ADVENT 2002 MEDITATIONS
Week 2: St. John the Forerunner
The Mother of God of Medjugorje: The Burning Bush
I have reached the inner visionThere are a handful of sainted figures that since their lives on earth, no one (outside of a mystical vision) has ever seen. Yet simply mention the name, and the imagination quickly provides a vivid picture: John the Evangelist, Sebastian, Agnes, Francis, Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc…John the Baptist.
and through Your spirit in me
I have heard Your wondrous secret.
Through Your mystic insight
You have caused a spring of knowledge
to well up within me, a fountain of power,
pouring forth living waters,
a flood of love
and of all-embracing wisdom
like the splendor of eternal light.From the Book of Hymns of the Dead Sea Scrolls
In the Eastern Church John is called the Forerunner and the Angelic Man, the one who exists almost exclusively on God alone. There is no other explanation for John but God. Though rough, ascetical and severely focused, he is not a fanatic. He is fiery but tender, assertive but humble. His whole life prepares him for a specific mission. When he is certain, after questioning the movements and hearsay about Jesus, that his own mission is fulfilled; he moves aside with grace. Sometimes he is called the last of the Prophets of the Old Convent, but his presence actually bleeds over that line and blends the old and new.
Personally I could paint, write and speak about John the Forerunner for a long time and still not "cover" him. In the 2000 years that people have been re-encountering John there is much that is contradictory in these meetings. I'm not going to try and settle these opinions by composing a neat or unified meditation. I'm going to let the contrasting pictures live, burn, and disturb us as true prophets always do. What I want to say clearly is that the prophets are not household pets, and resist being tamed. We see this endemic unrest in the Biblical prophets who openly voice the agony of their vocations, and simultaneously live for the reception and vocalization of the word that comes to them. In truth we fear them. The prophets "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
This icon is a rendition of the 16th century Masterpiece by the Greek iconographer, Michael Damaskinos. When I first saw a print of the original, I was drawn and repelled all at once. The ragged, spindly John, evoked a giant praying mantis, and the lovely anguished face evoked a beautiful skeletal angel. As with every icon I have tried to copy, the graceful composition is always deceptive. It may look simple, but the design of a great master is always difficult to reproduce. It is also a grace to enter the world or spirit of such a master. Damaskinos' portrayal of the Angelic Man is consistent with the Gospel accounts, and with most cinematic and painted images I have seen of the saint. He is always represented as a preternatural, half- animal creature. This allows you to see him more comfortably in the desert. The concept of the Angelic Man whose physical needs are minimal, also refers to his great gifts of spirit. This standard portrayal of John lived on, uncontested by me, until as a young art student at Boston University, I came across an image that added a complexity and unrest to my set image. I had taken the train to Washington D.C. to spend time in the National Gallery, and there met Andrea del Verrocchio's bust of John the Baptist from the 15th century.
