For the Sunday Gospels, I often consult St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea, where he compiles various classic Patristic comments on the given verses. Often these are quotations from homilies or longer commentaries that one can track down and consult at length; occasionally they are snippets from works that we no longer have. You usually get a sense of common questions and consensus. I always find them interesting even when they are not especially useful.
I bring this up because for today’s passage, there was a striking emphasis. From St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and St. Hilary, everyone is pretty convinced that it makes no sense for John the Baptist to ask, via his followers, the question he is asking. This was the Forerunner, the man who proclaimed, before the crowds at the Jordan, “Behold the lamb of God!” This was the one who witnessed the holy theophany, where the voice of the Father spoke from heaven proclaiming the identity of the Son.
So the Fathers wrestle with this and come to various conclusions, but generally they think that John wasn’t really doubting. He was, perhaps, asking the question on behalf of his disciples, whose insight was less clear.
Modern readers are on average a little more open to the idea that St. John himself was concerned. Surely it is no great condemnation of the Forerunner’s holiness and prophetic wisdom to attribute to him a very natural human frustration at his situation: he was sent to proclaim the kingdom of God, but now he sits in a prison cell. As the Lord suggests in his celebration of John, he is the greatest of all the prophets—that final and crucial transition figure summing up the whole of the old Covenant—yet as such is lower than the lowest in the kingdom of heaven. He will not even see the fruit of his work. That is a very hard place to be, even for someone who remains faithful to the end.
Whether the message is directed more at John or at his disciples, or at the crowds that hear the conversation, the Lord’s response is a striking invocation of the prophetic tradition leading up to John. Isaiah’s promises are now fulfilled. The desert will bloom with life; the vindication of Israel is at hand.
The desert in Isaiah’s vision is, on one reading, the world desiccated from sin and death, cut off from the life-giving waters of the Spirit of God. Whereas many prophetic passages speak of the day of the Lord as one of vengeance and destruction, here the justice of God shows up as new life and restoration—the return to Eden from exile. The later prophet Ezekiel, in that famous passage used for the Vidi aquam chant in Easter (and recently read when the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica fell on Sunday!), evokes this same transformation of desert into garden, but Ezekiel points more clearly to the source of that transformation. The water flows from the Temple in a Jerusalem and a Temple that has itself been made new.
But Jesus tells us in the Gospels that he is the new temple. Only after his death and resurrection do all of these images come together for the Church. He is the fulfillment of Isaiah not just in the effects of his ministry of physical healing, but in the way that he will offer himself as a source of life for the destruction of the world’s long bondage to sin and death. The Lord is going to battle against his enemies, but those enemies aren’t flesh and blood. They are the spiritual forces of dryness and separation, of humanity’s long rejection of its vocation to worship.
Among the Patristic commentaries on the Gospel that I mentioned earlier, St. Hilary offers what I think is a really illuminating allegory:
Mystically, an even fuller understanding is to be had of that which John did here. For as a prophet he prophesied even in the very circumstances of his imprisonment: because in him the Law became silent. The Law had been foretelling of Christ and the forgiveness of sins, and had promised likewise the kingdom of heaven. And John had brought to completion this work of the Law. The Law now silent, imprisoned by the wickedness of men, as it were held in bonds and shut away, so that Christ might not be made known, he then sends to look upon the gospel, so that doubt may be changed to belief in its doctrine, through seeing the works of the gospel.
There in Hilary, we can see how the Fathers are rarely interested in the kind of psychological questions that tend to vex us about what John was really feeling at that moment. What Hilary sees is the way that history itself is meaningful; how John as the climax of the prophetic tradition gave a kind of prophetic message not just with his words, but with his life. He could, even to the end, point in the right direction: away from sin, toward God. But the world under the authority of evil beheaded him.
We can return to that modern interest in the interior disposition of the saint and wonder again if this is not after all a painful place to be. We could imagine the desire for encouragement from his divine cousin to the effect of please tell me that this martyrdom is really saying something true, that it is all worth something. But we could also imagine the desire to encourage his followers, who want to believe but do not fully understand what it would mean to believe. How, in the end, can the desert imagine a garden until it finally becomes one?
Patience can seem the hardest of virtues because it seems to be directly necessary for acquiring all of the others. You can grow only through long habit and practice, and you can grow habits only through patience. To begin attempting patience already requires a basic conviction that the waiting is worth something, that the waiting is in fact a work productive of some thing of value. We do not know, except maybe in pious legend, how long Adam and Eve stayed in the Garden of Eden before the Fall recorded in Genesis 3. We usually describe that Fall as an act of obedience, or an act of pride, but we might just as well describe it as an act of impatience. Why wait to understand when I can take understanding now? Why wait for an even greater communion with God, for a supernatural confirmation of perfection, when I can claim the divine life now?
St. James, in our epistle for today, describes the whole life of salvation as a kind of patient work, like farming. We have to learn that our souls, like our bodies, exist in time. They do not grow up all at once or without any effort or resistance. But we can no more hurry the growth of our souls than we can hurry the growth of a seed. It will come, just as Christmas will come, in the fullness of time.