The First and Second Finding of the Precious Head of the Holy, Glorious Prophet and Forerunner John the Baptist
Great Fast Day 13
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Matthew 11:2-15
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Today we celebrate a feast that will strike many of us as odd: the Feast of the First and Second Findings of the Head of John the Baptist. This feast points to the struggles that the faithful of the Church through its early history took to preserve this precious relic of the Forerunner. These accounts can be read in the entry for this day in the Synaxarion, the collection of books organized by month which contain the Lives of the Saints.
The readings for this feast replace the prescribed readings for the second Saturday in Great Lent. Instead of focussing on another catechetical passage from the Gospel of Mark proper to this period of the Fast, we read from St. Matthew’s Gospel about what Our Lord says about the Forerunner, highlighting in particular St. John the Baptist’s vocation as a prophet and the one who was foretold by the prophets, in particular Isaiah. Despite this reading not being from Mark, we are presented with a gospel passage that is deeply catechetical in that it teaches us something very important about our Catholic Christian faith: the importance of prophecy.
St. John the Baptist is the last and greatest of the prophets of the Old Covenant; he is the culmination of the work of all that the prophets who came before him undertook to point the people of Israel to the coming of the Messiah. And the Holy Forerunner is indeed more than a prophet, with Christ likening him to the great prophet Elias, since it is John the Baptist who directly prepares the way for Christ. St. John the Baptist is like the royal trumpeters who sound the fanfare as the Queen approaches. In Creation, St. John the Baptist is like the small blue and white snow drop flowers that poke their head through the still cold April soil revealing the coming of a glorious spring with all of the new life it brings. Finally, St. John the Baptist is the great saint of Lent, in that he calls us to repent and to prepare ourselves to receive the Messiah who saves us.
Let us today magnify the Holy Prophet, Forerunner, and Baptist John who reminds us during this Holy Season to make our paths straight for the Resurrected Lord who will come again.