'The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, had its beginning in this way. It was written in Isaiah the prophet: "Behold! I am sending my messenger before you to prepare your way. He is the voice of one proclaiming in the wilderness: make ready the way of the Lord; make his paths straight!"
Now it happened that John, the one baptizing in the wilderness, was proclaiming a baptism, based on repentance, for the remission of sins; and all those dwelling in Jerusalem and in the region of Judea were going out and being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. John wore a cloak of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his loins; and his food was locusts and wild honey. He said also in his proclamation: “There comes after me one that is mightier than I, the strap on whose sandals I am unworthy to undo. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
--Mark 1: 1-8 (P.H. Epps Translation)
There’s a lot of reasons why the Gospel of Mark is my favorite. My great-grandfather translated it, for one. It’s the earliest, and a great many scholars suspect, the most accurate retelling of the story of what is sometimes called the Jesus Event. Also, Mark wastes no time getting into the story; I’m probably dating myself here, but one of my favorite albums just out of high school was The Eminem Show by the rapper Eminem, and one of the first songs on the album is called "Let’s Get Down to Business." That’s Mark’s Gospel, getting right down to it because, to quote a line from that song, Mark “ain’t got no time to play around.”
Unlike the Gospels that would come later, Mark wasn’t written, at least not initially. It was a performance piece, done in the same style as the Iliad or the Odyssey. Someone would stand in the middle of a town square and shout: “Ἀρ¦χὴ τοῦ εὐ¦αγ¦γε¦λί¦ου Ἰ¦η¦σοῦ Χρι¦στοