29th August ~ The Beheading of St John the Baptist

Whilst he respected him as a saint he hated him as a censor, and felt a violent struggle between his veneration for the sanctity of the prophet and the reproach of his own conduct.

John the Baptist, the preparation of whom for his unique office of forerunner of the Messias has already been referred to on the feast of his birthday (June 24), began to fulfil it in the desert of Judaea, upon the banks of the Jordan, towards Jericho. Clothed in skins, he announced to all men the obligation of washing away their sins with the tears of sincere penitence, and proclaimed the Messias, who was about to make his appearance among them. He exhorted all to charity and to a reformation of their lives, and those who came to him in these dispositions he baptized in the river. The Jews practised religious washings of the body as legal purifications, but no baptism before this of John had so great and mystical a signification. It chiefly represented the manner in which the souls of men must be cleansed from all sin to be made partakers of Christ’s spiritual kingdom, and it was an emblem of the interior effects of sincere repentance; a type of that sacrament of baptism which was to come with our Lord. So noteworthy was this rite in St John’s ministrations that it earned for him even in his own life the name of “the Baptist”, i.e. the baptizer. When he had already preached and baptized for some time our Redeemer went from Nazareth and presented Himself among the others to be baptized by him. The Baptist knew Him by a divine revelation and at first excused himself, but at length acquiesced out of obedience. The Saviour of sinners was pleased to be baptized among sinners, not to be cleansed himself but to sanctify the waters, says St Ambrose, that is, to give them the virtue to cleanse away the sins of men.

The solemn admonitions of the Baptist, added to his sanctity and the marks of his divine commission, gained for him veneration and authority among the Jews, and some began to look upon him as the Messias himself. But he declared that he only baptized sinners with water to confirm them in repentance and a new life: that there was One ready to appear among them who would baptize them with the Holy Ghost, and who so far exceeded him in power and excellence that he was not worthy to untie His shoes. Nevertheless, so strong was the impression which the preaching and behaviour of John made upon the minds of the Jews that they sent priests and levites from Jerusalem to inquire of him if he were not the Christ. And St John “confessed, and did not deny; and he confessed, I am not the Christ”, neither Elias, nor a prophet. He was indeed Elias in spirit, being the herald of the Son of God, and excelled in dignity the ancient Elias, who was a type of John. He was likewise a prophet, and more than a prophet, it being his office, not to foretell Christ at a distance, but to point Him out present among men. So, because he was not Elias in person, nor a prophet in the strict sense of the word, he answers “No” to these questions and calls himself “the voice of one crying in the wilderness”; he will not have men have the least regard for him, but turns their attention to the summons which God has sent them by his mouth. The Baptist proclaimed Jesus to be the Messias at His baptism; and, the day after the Jews consulted him from Jerusalem, seeing Him come towards him, he called Him, “the Lamb of God”. Like an angel of the Lord “he was neither moved by blessing nor cursing”, having only God and His will in view. He preached not himself, but Christ; and Christ declared John to be greater than all the saints of the old law, the greatest that had been born of woman.

Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee, had put away his wife and was living with Herodias, who was both his niece and the wife of his half-brother Philip. St John Baptist boldly reprehended the tetrarch and his accomplice for so scandalous a crime, and told him, “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife”. Herod feared and reverenced John, knowing him to be a holy man, but he was highly offended at the liberty which the preacher took. Whilst he respected him as a saint he hated him as a censor, and felt a violent struggle between his veneration for the sanctity of the prophet and the reproach of his own conduct. His anger got the better of him and was nourished by the clamour and artifices of Herodias. Herod, to content her, and perhaps somewhat because he feared John’s influence over the people, cast the saint into prison, in the fortress of Machaerus, near the Dead Sea; and our Lord during the time of his imprisonment spoke of him, saying, “What went you out to see? A prophet? Yea, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee. Amen I say to you, amongst those that are born of women there is not a greater than John the Baptist.”

Herodias never ceased to endeavour to exasperate Herod against John and to seek an opportunity for his destruction. Her chance at length came when Herod on his birthday gave a feast to the chief men of Galilee. At this entertainment Salome, a daughter of Herodias by her lawful husband, pleased Herod by her dancing so much that he promised her with an oath to grant her whatever she asked though it amounted to half his dominions. Herodias thereupon told her daughter to demand the death of John the Baptist and, for fear the tyrant might relent if he had time to think it over, instructed the girl to add that the head of the prisoner should be forthwith brought to her in a dish. This strange request startled Herod; as Alban Butler says, “The very mention of such a thing by a lady, in the midst of a feast and solemn rejoicing, was enough to shock even a man of uncommon barbarity”. But because of his oath, a double sin, rashly taken and criminally kept, as St Augustine says, he would not refuse the request. Without so much as the formality of a trial he sent a soldier to behead John in prison, with an order to bring his head in a dish and present it to Salome. This being done, the girl was not afraid to take that present into her hands, and deliver it to her mother. Thus died the great forerunner of our blessed Saviour, the greatest prophet “amongst those that are born of women”. His disciples so soon as they heard of his death came and took his body and laid it in a tomb, and came and told Jesus. “Of which when Jesus had heard, He retired… into a desert place apart”. Josephus, in his Jewish Antiquities, gives remarkable testimony to the sanctity of John, and says, “He was indeed a man endued with all virtue, who exhorted the Jews to the practice of justice towards men and piety towards God; and also to baptism, preaching that they would become acceptable to God if they renounced their sins and to the cleanness of their bodies added purity of soul”. He adds that the Jews ascribed to the murder of John the misfortunes into which Herod fell.

Although today’s feast does not seem to have been adopted in Rome until a comparatively late period, we can trace it at an early date in other parts of the Western church. We find it mentioned not only in the “Martyrology of Jerome” and in the Gelasian sacramentaries of both types, but it occurs in the Liber comicus of Toledo belonging to the middle of the seventh century. Moreover, either then or even sooner it had probably established itself firmly at Monte Cassino; and indeed we may assume that its observance was introduced into England from Naples as early as 668. As we find this special feast, as distinct from that of the Birthday of the Baptist, kept on the same day (August 29) in the synaxaries of Constantinople, it is quite likely that it was of Palestinian origin. In the Hieronymianum it is associated with a commemoration of the prophet Eliseus, the link being that both Eliseus and St John Baptist were believed in St Jerome’s time to have been buried at Sebaste, a day’s journey from Jerusalem. Now the gospel-book of Würzburg, dating from about 700, has an entry “Depositio Helisei et sancti Johannis Baptistae”, and there are other gospel-books which couple the two in the same way.

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints