THE AUTHENTIC WITNESS
From the writings of Fr Jean Danielou
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As John the Baptist was the Lord’s precursor even before his birth, so
also he was the forerunner of Christ’s public life. After the desert period came
the crowning moment of a life spent preparing the way for Christ. There was a
man named John sent by God, who came as a witness to testify to the light,
so that through him all might believe.
This text shows that the essential mission of John the Baptist was to bear
witness to the light, to point to Jesus. His was a pre-eminent role in the
preparation for the coming of Christ and of Christ’s own work. John it was who
paved the way for our Lord’s public life and teaching by predisposing the souls
of his hearers to receive it. One might say he was an educator of souls; his task
was…to do the preliminary chiseling that would make them more receptive to
Christ’s message. Our Lord’s teaching would have been too strong for souls not
previously prepared for it. They needed some schooling in advance. Their
interests had to be re-directed; it was necessary to wean them from worldly
habits and to arouse a spiritual dissatisfaction in their hearts.
That was John the Baptist’s assignment. Sent to people utterly heedless
of the things of God, it was his task to awaken in them sufficient concern to
disturb their subtle ways and to stir up their initial goodwill, so that they might
be capable of understanding Christ.
John the Baptist thus joins the long succession of those who have taken
part in the work of preparing for the Lord’s coming, those who, like John, were
withdrawn by God from the things of this world and mysteriously admitted to
the divine plans, in order that they might blaze the way for God among the
people. John in his turn will move among his contemporaries to mark out the
Lord’s way, smoothing paths and leveling hills. But for such a mission he must
from the outset be possessed by the Lord in the depths of his being, since it is
a hard furrow he will have to plow. The people of the Baptist’s generation were
absorbed in the same pursuits as the people of our own day. St. Luke describes
them in a memorable passage: the soldiers engaged in violence and false
charges, and the tax collectors in demanding more than their due.
Such is human nature. It was so in the time of John, and it is the same
today. Preoccupied with worldly affairs, people are completely heedless of
God. As one goes here and there in the world it is very painful to experience
the utter indifference of the rank and file. To shake the world out of this [kind
of] vision, who can rouse the masses from their inertia? They have to be
authentic witnesses. A witness is someone who has first been granted an inner
vision; God has introduced him to the divine viewpoint so that he can pass on
what he has seen to others.
So it was with John the Baptist. God first admitted him to his own
council, revealing to him the mystery of the divine plan, drawing him into the
desert to share with him his own joy. Then came the essential part of his
vocation: he was a witness to Christ; that is to say, he was the one who pointed
out Christ to the people
1 Le mystère de l’Avent, Paris 1948, pp. 82-84; reprinted in Meditations on the Sunday Gospels: Year A; introduced
and edited by John E. Rotelle, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995, pp. 18-19.3