John the Baptist calls us to salvation
Is it not strange, my friends, that God is constantly exhorting us to virtue while we hide ourselves away from this succour and postpone salvation? Doesn't John, too, invite us to salvation? Isn't he altogether a voice that exhorts us? Then let us ask him: “Who are you among men and where do you come from?” He will not tell us he is Elijah and will deny himself to be Messiah but will confess that he is a voice crying in the wilderness (Jn 1:20f.). So who is John? To take an image, allow me to say: a voice to the Word, a Voice to God's Utterance, who exhorts us by crying in the desert...: “Make straight the Lord's paths” (Mk 1:3 par.). John is a forerunner and his voice is forerunner to God's Word, a voice encouraging and predisposing to salvation, a voice exhorting us to seek our heavenly inheritance.
Thanks to this voice “the barren and deserted wife no longer lacks children” (cf. Is 54:1). The angel's voice has announced this childbearing to me; this voice was also precursor to the Lord, who brought the good news to the woman without a child (Lk 1:19) as it did to John in the solitude of the desert. Therefore it is by this voice of the Word that the barren woman bears a child in joy and the desert bears its fruit. These two voices, precursors of the Lord, that of the angel and that of John, communicate to me the salvation they conceal in such a way that, after the manifestation of the Word, we gather up the fruit of fecundity, life eternal.