Today, we celebrate the nativity of St. John the Forerunner, born miraculously to the barren Elizabeth and the righteous Zechariah, as we hear in today’s Gospel. The prophets foretold his coming before the Messiah (the Christ) to prepare the people to receive salvation. Isaiah wrote that he would be: “the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘prepare the way of the Lord…’” (Is. 40:3), as did the Prophet Malachi as well.
St. John is declared by Christ to be a second Elijah, the greatest of the prophets of the Lord in the Old Testament who declared the truth of God in an age of idolatry and hedonism. St. John is, in this sense, the last of the Old Testament prophets, and like many of his forebears among the prophets of the Old Testament, he too was beheaded for his testimony to the truth.
Prophets, confessors of the truth in every age, often are killed because they convict others just by their words, their witness, of how far the culture and its people are from God, from life, salvation. Saints hold a mirror up to the people. Many prefer to smash the mirror rather than to confront and change the ugliness and death of soul they see reflected back to them and so they put the Saint to death. So it was with the prophets. So it was with St. John.
The Forerunner did not fear death at the hands of sinful men. He feared God more than he feared man. Fearlessly, he proclaimed the truth of God, the way of God, the way of life, calling all people to the baptism of repentance in the waters of the Jordan, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2). In this sense, St. John is the last evangelist of the Old Covenant and the first evangelist of the New Covenant. He proclaims the way of salvation, which leads alone through Christ to the Father. Just as we are taught by the Church to fast before a Great Feast, always before we receive the Eucharist, so too it was necessary that St. John came to prepare the people for their Savior through his call to repentance.
To repent, (in Greek, metanoia) means to turn from the way we are going in our self-will and sin away from God and to turn back to God, back to His life and will. He alone is Life—He’s the Author and Giver of Life, the One who created all life in the first place. Christ God as the Word (Logos) of God is also the sustainer of all life—in Him alone is eternal life, which means life with Him. Thus Jesus declares, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by Me” (John 14:6).
St. John’s calling to repentance from sin is real and as relevant in our own day as it was in his day. He was calling people to repentance so that they could receive Messiah in his first coming. Today we repent to receive Christ and to ready ourselves for death and Christ’s Second Coming. St. Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle from Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death.” God does not desire our destruction. He did not create us as “objects of wrath” as some think, but rather, as objects of His love. God’s great condescension to take on human nature and become one of His own creation cannot be understood in any other way. It is the gift of Himself for the life of the world.
Rather, the wages of sin is death because sin is the willing rejection of life, the life of God, the Giver of Life, the Sustainer of Life, Eternal Life itself. There is no life apart from God.
I think many Orthodox are confused about this point today because so many have in subtle ways bought into the latest theories of evolution and humanism. God is not some remote, nebulous initiator who stands indifferently by as nature takes over. God is intricately involved in His creation from its inception to our own day. This truth is imparted to us in the Book of Genesis but also seen in the Incarnation of that very Word through Whom creation was spoken into being at the beginning of time—whenever that was. The intricacies of creation and the order seen throughout the creation and indeed throughout the universe as we discover more of it, are a testimony to the Creator and Orderer and make a farce of those so committed to their atheistic religion, which is so dependent on randomness and absence of God.
When we learn of the miracles of life, the intricacies of creation and the universe itself, it should cause a well-spring of gratitude and wonder to stir in us. Here too, we should see God’s love and desire for us. The other half of Romans 6:23 reminds us that while the wages of sin is death, “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We follow the call of St. John the Forerunner and repent from sin and death to embrace God and the life that is only in Him who created us in His image and likeness and desires to grant us eternal communion with Him. Such is His great love and mercy for us.
Believing in Him is eternal life just as the Lord proclaims in this all-familiar verse, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should have eternal life” (John 3:16). Belief in Him cannot be just ‘head-knowledge’, for “even the demons believe and shutter” Jms. 2:19). Rather, belief entails relationship, communion, koinonia, as we declare it in the Church, with the living God—not on our terms, but as recipients and inheritors of the faith “once delivered to the Saints” (Jude 1:3). For this reason, Christ declares that unless we are baptized, and unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood in the Eucharist, we cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. It is to this truth that St. John the Forerunner always directs us.
The Good News of salvation is that God desires all to come to the knowledge and love of Him. He says to all, “come and see,” “taste and see that the Lord is good.” All of us are called to repentance and all of us, likewise, through repentance, turning from our way, our will, to God’s way, God’s will, have the opportunity to humble ourselves, and learn what it means to follow Christ, to become a true believer as we live out our baptism day by day, struggling and striving to continue to die to the old man and live to the new.
The calling begins with repentance, openness to be changed, deified. May we, like St. John the Forerunner, fear God more than we fear men, and be willing to love God to such an extent that we through our witness, our words, and our deeds, glorify and openly proclaim our faith in our Lord and God Jesus Christ. “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!”
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 24 June 2018
Nativity of St. John the Forerunner
Epistle: Rom. 6:18-23; Romans 13:11-14:4 (Forerunner)
Gospel: Matt. 8:5-13; Luke 1:1-25, 57-68, 76, 80 (Forerunner)
