Red-Letter Day
The Birth of John the Baptist
June 24
also known as Nativity of the Baptist, Birth of John the Baptist, St. John Baptist Day
On 24 June the Church keeps the birth of John the Baptist, the son promised to Zechariah and Elizabeth and born to go before the Lord. The date is not remembered from any record of his birth; it is counted, six months back from Christmas, out of the sixth month Luke gives for Elizabeth when the angel came to Mary. It is a red-letter day in the Book of Common Prayer, and one of the oldest saints' days the Church keeps.
This day keeps a birth. Not a death, which is what almost every other saint's day marks, but a birth: the birth of John, son of the priest Zechariah and of Elizabeth, told in the first chapter of Luke. The mother was old and had borne no children. The father, told by an angel at the altar what was coming, did not believe it, and lost his speech until the child was born and named. When the neighbours pressed for a family name, the mute man asked for a tablet and wrote, His name is John, and his tongue was loosed and he prophesied.
Why the Church should keep a birthday at all was worth explaining even sixteen centuries ago. Augustine, preaching at Hippo in North Africa, put it plainly: "The Church has never celebrated the birthday in the flesh of any of the prophets, any of the patriarchs, any of the apostles. It only celebrates two birthdays, this man's and Christ's." The translation is Edmund Hill's. The reason is not that John was the best of men, but that his birth is fastened to another birth. He was six months older, as Luke reckons it; and so the Church, once it kept Christmas on 25 December, counted six months back and arrived at 24 June. The date is derived, not remembered. Nobody knows the day John was born.
That derivation gave the Latin preachers a figure they never tired of. In the northern year, John's day falls as the light begins to fail and Christ's as it begins to return. Augustine set the two side by side and let the Gospel say what it meant: Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui. He must increase, but I must decrease. Six of the eleven sermons Augustine left for this one day turn on that observation.
The whole of John's office is in that sentence, and the liturgy has said so for a very long time. The Roman collect for the day, older than any prayer book in English and still prayed word for word in the Sarum Use on the eve of the Reformation, asks God, who made this day honourable for us in the birth of blessed John, to give his people the grace of spiritual joys. Its preface says of him what no one else can be told: that alone of all the prophets he showed the Redeemer of the world whom he had foretold. Augustine reduced it further still, into four words that have been quoted ever since: "Vox Joannes, Verbum Christus." John is the voice; Christ is the Word. A voice passes; the word it carried stays in the heart that received it.
Cranmer kept the day in 1549 and wrote it a new collect in English, one that asks for something harder than admiration. It prays that we may follow John's doctrine and holy life, and "constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake." That is what the day asks of the worshipper, and the Anglican prayer books have gone on asking it, with a word changed here and there, from that year to this.
The eve had a life of its own outside the church door, and a long argument attached to it. Already in 401 Augustine was preaching against the fires that had blazed over the city the night before. In England the vigil kept open tables and garlanded doorways, and the fires, John Stow wrote, made "of bitter enemies, louing friendes." The Church argued with the custom, allegorised it, and outlived a good deal of it. What has not passed is the reason for the day. The voice went before, and stopped; the Word it announced is here.
The collect for this day does not ask you to admire John. It asks that you may speak the truth constantly, rebuke vice boldly, and suffer patiently for the truth's sake, which is a petition for something you may not want on the morning you pray it. Robert Nelson, teaching this feast to English households in the eighteenth century, took the trouble to add that reproof "ought always to be managed with great Discretion," and to say that afterwards you should skin over the wound you have made. That is the day's difficulty in miniature: the courage to say the true thing, and the care not to enjoy saying it. Where has God given you a fair opportunity to say something true and costly, and what would it take to say it as John's day asks, boldly and gently at once?
The birth itself is beyond dating. Luke gives no year and no day, only a relative marker: Elizabeth was in her sixth month when the angel came to Mary. The observance, by contrast, can be dated, and the two must not be confused. Rome's earliest surviving calendar, the Chronograph of 354, which is the first document to place Christ's Nativity on 25 December, carries no entry for 24 June and no mention of John at all. That is negative evidence for Rome only, and says nothing about other churches.
