Vigils Reading – 3rd Sunday Advent

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withdrawn by God from the things of this world and mysteriously admitted to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