"Beyond the most sacred day of our Lord's nativity, we have read that no one else's birthday is celebrated, except that of John the Baptist," begins St. Augustine in his homily for today. He continues: "For others the completed merits of their last day are celebrated: but for him (that is, John the Baptist) even his first day, even the very beginnings of the man are set apart for honor." And why is this? To summarize st. Augustine's thought, John the Baptist's coming is what does him the greatest honor, not his leaving. In his coming the new law of grace is announced to the world, while in his leaving the prophets of the Old Law pass away, for, under that testament, says the Holy Scripture, no one came better than St. John the Baptist, and no one came after.

There is a bit of a theological lesson here, which is of an immediately practical value to every professing Christian.  Law, that is to say, the compulsion of obedience to a rightful ruler, in the theological sense, God, no matter how rightly conceived, no matter how justly and kindly intended, is always superseded by love.  This less is tauaght us by the Apostle John in his first epistle, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love."

Now, I find, as a rule, that this doctrine is one of the most embarassing for Catholics. We who, as a communion, are perhaps the most litigious of churches, the most systemetized of Christian religions, often find ourselves the object of no small ridicule from other Christians, especially those such as the Evangelicals, who seem, and I can say seem, because I was one of them, to be without all the rules, all the legalistic proceedings and entanglements in which we Catholics seemed to be involved.  Anyone who has sat through a Baptist business meeting, however, can tell you how false such an assumption would be. They need rules just the same as we all do.  For them, those rules are enshrined in that paradigm of deliberative democracy, Robert's Rules of Order, for us, those rules are enshrined in the Code of Canon Law.  Theirs were complied by a military General; ours were compiled from the teachings and decisions of Holy Church Councils, gathered from all over Christendom to hear and proclaim the Word of God, Councils at which saints, in various times, both presided and deliberated. I will leave to your judgment which source is the more likely to have been inspired by God, and which should be justly called "the traditions of men."

The saints, however, had no need of these laws.  Far be it, indeed, from our imagination to suggest that the chaste and unmarried bishops had any need to make laws about the proper conduct of an annulment.  Nor do any of you who take the marital life as seriously as the teachings of Our Lord demand.  Annulments are not the substance of our Lord's teaching about marriage, but the consequence of human sinfulness. It is such that even under the law of love handed on to us by our Saviour the Church is watchful for the rights and duties of all, and for the maintenance of good order, which is the means by which both are kept, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "God is not a God of confusion but of peace."

There is a problem, however, with acting or believing only in fear of the law: it cannot save us.  It cannot hope to keep us free from the temptations of the world, and it cannot help us when our need exceeds the scope and letter of the law.  Think, for example, of the state of our soul after we have sinned mortally.  The price for that sin has already been paid, and we have no need to do anything more than feel contrition for the commission of such a sing against righteousness and seek the healing remedy of a good confession before God and perform the little penance assigned to us by our priest. What, however, in the case of an unprepared for death, with no priest around to give us the sacrament of annointing that will forgive us our sins?  We will go straight from that place to eternal damnation, and spend all ages separated from the God who loves us.  Fear of punishment puts us at the mercy of God, but it does not of itself obtain the grace of God, which is the necessary criterion for salvation.

But love, what does love accomplish?  First of all, love obtains for us from God the grace not to sin at all in the first place.  Second, if we do sin, only love can move us to full repentance for our sins, not simply that they have violated the "law" of God, but mainly because we love and desire reunion with God, whom we cherish about all the lesser desires for which we committed the sin.  We call this second kind of repentence "perfect contrition" and by it we are reconciled to God, although we must still confess it to a priest with the faculties to give us absolution, so that we can be fully restored to participation in the sacraments, such as Holy Communion.  In this way the Church knows with certainty that we are free from any guilt that would lead to sacrilege. The Church must, in its governance, remain in bondage to law and formality for the sake of our souls, as indeed St. Paul writes, "For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more."  St. Paul was a bishop and an apostle to the whole church, and in him the Church itself is perfectly figured, for she is free "from all men" having Christ as her cornerstone and foundation, with St. Peter's successors as his representatives, yet, nevertheless, in her solicitude for the salvation of souls, she gives herself freely in bondage to the weakness of men so as to maintain good order and assure the salvation of souls. Love, however, remains supreme. By love, you have no need to fear the Law. By love, you obtain the grace which will kepp you from damnation and, what is more important, the grace which will grant you everlasting fellowship with God.

In the words of St. John the Baptist, who as I said at the beginning of my sermon, is a representative of all that is great and right about the law, "he must increase and I must decrease." If you substitute the word "Love" for "He" and "the Law" for "I" you get the sense of my simple message to you.  "Love must increase and the Law must decrease." St. John the Baptist died at the petty whim of a tyrant, a martyr, to be sure, but whose soul did he save by his death? Has even one man been ransomed from his state of sin by the death of the greatest of prophets? Was his death one like the martyrs, who died with the full knowledge of the Gospel, having heard about the Resurrection of our Lord? St. John the Baptist was greater than all the Prophets, but in some ways, less than all the Christian martyrs.

I say this not because I want to take anything away from the honour we give St. John the Baptist today. Hardly.  St. John the Baptist cannot be praised more than the words by which our Lord praised him, "Among those born of a woman, there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist."  To him even Our Lord felt it necessary to be humble in the reception of Baptism.  The Church rightly calls upon us to praise the man who even in the womb knew the Spirit of the Lord.  Not many of us can say that for ourselves.

Rather, I am saying this to show you that St. John the Baptist is nonetheless a different kind of saint, to be honoured in a different kind of way. All of us, indeed, are invited by the feasts of saints to reflect on our deeds in comparison with theirs, the better to recognize in ourselves our manifold failures in comparison to their virtues.  This is only right and proper, seeing as they have had the same opportunities as they, and, whereas they have conquered, we have more often than not, failed miserably when put to the test. But with st. John the Baptist it is different.  We rather see how fortunate we are to have received the message of love and the baptism given us by Jesus Christ, so that we should never receive the condemnation and baptism of St. John. This acts as an exhortation not to a stricter and more literal understanding of the law and its demands, but rather to a fulfilment and transcendence of of the law through God's grace.  This honors St. John all the more, because it was to prepare for this that he lived and conducted his ministry.

Let us, all of us, take the moral law, contained in the ten commandments, and the precepts of the Church in this way. We may not transgress them, to be sure, for all the moral teachings of the church, namely, what is and is not a sin, and the procedures that regulate its governance are not meant to be burdensome.  Indeed they become light once you embrace loving God for who he is, once you stop following after God for fear of his punishments, or men, of your wives' punishments, or wives, of the other women's. Then,seek to do his will at every moment. Life is short and fragile.  It is not worth spending it in boredom.  But if you begin to love God, if you let it burn within your heart, you will start to find Church a lot less boring, and righteousness a lot more natural than before, and may our Lord help us to keep all these things, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.