A Reflection for the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
Find today’s readings here.
Today’s readings remind me of a statue I saw in Ein Kerem, the traditional site of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. I encountered it during the last America Media pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2023, before the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent wars in Gaza and with Iran made it unsafe to travel there.
The statue depicts a visibly pregnant Elizabeth greeting Mary, whose hand is resting on her own womb, a subtle reminder of the traditional iconography of the Visitation that shows John and Jesus in utero as their mothers embrace.
The Gospel for today’s feast follows Luke’s account of the Visitation and Mary’s Magnificat. After Mary has “remained with her about three months,” Elizabeth gives birth to John the Baptist, whose nativity the church celebrates, on cue, six months before Christmas Eve.
This quick recounting compresses too much of what must have been a fraught and uncertain time for Elizabeth, her husband Zechariah, Mary and Joseph. Months of Zechariah’s silence, waiting for his tongue to be freed. Months of questions for Mary and for those who knew her back in Nazareth, waiting for her to return from her journey to Elizabeth. And all of this on top of the anxiety felt by any parents, especially first-time parents, awaiting the birth of a child.
Today’s first reading, from Isaiah, speaks to that anxiety, that hope and expectation of God being about to do something so that his “salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” But it also speaks—and I find this echoing in my own heart and prayer these days—to the way that hope and anxiety can be exhausting. “Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord, my recompense is with my God.”
Between those two poles, between the fruitlessness of relying solely on our own efforts and the faith that God’s justice and mercy will be vindicated, is where we must find the courage to cooperate with grace. In these days of uncertainty about the future of our own country, of the growing risk of war around the world, that hope seems all the more necessary but also more and more elusive.
Mary and Elizabeth met and embraced. Elizabeth felt the infant John leap for joy in her womb. From that embrace and that inner movement, she drew the strength to rejoice in John’s birth, and Zechariah in turn found the freedom to speak and bless God. Those who loved them rejoiced with them, and recognized that the hand of the Lord was at work in these events.
May we likewise be blessed, even in moments of anxiety and exhaustion, with encounters that strengthen our hope and trust in God, and lead us to the freedom, like John the Baptist, to announce the coming kingdom of God.
