THE YEAR OF GRACE IN TODAYS READINGS

Reflection on the Gospel – Birth of John the Baptist
Veronica Lawson RSM

Luke 1:5-17 (Vigil); Luke 1:57-66, 80 (Daytime)

What are you doing for the Year of Grace? I have heard that question time and again over the past few weeks. The response of a young woman friend stays with me: “I plan to be gracious all the time, even in the face of hostility, or perhaps especially in the face of hostility.” Her whole being spoke to me of graciousness. She plans to live in the spirit of today’s feast, the feast of the birth of a herald of grace.

The reading for the vigil tells of the angelic announcement of the birth of John the Baptist.  The gospel writer locates John in relation to time and place and lineage. He is born in the days of Herod of Judea. Both parents are named. Both are of priestly descent. Both are ‘righteous’ before God. They are elderly and childless. Their childless state is attributed to Elizabeth’s barrenness, as one might expect in a pre-scientific age.

Zechariah is performing his priestly service in the Jerusalem Temple when the angel appears to him and announces that his ‘prayer has been heard’. Elizabeth is to bear a son whose birth will bring ‘joy’ and ‘gladness’, not only to his parents, but to ‘many’. This child, who is to be named ‘John’, will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth. His mission is to ‘turn’ people to God and to engender in them a state of preparedness. The urgency of his mission is conveyed by the reiteration of the notion of ‘make ready’ and ‘prepare’.

John’s name receives some prominence in the Lukan account of the announcement of birth and of the events following his birth. Contrary to the expectations of family and friends, this child is not to be named after his father. He is to have the name that God’s messenger has announced to Zechariah. The Hebrew form of John, from which the Greek of the gospel is derived, means literally ‘God [YHWH] has graced’ or ‘God [YHWH] has given grace’. Elizabeth will insist that the child is to be called ‘John’. Her intervention is juxtaposed with the narrator’s comment about God’s ‘great mercy’ towards her in giving her this child. Zechariah finds his lost voice at this moment and uses it to confirm Elizabeth’s word, implicitly demonstrating the grace of God at work in her.

God’s grace and mercy towards Jerusalem and its people are linked in Israel’s psalms: ‘You will rise up and have mercy on Zion, for it is time to grace it’ (Ps 102:13). John’s birth signals the outpouring of God’s grace and mercy on God’s people. ‘What then will this child be?’ is the people’s question concerning John. We have the benefit of an answer to that question from the lips of the Lukan Jesus:  ‘A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet (Luke 7:26).”