Second Sunday of Advent

17/12/2023

Last week, we started the season of Advent, with an ‘over the horizon’ look at the end of all things, coming in Mark’s gospel immediately after his darkly foreboding reference to the desecration of the temple and a time of terror. Something vague and portentous is coming!

This week, on the second Sunday of Advent, things start to get more specific. We head back to the beginning of Mark’s Gospel for the beginning of the story and the announcement of the good news! Though what, you might wonder, could possibly be good news for the late first-century Jewish community Mark is writing for? It’s a time of war, somewhere near the brutal end of a seven-year uprising against the Roman occupying army, culminating in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And the first 8 verses of Mark’s urgent war-time gospel makes a bold claim of good news for a people who have lived under occupation for a century or more and who now face the destruction – for the second time in their history – of the temple that assures them of God’s presence in their midst.

Actually, for people who knew the Roman propaganda all too well, the good news that Mark dares to announce would have been nothing short of alarming. There was after all only one person in the world you could safely call the Son of God, the Saviour of the world - and that was the Roman Emperor, Vespasian, who had despatched his rivals to the throne by marching on Rome itself the year before, and was now personally laying siege to Jerusalem. Because these were the Roman emperor’s official titles – and if it was good news to call an obscure Galilean peasant executed 40 years earlier the Son of God then it was dangerous good news, it was good news that thumbed its nose at the superpower currently battering down the gates of Jerusalem. And then onto the stage on the banks of the Jordan River southeast of Jerusalem steps John the Baptist, the most uncouth of all God’s prophets.

And what a fanfare! The gospel writer cobbles together some of the most resonant verses in the Old Testament to introduce the prophet – the voice of the one who cries out in the desert as a messenger, the one who announces the good news. For anybody who knows anything about how Israel has been liberated in the past, here is something to prick up the ears. There’s a sense of continuity with what God has done for God’s people before – the distant memory of a desperate flight from Egypt and the years of wandering through the desert. And the more recent traumatic memory of Jewish exiles in Babylon some 500 years earlier.

We heard in our Old Testament reading the full passage that Mark is quoting from. After long years of humiliation and exile in Babylon that the Judean people saw as punishment and rejection by God, suddenly God announces that they have suffered enough. In geopolitical terms, there was a new superpower in town. The exiles are released. Theologically, the lever is thrown abruptly from suffering and judgement to pardon and tenderness. This sudden change at the beginning of chapter 40 in Isaiah - the beginning of what is usually termed Second Isaiah - announces redemption and the end of captivity for God’s people.

The change is immediate and dramatic – on the one hand it sounds like God is bulldozing a track through the desert – a path for the returning captives from Babylon to the doorstep of Jerusalem. On the other hand it is in the desert itself where the people are aimlessly wandering where God is coming to be with them and tend to them. On this reading, not so much the promise of rescue as the promise of comfort in the middle of hardship. God comes to his people as a shepherd in the wilderness. Either way, the time of exile and punishment is ended – and even though human beings haven’t changed – even though we are still fickle and faithless, and bring disaster on ourselves, we are God’s sheep.

Perhaps those of us who are safe and comfortable can’t really hear this passage from Isaiah properly. Perhaps it is only ever really heard properly by outcasts and exiles, by women and men living under oppression or injustice, or by those enduring the terrors of war. Dare I say it, perhaps this passage is best heard in Gaza, or in Ukraine or South Sudan? You are not forgotten, it will not always be like this. If you, this year, have had the bottom knocked out of your world, if you have seen everything you love crumble, if you have been lost in the desert of your own life and haven’t been able to find your way back, then the news that you are loved and remembered, that the God who created you is right there in the desert with you gently guiding you back - this passage can remind you that our God is not remote, but personal, and that God’s character is always to enter into our world in acts of humble love.

So Mark begins his good news, with this verse from Isaiah that reminds his hearers what God has done before in the face of military defeat and humiliation. This is the God of the underdog, the God of tenderness and restoration. But then, onto the stage steps John the Baptist, dressed in coarse rags, announcing the coming of the messiah, the holy one of God. And, he’s pointing the finger at you and me.

Now, Mark doesn’t mention it in his abbreviated account, but both Matthew and Luke tell us that John’s message is blunt and uncompromising – his warning to those who come out to hear him in the desert is that they are not in a good way, not morally, not spiritually. ‘You snakes!’ he calls them. ‘You vipers! If you want to be able to receive what God’s doing, the good news poised on the brink of coming into the world – then repent – make a U-turn’. Actually, the Jewish historian Josephus, writing during the time of the Roman wars about the same time as Mark, records that John was a wildly popular preacher. Can you figure it? Maybe most of the people flocking out to the desert to hear him were the ones who knew already that the way things were was intolerable. It’s the poor after all who find the simultaneous message of repentance and hope intoxicating. The powerful find that sort of talk disturbing.

Because the good news that Isaiah announces, the good news that the gospel writer claims - the good news John announces on the West Bank of the Jordan - it’s good news for people at the end of their tether, for men and women who look at the way the world is and who cry out, it shouldn’t be like this! It’s not really good news for us if we are comfortable, if all we are really looking forward to is 15 sleeps till Christmas and maybe overdoing it on carols and tinsel and festive cheer - or even the agreeable nostalgia of gathering yet again around a manger with sleepy animals and a baby. Because John tells us that before we can hear this as good news, we have to take a long hard look at ourselves.

John does something else that’s disturbing to the status quo. He baptises. A dunk in the Jordan, that most symbolic of rivers because it represents the dividing line between the wilderness and the land of God’s promise. Symbolically it’s about more than just individual forgiveness, it’s a turning again of a people towards the covenant made and renewed with God, over and over again, in the desert. John dares the wrath of the temple authorities who believe that they alone have the institutional means of forgiveness. From now on, says John the Baptist, forgiveness comes wholesale. But first, repent! Repent of complacency, repent of dull acceptance, repent of heedless indifference.

This week the message gets both more personal and more urgent. God himself speaks the intimate language of comfort and reassurance – your time of heartache, your time of grief and emptiness, your time of guilt is over, I am with you in the wilderness of your life. And on the edges of our consciousness, John the Baptist picks up the challenging counterpoint – you want good news in the desert? – then be good news! If the one who is to come is going to make any difference, then we have to be ready for the Spirit of God to enter us and lay claim to our lives - and change us. John picks up correctly that the job of making a straight path in the desert, the work of preparation, is up to us. Advent is about stripping back our pretences, about preparation, purification and setting straight – both in our individual lives and in the world. You want to receive God’s message of comfort and reassurance? – then learn how to give comfort, speak tenderly, proclaim an end to others’ guilt and grief. On the second Sunday of Advent we are called back by John the Baptist to the promises of our own baptism, called to prepare the way of the Lord in silence, called to listen with one another to God’s Word, to share one another’s burdens, called to humbly wait for what God has to reveal to us.