He looks about seventeen, and very gentle. Not at all the crude creature that lived on insects. His mouth open in prophecy, could also be about to sing. The youth and tenderness in his face almost prohibit you from placing him in the midst of the abuse and violence of his calling. You want to protect him. Here's another youth in the midst of carnivores like the child martyrs Agnes, Tarcissius, Maria Goretti. Two other powerful images added to this side of John; Michelangelo Carravaggio's painting in Kansas City, and Ken Russell's radiantly pure John surrounded by the utter decandence of Herod Antipas court in the film "Salome". These works of art emphasizing an awe-fully vulnerable John opened me to receive Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich's visions of the young and mature John in her Life of Christ:
When in his sixth or seventh year, I saw him again led into the desert by his mother…To be true to the tension, I promised to sustain in this meditation, I am going to let another woman speak who has also spent much time with the Baptist. Joan Taylor is a contemporary scripture scholar, in her book The Immerser: John the Baptist Within Second Temple Judaism She stresses another side of John:
After going some distance into the ravine, Elizabeth took leave of John. She blessed him, pressed him to her heart, kissed him on the cheeks and forehead, and turned away, looking back at him as she retracted her steps, weeping. But the boy appeared wholly unconcerned, and quietly walked on deeper into to ravine. I followed the child with a feeling of uneasiness at his going so far from his mother, and fearing that he would not be able to find is way home again. But just then, a voice said to me, "Be not uneasy. The child knows well what he is about." I went with him and, in several visions, saw his whole after life in the desert. He often told me himself how he denied himself in every way and mortified his senses, his understanding becoming clearer and clearer, learning in an unexplainable way something from everything around him. I saw him when a child playing with flowers and animals… Both here and afterward in other places, I often saw by him radiant figures, angels, with whom he treated fearlessly and confidently, though most reverently. They appeared to be teaching him, directing his attention to different things. He had fastened a piece of wood to his staff, thus giving it the form of a cross, also a strip of broad grass, or bark, or leaves like a little flag. He often played with it, waving it here and there. While he lived in this part of the desert…
I also saw him drawing forth from holes in the trees and picking out of moss on the ground lumps of some brownish-looking stuff, which he ate. I think it was wild honey, for it was very plentiful there. The skin that he had brought with him from home, he now wore around his loins, and over his shoulders hung a brown, shaggy cover, which he had woven himself. There were in the desert wool-bearing animals, which ran tamely around John, and camels with long hair on their neck. They stood patiently and allowed him to pull it out. I saw him twisting the hair into cords and weaving from them that covering which he wore hanging around him when he appeared among men and baptized.
I saw him in continual and familiar communication with angels, by whom he was instructed. He slept upon the hard rock and under the open sky, ran over rough stones through thorns and briers, disciplined himself with thistles, wore himself out working on trees and stones, and lay prostrate in prayer and contemplation. He leveled roads, made little bridges, and changed the sand with a reed, kneeling and standing motionless in ecstasy, or praying with outstretched arms. His penance and mortification became more and more severe, his prayer longer and more fervent. He saw the Savior only three times face to face with his bodily eyes. But Jesus was with him in spirit; and John, who was constantly in the prophetic state, saw in spirit the actions of Jesus…I saw John when full grown. He was a powerful, earnest man. He was standing by a dry well in the desert, and appeared to be in prayer. A light hovered over him like a cloud, and it seemed to me as if it came from on high, from the water above the earth. Then a light, shining stream fell over him into the basin below. While gazing on this torrent, I saw John no longer at the edge of the basin; he was in it, the shining water flowing over him, and the basin filled by the sparkling stream. Then again, I saw him, as at first, standing on the basin's edge; but I did not see him out of it, nor coming out. I think that the whole was perhaps a vision, which John himself had had, and by which he was instructed to begin to baptize; or it may have been a spiritual baptism bestowed upon him in vision
Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich
1774-1824
… A gathering of people in the wilderness at the Jordan near Jericho, a call to renewed purity and obedience to the Law, together with eschatological language would collectively have been considered by some elements in society to be anti-Roman and would therefore have fueled attitudes that were part of a revolutionary Zeitgeist. If John was hailed as a prophet, then there would have been even more reason for Antipas to feel worried. A prophet who predicted the end was hardly someone the tetrarch wanted on his back doorstep…it may be worth mentioning one further point, namely, that John was probably not completely otherworldly and naïve in his outlook. Innocence may be used as a point in favor of viewing John as a nonpolitical figure who went lamb-like to his own slaughter, but it does not quite ring true. In a world where politics and religion were so closely interwoven, the wilderness was not an escape from the religious and political realities of Jerusalem. The interest of the documents, found near Qumran, betray a deep involvement with the politics of the past, present, and future, despite the community's quietistic and seperatist lifestyle. It seems preferable to me, though this must remain a personal opinion, to think of John as very well aware of the implications of his message and of what the crowds coming to him were hoping for, and to credit him with an eye to contemporary events and figures. As we shall see, his criticism of Antipas has to be understood against the backdrop of the discontent and expectations of the crowds around him. He appears in our sources as literate and intelligent and a powerful figure able to command a huge following.In the scriptural accounts of all the prophets, what we call"social justice" is their main concern, and they connect injustice with idolatry and false religion. It is idolatry and the mimicking of other cultures, which lead over and over to the enslavement of God's chosen people. When they abandon the true God, true love of the neighbor, the alien, the poor… true values and adopt those of the surrounding cultures, they lose their identity, and easily fall prey to whatever "super power" which happens to be reigning at the time. The result is tyranny and death.
