Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist

@ the Kentucky State Fair

Lectionary: 428/634


We have been reassured about you, brothers and sisters, in our every distress and affliction, through your faith. For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord.

The martyr is first of all a witness. That’s what the word means. It is seriously abused when it is used for other purposes, as when Muslims celebrate slain warriors as martyrs, or when a person refuses to speak for herself in a difficult relationship and says she suffers like the martyrs.

Saint John the Baptist is called a martyr because he gave witness to the holiness of marriage. In the school of the prophets Hosea and Isaiah, this last of the prophets understood that God loves his people as a man loves his wife. Their devotion, loyalty, affection and courage demonstrate the fundamental relationship of the human to the divine. 

God has been described as king, and his people as subjects; God has been described as creator and his people as creatures. And those are good analogies. But most important is the symbol of God as husband to Israel; and Jesus, to the Church.

Saint John was arrested because he protested against Herod’s taking his brother’s widow to be his wife. This bond was anathema to the Jews and, like the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet, very suspicious. Then John was summarily executed at the behest of Herod’s wife, Herodius. She hated him for his opposition and arranged for his death. Finally, John died because of Herod’s incestuous lust for his wife’s daughter – another violation of marriage. Clearly, he died as a witness in defense of marriage.

We also celebrate John’s death as a martyr because he spoke for the Truth. If he was not singled out by Herod for his testimony about Jesus, few martyrs are. More often they die for other reasons. Eleazar and the Maccabean Martyrs died for their refusal to eat pork. Their tormentors did not care which God they worshiped so long as their professed beliefs made no difference. But when they proved their difference by refusing pork, they were tortured and killed. Roman martyrs suffered for their refusal to worship the emperor. Japanese martyrs suffered for their allegiance to the papacy; Jesuit martyrs suffered for introducing European ways to Native Americans.  Two Polish friars were killed by Shining Path Guerrillas for assisting the poor.

The willingness of the martyrs to die testifies to the credibility of their testimony. They speak the truth to power despite their obvious weakness. This is not a facility given to liars. Martyrs remind us  there are truths worth dying for, and many truths more important than my brief moment of life. 

Today's first reading gives us our response when we learn of the martyr's death: 

For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord. 

Recalling  "the friend of the bridegroom"  and the manner of his death, we should stand firm in the truth of marriage as the Bridegroom has shown it to us.