I see a great difference between the diction of the author of this sermon and that of Maximus. Wherefore I neither agree with Muratori, who counts it—as transcribed from the Ambrosian codex—among the works of Maximian in volume IV of the Anecdota, nor with the others who, following Muratori, ascribe it to Maximus. There are those who attribute this to Saint Ambrose. In the praises of the holy and most blessed John the Baptist, whose birthday we celebrate today, I know not what I should chiefly proclaim: whether that he was wondrously born, or that he was more wondrously slain. For he was born amid prophecy, he was put to death amid truth; by being born he announced the Savior's coming, by admonishing he condemned Herod's incest.
For a man holy and just, and one who beyond the common birth of men had been begotten from a promise, merited this from God: not to depart from the world by a death common with the rest, but to lay down, by confessing the Lord, the body which by the Lord's gift he had received. Therefore John in all things did the will of God; because for the sake of the Lord's work he was both born and died.
For, to recount briefly the sequence of his birth: when his father Zechariah and his mother Elizabeth were worn out with the old age of their years, and rejoiced in no offspring of children, and the most flourishing time even for begetting children for them had passed—so that even their very wish for taking up progeny now failed them—they are endowed by a sudden promise through an angel, and holy Gabriel announces that John shall be born, saying: Fear not, Zechariah, behold your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth shall conceive and bear a son (Luke I). Your prayer, he says, is heard; whence we understand that Zechariah's righteousness begot John rather by praying, than Elizabeth's old age brought him forth by childbearing.
Hence, I say, we understand that supplication created John, not pleasure. For when the inner parts of the maternal womb had grown cold with the old age of years, and the wearied members of the body had lost the grace of fruitfulness, against the impossibility of the body, against the barrenness of the inner parts, at Zechariah's prayers Elizabeth's womb swells, and she conceived John not by nature, but by grace. Whence it was necessary that a holy son be born, who was begotten not so much by embraces as by prayers. But we ought to wonder the less that John merited so great a grace in being born; for the forerunner and precursor of Christ ought to have something similar to the nativity of the Lord and Savior. Since indeed the Lord is begotten of a virgin, John is brought forth of a barren woman;
the former is drawn forth from a spotless young maiden, the latter is begotten of an old woman already worn out. Therefore his birth too has something of glory and of miracle. For although a woman's childbirth may seem more lowly than a virgin's, yet, just as we look up to Mary because a virgin bore, so we marvel at Elizabeth because an aged woman brought forth. Which fact indeed I think contains a certain mystery: that John, who bore the figure of the Old Testament, should be born of an old little woman with blood now cold; but the Lord, who was to proclaim the Gospel of the heavenly kingdom, should be born of the bloom of a fervent young maiden. For Mary, conscious of her virginity, marvels at the offspring wrapped in her womb;
but Elizabeth, conscious of her old age, blushes that her womb is to be weighed down by childbearing; for the evangelist says: she hid herself for five months (Luke I). But how marvelous is this, that the same archangel Gabriel represents the office of each birth! He consoles the incredulous Zechariah, he encourages the trusting Mary. He, because he doubted, lost his voice; she, because she at once believed, conceived the saving Word. And this among the praises of John seems by no means to be passed over in silence: that not yet born he already prophesies, and still set within the folds of the maternal womb he confesses the coming of Christ by his joys, because he could not by his voice. For Elizabeth says to holy Mary:
As soon as the voice of your greeting came into my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy (ibid.). For John exults before he is born, and before he recognizes with the eyes of the world the visible form, he already recognizes with the spirit the Lord of the world. In which I think that prophetic saying agrees which says: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; and before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you (Jeremiah I). Whence we ought not to wonder that, shut up in prison by Herod, he ever made Christ known to his disciples, since even shut up in the womb he proclaimed the same Lord by his gestures. (A page is missing; then this fragment follows.) ... I am the way, the truth, and the life (John XIV).
On the same day, therefore, we celebrate the birthday of John on which we also attend to the beginnings of the harvest. Great is each birth, which both drove away the poverty of the womb and drove away the hunger of sinners. Hence the wasting plague no longer torments me, no pestilent conscience consumes this man; I feel refreshment alike in my senses and in my inward parts; nay rather, John himself is our harvest, for from his prophecy we send forth the fruit of salvation, and from his words, as from a heavy stalk, we take up the grain of salvation. Concerning which grain it is written in the Gospel: Unless a grain of wheat, falling into the earth, dies, it remains alone (John XII), and the rest, and so forth.