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On June 24, 1981 the Mother of God began appearing in the small village of Medjugorje, Bosnia. It was the feast of the Birth of John the Baptist. On June 26th she appeared again this time weeping, begging for prayers, and asking to be called the Queen of Peace. It was ten years to the day when the wars in Bosnia would begin. You rarely hear from the pilgrims who come back from Medjugorje that Mostar is only seventeen miles away. Mostar was hit harder than Sarejevo during the war; much of the city was destroyed. There were so many deaths that they had to convert the open parks into cemeteries. Several times they tried to bomb Medjugorje, they all failed.
This icon is part of a diptych (two panels) which was commissioned by one of the Frairs in Bosnia. The other panel is "Our Lady of Medjugorje: The Burning Bush". I believe the Mother of God is the prophet of the Second Advent or the New Advent as Pope John Paul II has proclaimed in his first encyclical, "Redemptor Hominis". Pehaps John Paul II is the "returning John the Evangelist; as John the Baptist was the returning Elijah?" Medjugorje is the "new Jordan" or the place where people can go to confess, experience a baptism of renewal, and leave as apostles of the New Advent. There is a tangible sense of the surrounding arms of the Mother of God there. Why Medjugorje? One explanation that has been offered is that the Croation people there, as well as the Frairs, have always remained faithful to Jesus Christ amidst persecution for centuries, and overwhelming pressure to become secular. Yet when the young visionaries asked the Mother of God "who is the holiest person in the village"…she pointed to a Muslim woman and said further, that all religions are from God and you are not a Christian if you don't respect other true religions. John the Baptist was willing to baptize anyone with a humble interior disposition, who came to him in need. He took his ministry away from the Temple,and out into the wilderness:
As we have seen, in Isaiah 1:12-15, God is described as saying that Temple worship is futile as are sacrifices, prayers, and festivals. For God, is not pleased with His people because their "hands are full of blood."…In Matthew 3:11 John states, "I immerse you in water for repentance." If one wanted to distinguish John's immersion from any other type of immersion, one would need to link it with the reason it was necessary: repentance…repentance was for or towards inward cleansing… the process cannot go back to front. John's immersion was not primary (or initiatory), as though one were accounted righteous afterwards. This notion was precisely what he rejected outright…John immersed after righteousness had been attained."I'd like to end this meditation by mentioning my favorite image of John. Of all the sculpted, painted and written pictures of John, I find the Prologue of John the Evangelist, and the following words of the first chapter, are still the most powerful for me. I can remember the sonorous, hypnotic reading of the Prologue at the end of Mass when I was an altar boy;at the mention of "In principio erat verbum…" I would "go out." These words of the Evangelist speak the new Genesis, and create it within you at the same time. It is as if you can experience time, or actually no time, as God lives it. The Word who "was/is/ and is to come" is alive and John the Forerunner is the messenger.
Joan Taylor
Let us end with the words of Augustine:
"Now there are many things that can be said of John the Baptist, but let me sum it up in a nutshell,
He must increase,
I must decrease.
William Hart McNichols
November 2002
- Other Icons by Fr. William McNichols
- Information about Fr. William McNichols and his Icons
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Page Last Updated: October 21, 2003
