Today, we are six months away from last Christmas and next Christmas. The Church today celebrates the birth of Jesus’ senior relative, John the Baptist.

John’s birth is described in the Bible (Luke 1:57-80). Indeed, the first two chapters of Luke treat the births of Jesus and John in tandem. In Luke 1, we first hear of the Archangel Gabriel announcing John’s conception to his father, Zechariah (1:5-25). That is immediately followed by Gabriel’s announcement inviting Mary to be the Mother of God (1:26-38). Mary then travels to Elizabeth, where the encounter of mothers and sons is described (1:39-56), including Mary’s great canticle of joy, the Magnificat. (The Visitation also makes a powerful prolife statement: see here.)

Finally, John’s birth and circumcision is itself described (1:57-80), crowned by Zechariah’s great canticle of joy, the Benedictus. In keeping with his distinctiveness, the birth of Jesus is featured uniquely in Luke 2.

The details of John’s birth are sparse: when the time came, she gave birth to a son, and her relatives and neighbors rejoiced.

Far more attention is put on John’s circumcision eight days later. Controversy surrounds the boy’s naming: unlike some parts of modern America, the primacy of parental role in naming a child was not impeached. Elizabeth speaks up — somewhat unusual for the wife to take that role — in saying the boy is John. That name does elicit a controversy because, in a traditional society like ancient Israel, names are passed down in families — but “none of your relatives has this name” (Luke 1:61).

Elizabeth speaks because Zechariah cannot: he has been struck mute for months, since returning from his service in the Jerusalem Temple, where he received Gabriel’s announcement of John’s conception with some measure of doubt. As the child’s father, they ask for his decision. He takes a writing tablet and declares, like his wife, “His name is John” (1:63) to all their amazement.

And that’s not the only thing they are amazed by, because Zechariah’s obedient confession of the child’s name — the name given him by the angel (Luke 1:13) and, therefore, by him who knows us by name before we exist (Jeremiah 1:5, a prophecy applicable to John) — results in the opening up of Zechariah’s tongue to God’s praise in a beautiful canticle.

What has always struck me is Luke’s observation about the people who were there for John’s birth and circumcision: what happened was talked about across the hill country of Judea, with the witnesses wondering “what then will this child be?” (Luke 1:66). Is that not the question we should pose in reverent awe before every gift of life we receive from God?

The Nativity of John is depicted in this late medieval painting by a 15th-century painter from Siena, Sano di Pietro, and on exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Painted around 1450-60, it shows both medieval (flat perspective, only the theologically significant personages) and early Renaissance elements (the Renaissance-like interior).

Time is suspended here: Elizabeth is still in bed, having just delivered John (who is swaddled by relatives and friends adjacent) while Zechariah, in the same scene, writes eight days later the child’s name.

The painting reflects the Sienese School of art, especially by using bright colors and attention to cloth detail (the folds of the bedspread and bed hangings), those details not however detracting from the spiritual centrality of the depicted event.

Compare that to a more common painting depicting this same scene: The Florentine Domenico Ghirlandaio’s “Birth of John the Baptist.” The paintings are perhaps 20 years apart, but illustrate the difference between the rival Sienese and Florentine schools. This fresco is far more sumptuous in its detail and the perspective better, but at the cost of the religious: if you weren’t told and didn’t notice bed-resting Elizabeth’s subtle halo, could you not think this is some aristocratic Florentine woman’s giving birth?

(For more reading, see here.)