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Commentary on the Gospel – December 23, 2025
The Importance of Being Named John
The tendency to try to turn children into “copies” of their parents by giving them the exact same name is something that goes way back. This custom existed even in Israel during the time of Jesus. However, no family resemblance or kinship can ever erase or diminish the unique, unrepeatable originality of every single person.
That is why Zachariah’s gesture is so important. By backing up his wife Elizabeth and insisting on naming their son John, he breaks the mold. The name Zachariah means “The Lord remembers.” While that name makes sense for a son born unexpectedly in old age, it actually fits the father better, because it inevitably refers to the past.
The name John, however, means “God is gracious” (or merciful), and also “Gift of God.” This name speaks of the immediacy of something new—the very newness John is born to prepare. Zachariah, old and mute, is a perfect image of the Old Testament: it seems like it has nothing left to say, yet it still has enough strength to bear one last fruit. This fruit puts the final period at the end of that long history of God’s promises—promises deposited in Israel but valid for the whole world. John will pass the baton to a new era: the era of fulfillment. By giving him the name John, Zachariah senses a newness that the Baptist won’t start himself, but for which he will open the path.
A person’s name implicitly carries the mission they have to perform in life—that is, their vocation. In John, we discover some essential traits of the human and Christian vocation.
First, the call. From the mother’s womb, a person is called to fulfill a mission in life. It is important to understand that this isn’t an unavoidable destiny written beforehand. This “open” character of the call is expressed very well in the question the neighbors were asking: “What, then, will this child be?” It is a call addressed to our freedom, and as human beings, we must realize it by making our own decisions to respond to it.
Second, meaning. This call, which must be answered freely, tells us that life makes sense, and that this meaning is present from the very moment of conception. Therefore, we are responsible not only for our own lives but also for the lives of others, especially when life is entrusted to us because it cannot yet fend for itself.
Now, people often challenge this claim that life has meaning. There are life experiences of deep disappointment and frustration that can tempt us to think otherwise. But if we look closely, we realize that the very existence of disappointment and frustration proves that meaning exists—they speak of expectations that, for whatever reason, couldn’t be met. When someone proclaims that life is meaningless, they almost always do so with a tone of complaint—which implicitly recognizes the very meaning they are denying. If life were truly meaningless, we wouldn’t even notice it, nor would we feel the need to complain about it.
Third, service. From the womb, John tells us about a meaning that is vocation (a call), mission, and also service. This is the third essential trait of the human vocation, and it is especially visible in John.
John’s mission is to open the way and then step aside—to decrease so that Jesus may increase. Truly, to fulfill our own mission in life, we have to know that we are at the service of something greater than ourselves. Therefore, being the center of attention or being “important” isn’t what matters. Great events and great figures would be nothing without the multitude of people who, without being famous, lived their own vocations faithfully. They paved the way for those things and people who are “greater” than them, but who would be nothing without them. Jesus himself submitted to this same law of the Incarnation: to carry out His saving mission, He needed other people—like John—to faithfully fulfill their own missions and prepare the way for Him.
As we contemplate the figure of John the Baptist and meditate on our own vocation and the meaning of our lives, we can see that every Christian vocation has a component that makes us like the Precursor. Jesus continues to come into the world, drawing near to men and women, many of whom do not know Him.
For Jesus to reach them, following the laws of the Incarnation, He needs precursors and mediators to smooth the path and prepare His coming. We ourselves, at some moment in our lives, had a “John the Baptist” who introduced us to the knowledge of Christ. And each one of us, like every Christian, is called to carry out this mission. Through the testimony of our words and deeds, we must point not to ourselves, but to the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29, 36).