:17-19; Ps 71; Mk 6:17-29)

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The late Fr. Andrew Britz OSB, former editor of the Prairie Messenger newspaper, was noted for his courageous editorials that addressed rather fearlessly and directly the key and often controversial issues of the day. After his death, a selection of his editorials was compiled into a book entitled, fittingly, Speaking Truth to Power.

The memorial today of the Passion of St. John the Baptist invites us to be prophetic, depend on God’s consolation and speak truth to power.

The spiritual journey involves two distinct inner movements – consolation and desolation. Once in a while we may have a powerful spiritual experience of the closeness of God called consolation. Those experiences are intended to carry us through the inevitable times of darkness and desolation, often the experience of the “apparent absence” of God in our lives.

The two prophets in the readings today each experienced consolation and desolation. Jeremiah ran into resistance to his message from the stubborn people of his time. That was his desolation. The Word of God, however, came to his assistance, strengthened him and formed him into a fortress of iron able to withstand and confront the religious establishment of his time which had sold out to the temptations of possessions, prestige and power. That consolation empowered him to stay faithful to his prophetic mission.

For his part, John the Baptist faced not so much resistance, but rather the resentment of King Herod, when he spoke truth to power and confronted Herod about, among other things, living with his brother’s wife. That was his desolation.

Like Jeremiah, John the Baptist had been strengthened by the consolations of God from his conception on. Surely his mother Elizabeth shared with him, as a child, the joy she felt when she was filled with the Holy Spirit and felt him leap for joy in her womb in the presence of Mary who was pregnant with Jesus.

Imagine the consolation John must have felt when he was chosen, not just to recognize Jesus as the true Lamb of God, but to also baptize him in the waters of the Jordan. Imagine how blessed he must have felt to hear the Father’s voice blessing Jesus, and to see the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus in the form of a dove.

Doves at the baptismal site on the Jordan

Surely these memories supported and sustained him in confronting Herod, and in his subsequent suffering in a small, dank and dark prison cell, even as he wondered if Jesus really was the messiah. Imagine how he must have felt to hear how Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah – the deaf hear, the lame walk, the blind see, the mute speak and the dead are raised to life! That response must have filled his heart with joy and the strength to lay down his life for his faith.

Our task is to also speak truth to the Herod’s of our day, those using power for personal, selfish purposes. Like Jeremiah and St John the Baptist, we are to confront injustice and work for justice in the spirit of the late Cardinal Bernadine’s seamless garment, beyond any single issue to include wherever unfair practices, oppression of the poor, maltreatment of God’s creation and lack for respect for all life is found. Like the prophet Micah, we are to act justly, love tenderly, walk humbly before our God.

When trials come, and when dark times of desolation threaten to overcome us in our struggle for justice, it is important for us to also remember the consolations of God that we have been given in the past, especially those insights and spiritual experiences stemming from the Word of God that so strengthened Jeremiah in his time of darkness.

I remember the consolations of God, or spiritual experiences, that were a gift to me on my thirty-day retreat in Spokane a few months before my ordination as a priest in 1974. One was a message through words that I heard within my head and not with my ears, that God’s grace was as fine as a spider’s thread – it was always with me – most often I don’t see it. Those moments still sustain me to this day – I can always lean on them to be reassured of the fidelity and love of God for me, even when God seems to be a “million miles away,” as one person put it.

The Documents of Vat II can be another source of strength for us, with its teaching that working for social justice is integral to the gospel and to our ministry.

The Eucharist today is the Word of God coming to us as it did to Jeremiah, and the reception of the very Body and Blood of Jesus is like the dove that descended on Jesus and that John the Baptist witnessed.

Let us pray that both will strengthen us to be prophetic, to seek the God of consolation, to lean on the consolations of God and to speak truth to power in our own way, within whatever manner of desolation we might face.