Feast day: June 24

Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Solemnity · 1st century

Patron of Baptism, converts, tailors

The forerunner of Christ — the only saint besides Mary whose birth the Church celebrates with a solemnity.

John was born to the aged priest Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, a kinswoman of the Virgin Mary, about six months before the birth of Jesus — his conception and naming announced by the angel Gabriel. When the newly pregnant Mary came to visit, the unborn John, the Gospel says, leaped for joy in his mother's womb at the nearness of the Lord. The Church marks his birth on June 24, one of the very few birthdays it celebrates.

He grew up to live in the wilderness of Judea, clothed in camel's hair and eating locusts and wild honey, and there the word of God came to him. He began to preach a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and crowds streamed out to the Jordan to be baptized — soldiers, tax collectors, and Pharisees alike — as he warned them to bear fruit worthy of repentance and prepared the way for one greater than himself.

When Jesus came to him at the Jordan, John baptized him and saw the Spirit descend, and he pointed his own disciples toward him with the words, 'Behold, the Lamb of God.' Of his role he said simply, 'He must increase, but I must decrease' — the precursor content to fade once the Lord had come. Jesus said of him that among those born of women none was greater.

His fearless preaching was his undoing: he rebuked King Herod for unlawfully taking his brother's wife, and was imprisoned and at last beheaded at the whim of a dancing girl's request. The forerunner in birth, in preaching, and in death, John the Baptist is honored as the last and greatest of the prophets, the bridge between the Old Covenant and the New.

His birthday sits near the summer solstice as days shorten, Christ's near the winter solstice as days lengthen: 'He must increase; I must decrease,' built into the calendar.

“He must increase; I must decrease.”
— Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Image: Titian (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08486b.htm