The first substantial witness is Augustine. Eleven sermons of his survive for this day, the largest patristic cluster for any saint's day; the editors date them between 399 and about 430. They show a feast already established, with a large crowd, an annual habit of preaching, and a folk observance on the eve that the bishop was already fighting. The earliest legislative notice is later: the Council of Agde in Gaul, in 506, ranked the Nativity of John among the six greatest days of the year, with Easter, Christmas, the Epiphany, the Ascension and Pentecost, by requiring that they be kept only in the cities or the parish churches and not in private rural oratories, on pain of excommunication for the clerics who did otherwise. It is a rule about where, not about rest from work, and the neighbouring canon that binds the laity to attend with their bishop names only Easter, Christmas and Pentecost. John's day is not on that list.
By the sixth to eighth centuries the Roman books give the day an elaborate shape modelled on Christmas: a Mass for the vigil, a Mass in the night, and a Mass for the day, each with its own collect and preface, all three standing together in the Gregorian sacramentary tradition. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia also reports a double Office on this day, attributed to Sabas, and a fast before the feast that had lapsed only "until recently"; the attribution to Sabas carries no primary citation and should not be stated flatly. The day collect, Deus qui praesentem diem, is attested across the Leonine, Gelasian and Gothic-Gallican traditions, which makes it one of the oldest continuously transmitted prayers in the Western sanctorale, and the Sarum Missal was still using it verbatim on the eve of the Reformation, where the feast ranked as a Minor Double of Nine Lessons with Quadruple Invitatory and Four Rulers of the Choir.
In 1549 the day passed into the first Book of Common Prayer as a red-letter holy day, with Isaiah 40:1-11 for the Epistle and Luke 1:57-80 for the Gospel, and proper lessons at Matins and Evensong. The collect, however, is a clean break: Cranmer did not translate the ancient Roman prayer Sarum had carried unbroken for centuries but wrote an entirely new English one. In 1662 a single word changed, "penaunce" to "repentance"; the American books of 1789, 1892 and 1928 kept that text; 1979 modernised the pronouns and read "teaching" for "doctrine"; and the ACNA Book of Common Prayer 2019 adds a closing petition with no earlier precedent. The eve stood among the vigils and days of abstinence in the prayer-book table as late as the reprint in the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750, where John's is the only saint's nativity in the list. No vigil fast is appointed in 2019, a documented loss.
What people did on this day happened mostly on the night before it. Fires were lit on the eve from Ireland to the Baltic, and they are the most widely spread folk custom attached to any Christian feast; the earliest pastoral notice of them is a complaint, Augustine in 401 objecting that the whole city had been ablaze with stinking flames. By the twelfth century the clergy had changed tack from banning the fires to preaching from them: a late-medieval English homily, printed by John Brand in 1813, distinguishes three kinds, "one was clene bones, and noo woode, and that is called a Bone Fyre," a second of clean wood, and a third of both, and gives each a meaning, the wood fire signifying that John was a lantern of light to the people. In Elizabethan London the vigil meant open tables set outside the door for neighbours and passers-by, doorways shaded with birch and fennel and St John's wort and white lilies, glass lamps burning all night, and bonfires that Stow says reconciled quarrelling neighbours; he writes it in the past tense, and of the June and July vigils generally rather than this one alone. The day's Vespers hymn, Ut queant laxis, ascribed to Paul the Deacon in the eighth century, left a stranger legacy: the first syllables of its opening lines gave the notes of the scale their names. Unlike Candlemas or Palm Sunday, this feast produced no blessed object that entered Anglican parish use; its material life stayed alongside the liturgy rather than inside it.
Augustine, Sermons 273-305, translated by Edmund Hill in The Works of Saint Augustine III/8: supplies the eleven sermons preached for 24 June, with the editors' dates in each headnote. The two-birthdays sentence is Sermon 287.1; the complaint about the fires is Sermon 293B.5, preached on the evening of 24 June 401. Full text at archive.org/download/saint-augustine-sermons/.
*Augustine, Sermo CCXCIII, In Natali Ioannis Baptistae**, Latin in Patrologia Latina vol. 38, col. 1327ff. Section 1 carries Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui; section 3 carries Vox Joannes, Verbum Christus*. Scan at archive.org/download/patrologiae_cursus_completus_lat_vol_038/.
