Vigils Reading

THE SUMMIT OF WAITING

By André Rétif

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John’s stay in the desert was simply a burning expectation of the Savior.

All the aspirations of the prophets and the just in Israel and the extremely

fervent desire of the remnant of the holy people found in him their concentrated

and almost explosive expression. Christ was certainly present to John in his

solitude. And so, when he saw Him with his eyes, his body did not quake. His

faith was so lively and enlightened that he thought his eyes of flesh had seen

Him previously.

“A happy life,” says St. John Chrysostom, “is to leave humans, seek the

company of angels, flee the cities and find Christ in solitude.” Can better words

be found to express at once both the focal point of his expectation and its

realization? To find Christ in renouncing and abandoning all. This chaste man

of faith had been the first to light his lamp and was like a person waiting. He was

going to be the first to hear the shout in the night: “Behold, the Bridegroom

comes!” This friend of the Bridegroom who gives his heart free rein, is the first

to leap with celestial joy when his Beloved approaches. He was, it has been said,

starving, but only for the One who was to come. Hence, he continues to be the

model of every Christian and every missionary, whom each dawn and each

sunset should find awaiting the return of the Son of Man anxiously, but without

agitation, joining in that expectation of the last things, which we know throbbed

in the hearts of the early Christians.

To John the outline of the Messiah, which became clearer as he prayed

and meditated on the sacred passages, was exceptionally real, tangible and

electrifying, and the whole world, contained in the Baptist’s soul, was sighing for

His presence far more ardently than the stag after living water.

We must not think that, because John the Baptist fled from the world, he

was insensible to the ardent longings of his times. Just as a landscape has to be

viewed from high above in order that one may appreciate its vast expanse, John

had to leave the world to understand it and discover its immense distress; for,

when viewed in God, things become extraordinarily clear and well defined.

John, preceding his captain, the Messiah, was the first to test his strength with

the devil and sense that the fate of a great number of souls depended on the

outcome of the conflict. John was the first to take upon himself responsibility

for the crowds whom he reached through the light of God without knowing

them, and to pronounce the cry of pity for the sheep without a shepherd. Was he

not already the shepherd of that immense flock that was to be led back to the

fold of God? Was he not an invisible and unknown shepherd who would be

imprisoned and decapitated in going to find his sheep?

John the Baptist is like all true contemplatives, monks and saints in being

eminently of his own times, which, however, he surpasses no matter what angle

we view him from. Together with Mary, whose expectation preceded his own

and was superior to it, he is the summit of the waiting for the Messiah, and he

resembles those peaks on which the sun is already shedding its faint red rays

when everywhere else night still reigns. If we are really to be men of our own

times, do we not have to free ourselves from them in order to discover through

God the whole of their inner meaning?