Start Date: 30 August 2021

End Date: 30 August 2021

Place: 365 Burrows Ave.

Beheding St. John 2The death of St. John the Baptist is reported in varying amounts of detail throughout the synoptic Gospels and Mark and Matthew report the event with the most detail. In Mark’s Gospel, John was arrested and imprisoned because of King Herod’s fear of him. John had been openly censuring Herod for taking his sister-in-law as his own wife, and Herod was afraid that John’s preaching would start a revolt against him.
Although Herod feared John, he would not kill him because he knew John was a righteous and holy man, and he liked hearing John speak. Herodias, Herod’s wife, did not share his respect for John and looked for any chance to have him killed. Herodias’ chance came when her daughter Salome’s dancing so pleased Herod and aroused such irrational lust in him that he promised her anything she desired. Herodias prompted her daughter to ask for the death of John the Baptist. Herod granted her wish and John was killed.
The day for this feast is taken from the date when the Church of St. John was dedicated at Sebaste, in Samaria. This church is located at what is traditionally thought to be the burial site for St. John.
Saint John the Baptist was called by God to be the precursor of His divine Son. In order to preserve his innocence spotless, and to improve upon the extraordinary graces which he had received in his earliest infancy, he was directed by the Holy Spirit to lead an austere and contemplative life in the wilderness. There he devoted himself to the continuous exercise of devout prayer and penance.
When Saint John was thirty years old, the faithful minister of the Lord began to discharge his mission. Clothed with the garments of penance, he announced to all men the obligation weighing upon them of washing away their iniquities with the tears of sincere compunction. He proclaimed the Messiah, who was of his own age but whom he had never seen, when one day Jesus came to be baptized by him in the Jordan. Saint John was received by the poor folk as the true herald of the Most High God, and his voice was, as it were, a trumpet sounding from heaven to summon all men to avert the divine judgments. Souls were exhorted by him to prepare themselves to reap the benefit of the mercy offered them.
When the tetrarch Herod Antipas, in defiance of all laws divine and human, married Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip who was yet living, Saint John the Baptist boldly reprimanded the tetrarch and his accomplice for so scandalous an adultery. Herod, motivated by his lust and his anger, cast the Saint into prison. About a year after Saint John had been made a prisoner, Herod gave a splendid entertainment to the official world of Galilee. Salome, a daughter of Herodias by her lawful husband, pleased Herod by her dancing, to the point that he made her the foolish promise of granting whatever she might ask. Salome consulted with her mother as to what to ask, and that immoral woman instructed her daughter to demand the death of John the Baptist, and that the head of the prisoner should be immediately brought to her on a platter. This barbaric request startled the tyrant himself; but governed by human respect he assented and sent a soldier of his guard to behead the Saint in prison. Thus died the great forerunner of our blessed Saviour, some two years after his entrance upon his public ministry, and a year before the death of the One he announced.
Beheding St. John 3