Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

 Lectionary: 587

It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you with regard to the things that have now been announced to you
by those who preached the Good News to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels longed to look. (1 Peter 1:8-12) 

As the Church continued to reflect upon the Pascal Miracle of the Lord's life, death, and resurrection, Saint Peter remembered the long history of God speaking to his people through many prophets, sages, and teachers. Those blessed souls saw and heard promises of the Good News which would be announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary and by John the Baptist to the Jewish people. 

The Letter to the Hebrews, in chapter 11, also recalls the faith of the ancestors from Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham to...

Others (who) endured mockery, scourging, even chains and imprisonment.

They were stoned, sawed in two, put to death at sword’s point; they went about in skins of sheep or goats, needy, afflicted, tormented.

The world was not worthy of them. They wandered about in deserts and on mountains, in caves and in crevices in the earth.

Yet all these, though approved because of their faith, did not receive what had been promised. God had foreseen something better for us, so that without us they should not be made perfect.

Our first Pope and the Writer of Hebrews reminded the Church of the debt we owe to many generations of faithful people, and insisted that their lives, hopes, and expectations would not be fulfilled if we forget what the Lord has done for us. 

Jesus, on the night before he died, said to his disciples, "Do this in memory of me." We have never forgotten that Man's dying wish. It has shaped our lives and left a deep mark on human history. We remember those words during every Mass; they sum up and encapsulate what has gone before: "Eat this" and "Drink this." 

Two millennia later, many millions of the Lord's disciples have been added to that list of forebears who "endured mockery, scourging, even chains and imprisonment...." Missionaries, pioneers, and settlers have abandoned their homelands and risked their lives in sea voyages to bring the Gospel to all nations. We find their cemeteries and thousands of churches wherever they went. Our ancestors, from their place in glory, see that their lives meant something because you and I believe as they believed.

I remember them when I say, "Do this in memory of me." And perhaps I am speaking for myself also. Who will remember Father Ken Bartsch, OFM Conv a hundred years from now? I don't suppose anyone will. 

But they will remember the Lord, Mary, the Apostles, martyrs, saints, and the thousand generations of faithful souls who have kept the faith.  And our descendants also will shed blood in their struggle against sin. 

And we will rest easy in our graves because they are still making the sacrifices we have made.