Sunday, December 10 - John the Baptist

Luke is, of course, the author of the Gospel of Luke.  But he is also the author of the book of Acts.  In both of these books, the Spirit fills people with joy, resulting in songs and praise.  Peter Leithart describes this:

"The infancy narratives of Luke tell about the births of John and Jesus (Luke 1-2).  In both cases, the work of the Spirit is very much highlighted.  John is filled with the Spirit from his mother's womb (1:15); the Spirit comes upon Mary (1:35); Elizabeth, Zecharias and Simeon all praise God in the Spirit (1:41, 67; 2:25-27); Jesus receives the Spirit at His baptism (3:22).  Jesus says in His first sermon that the Spirit is on Him, and the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness, and drives Him back to Galilee (4:14).  This of course fits with the opening of a two-volume work where the Spirit is going to be the power behind the early church.  At the beginning of Acts, the Spirit is active, descending upon the disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2).  In both Luke and Acts, the Spirit produces joy and praise.  Luke begins with song, and the gospel also ends with praise, as the disciples devote themselves to worship (24:52-53).  Luke's gospel also begins and ends in the temple.  When the Spirit comes upon the apostles at Pentecost, they too are filled with joy, as they declare God's wonderful works (Acts 2:11; cf. 13:52) (Peter Leithart, The Four, 176)

Coelius Sedlius wrote a hymn called "From Lands That See the Sun Arise" in 450 A.D. which functions as an acrostic poem in the original Latin.  John the Baptist is traditionally the focus of the second Sunday in Advent.  Look for the reference to the joyful baby John the Baptist, in the fifth stanza:

From lands that see the sun arise
To earth's remotest boundaries
Let every heart awake, and sing
The Son of Mary, Christ the King.

Behold the world's Creator wears
The form and fashion of a slave;
Our very flesh our Maker shares,
His fallen creature, man, to save.

For this, how wondrously he wrought!
A maiden, in her lowly place,
Became, in ways beyond all thought,
The chosen vessel of his grace.

She bowed her to the angel's word
Declaring what the Father willed;
And suddenly the promised Lord
That pure and holy temple filled.

That Son, that royal Son she bore,
Whom Gabriel announced before,
Whom, in his mother's womb concealed,
The unborn Baptist had revealed.

And, while the angels in the sky
Sang praise above the silent field,
To shepherds poor the Lord most high,
The one great Shepherd was revealed.

Eternal praise and glory be,
O Jesu, virgin-born, to thee,
With Father and with Holy Ghost,
From men and from the heav'nly host.

There is something of a procession, stanza-to-stanza, of God's redeeming work as successive containers are filled with God's presence.  In stanza two, it is our human flesh, filled with God.  In three, Mary becomes the "vessel of his grace."  In four, it is the temple.  In five, John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth's womb, filled with joy and "revealing" the infant Christ.  In six, the angels fill the world with song, revealing "the one great Shepherd" to "shepherds poor." 

Again, the poem is an acrostic.  It's Latin title is Paean Alphabetocus de Christo.  Sedlius seems to be counting the ways that God chases emptiness out of the world with the fullness of Christ.