We could even say that the Gospel is the synchronic account of two prophets, John and Jesus, with their profound peculiarities, their specific call, but also their essential unanimity in carrying out God’s designs, with the same resoluteness in the service of the Kingdom. Today, unfortunately, the Baptist no longer possesses the post he merits in the Church’s memory and consciousness: after the first millennium and the middle of the second — in which John the Baptist and Mary together represented the bond between the old and the new alliance and together stood as intercessors next to the Lord in glory, in the liturgy and in iconography — the growth of the Marian cult overtook the Baptist and ended by obscuring it, drifting with danger to the equilibrium of Christological consciousness. If the Church still today solemnly celebrates the Baptist’s birth, that is because it remains conscious of this figure’s central position according to Revelation: in the Synoptics the good news of the announcement of the kingdom always opens with John, just as the Gospel of Jesus’ infancy according to Luke open with the angel’s annunciation to Zacharias and with the story of John’s marvelous birth.

John is a man whom only God could give to Israel. At the beginning of his story there is an old, sterile woman, Elizabeth, and a father in the temple, he too advanced in years: the Lord’s poor, “just before God, irreprehensible in the observance of all the Lord’s laws and prescriptions” (Lk 1,6), the humble rest that trusts in God, and it is just to these that God turns to carry out his design of love and salvation. Nothing can condition God’s choice, nor can it be impeded by human limits such as old age and sterility: he only asks that there be predisposition, awaiting, faith. This is how John is born, announced by an angel to the father-priest officiating in the temple, and he is only an embryo in his mother’s womb when he already dances at recognizing the presence of the Messiah and Lord Jesus just conceived in Mary’s womb, and in his mother’s womb he is sanctified by the Holy Spirit who descends on her.