Liber sacramentorum (the Gregorian sacramentary, Migne PL 78; TEI text by Ph. Roelli, Corpus Corporum, Zürich): the vigil Mass at IX Kalendas Julii, the night Mass headed In prima missa de nocte, and the day Mass at VIII Kalendas Julii, with the collect Deus, qui praesentem diem honorabilem nobis in beati Joannis nativitate fecisti and the preface naming him alone of the prophets as showing the Redeemer. At la.wikisource.org/wiki/Liber_sacramentorum; the raw wikitext must be used, since the rendered page truncates.
The Gelasian Sacramentary, edited by H. A. Wilson (Oxford, 1894), Book II items XXV-XXVI: the vigil and day sets, with Wilson's apparatus cross-referencing the Leonine sacramentary and the Gothic Missal.
*Ivo of Chartres, Decretum IV, cap. 21, transmitting canon 21 of the Council of Agde (506): the ranking of the Nativity of John among the six greatest days and the restriction of their celebration to cities and parish churches. At ivo-of-chartres.github.io/decretum/ivodec_4.pdf. Critical edition of the acts: C. Munier, Concilia Galliae A. 314-A. 506*, CCSL 148.
The Book of Common Prayer (Scottish Episcopal edition), "Saint John Baptist's Day, June 24": the classical collect, including "boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake." Project Gutenberg ebook 29622, line 10269.
The Book of Common Prayer 1549, Collects, Epistles and Gospels, "Saint John Baptist": Isaiah 40:1-11, Luke 1:57-80, and the proper lessons. At justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Readings_SaintsA_1549.htm.
Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, reprinting the prayer-book Table of Vigils, Feasts and Days of Abstinence, where "S. John Baptist" stands among the vigils. At en.wikisource.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750.
*John Stow, A Survey of London*** (1598), "Of Watches in this Citie": the open tables set for neighbours "and passengers also," the garlanded doorways and glass lamps, and the bonfires that made "of bitter enemies, louing friendes." Kingsford's edition, 1908, at archive.org.
*John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities** (1813), vol. 1, on Midsummer Eve: the late-medieval homily De Festo Sancti Johannis Baptistae with its three fires, the attribution of the allegory to John Beleth, and Durandus on the rolling wheel. The passage is a homily, not, as is often said, the Golden Legend*.
*Robert Nelson, A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England*** (1704; this edition 1748), chapter XXVI: the household question-and-answer on what the festival teaches, and the appended catechesis on reproof, "managed with great Discretion."
In laudem Sancti Iohannis Baptistae (Ut queant laxis), ascribed to Paul the Deacon, eighth century, at la.wikisource.org/wiki/In_laudem_Sancti_Iohannis_Baptistae: the day's Vespers hymn, whose opening syllables named the notes of the hexachord.
Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), "St. John the Baptist" and "Ut Queant Laxis": the double Office attributed to Sabas, the three Masses and their assigned meanings, the fast "preceded until recently," and Dom Pothier's dissent from the usual account of how the hymn named the notes. Tertiary, and uncited for its strongest claims.
Orthodox Church in America, Nativity of the Forerunner: the Byzantine title, the ranking as a Great Feast with all-night vigil and one-day afterfeast, and the troparion and kontakion.
Coptic Synaxarium, 30 Baounah, at st-takla.org: the Coptic narrative of the birth, Zechariah's silence, and the writing of the name.
In the East the feast is a Great Feast with an all-night vigil and a one-day afterfeast, and the title runs differently: the Nativity of the Holy, Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John, where the Greek Prodromos foregrounds the running ahead rather than the baptizing. The date is the same. What separates the calendars is not the feast but the calendar beneath it: the churches that adopted the Revised Julian reckoning after 1923 keep 24 June on the civil 24 June, while those that did not, among them the Russian and Serbian churches and Mount Athos, keep it on what is now 7 July. That is a calendrical divergence, not a doctrinal one, and this feast is a bystander in it. The Coptic Church keeps the day at 30 Paona, and its Synaxarium tells the same story of the silence and the writing of the name.
Almighty God, by whose providence your servant John the Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of your Son our Savior by preaching repentance: Make us so to follow his teaching and holy life, that we may truly repent, boldly rebuke vice, patiently suffer for the sake of truth, and proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 40:1–11Psalm 85:7–13Acts 13:14b-26Luke 1:57–80
British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/