2nd Sunday in Advent: Mark’s Shocking Gospel, Part 2

Continuing the journey through the first 8 verses of the Gospel of Mark:

Mark follows up on his dramatic first verse, “The beginning of the good news^* of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,”  by seeming to reach back into the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah.  He does this, but he also combines Exodus 23:20 and Malachi 3:1 with Isaiah 40:3 to get this bit of poetry:

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,^*
who will prepare your way;
³the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight” ’….

By the way, some manuscripts merely say “as it is written in the prophets,” without mentioning Isaiah specifically.  But why would Mark do this?    Whassup with Mark here?  Some things to consider:

1. Reaching back to Exodus this way links the Jesus story with the seminal story of a God-driven journey of deliverance for the Israelites out of the bondage of Egyptian slavery. The Exodus led to the all-important covenant relationship forged between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai.

2. Reaching back to Malachi tethers the narrative of Jesus and John the Baptist with the last prophetic voice recognized in the Jewish Tanakh (Tanakh=collection of scriptures categorized under torah, prophets, sacred writings).   Thus we have a continuation of the prophetic spokespeople in the Old Testament with John the Baptist, with Jesus, and perhaps even with the narrator, Mark.

I hope this is not too boring, though we may be on the edge of some sort of scholarly bludgeoning of the narrative energy in Mark.  So I’m going to switch gears a bit now as Mark tells us about John the Baptist.

John the baptizer appeared^* in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgivenss of sins.  Literally a baptism of metanoia, or turning your attention away from self and toward God.  There is a lot of action here; John is baptizing at the Jordan river, and the crowds come to him from all parts of Judea, from big city, to small village, from a Jerusalem apartment as well as a rural farm.  People were drawn to the wilderness, a place that links Mark’s story to the Old Testament stories of wilderness experiences.  John’s baptizing at the Jordan also recalls Elisha’s instructions to Naaman the Syrian to go wash in the Jordan seven times to be healed of his leprosy.

Baptism, which literally means “dunking” in Greek, is also an act grounded in the Jewish rites of purification.  In the gospel of John for instance, the water Jesus uses to make new wine is water stored expressly for purification rituals.

John reveals that he is not the main event in this unfolding drama.  In announcing that one more powerful than him is about to take the stage, John basically declares that the expected unfolding of the apocalypse–Elijah comes to prepare the way for the Messiah–is at hand. Sorry, all you folks who are hunkered down waiting for the apocalypse to happen.  In Mark we discover that the apocalypse prayed for by many a God-fearing person, had begun with the arrival of John the Baptist.  Some would say that very apocalypse is still unfolding today.

One final note about the wilderness.  In the Bible it is almost always a place where people encounter God in powerful ways.  Jesus himself is driven into the wilderness by the Spirit, so that he can take on Satan, and then be ministered to by angels.  The wilderness is a place stripped bare of all the things, activities, and people we surround ourselves with to keep us locked in on ourselves.

When I moved from Austin, Texas to a small, rural farming town in the Great Plains, I discovered that in many ways I had made a wilderness journey of my own.  There were some good aspects to this.  There were times I felt more Spirit-connected and theologically sharper because of the absence of distractions.

I also remember what one woman said during a bible study while we were reading and discussing this passage where Jesus is being driven into the wilderness.   “I feel like I live in a wilderness place,” she said.  And she didn’t say it in a condescending or negative way about the place.  Just a matter-of-fact, this is the way it is, sort of way.  She was one of my sharper students, and seemed to gain and grow from the spiritual connections offered in this rural farming community which was wilderness in so many ways.

I once thought the monastic desert hermits fled society and saw the wilderness as a place of escape.  In fact, I was amazed to learn that they deliberately went out to the desert to do combat with evil, following the model of Jesus.

In our time, it isn’t so much that we have the choice to go to the wilderness as much as it seems that the wilderness is being forced on us.  The falling elevator we call the economy is tearing people loose from much of what they’ve built up for themselves.  Jobs. Homes.  Lifestyles.   Like the Israelites of the Exodus, folks are finding themselves in a place where the journey is getting pretty tough, if not hand to mouth, and the future is uncertain, if not frightening.  Many would no doubt long to return to the way it used to be, where the perks and privileges would continue to sate their appetites like the fleshpots in Egypt.  But the stock market ticker joins the forclosure news in telling us that there may be no going back.  We’re on a journey to a new place whether we like it or not, and right now, the road map has us headed through miles and miles and miles of wilderness.  The gospel might just be that the wilderness with its hardships and sufferings need not be a bad place.  Shoot, it might even be a good place, a powerful place where we may just encounter life changing experiences that turn us away from all the forces that would deceive us and lead us down the road of death instead of life.  Repentance, Metanoia, Forgiveness.  These things, say Mark happen in a wilderness experience where the apocalypse, the revealing of God’s presence with us in history, is at hand.  This might not be such a bad journey to take after all.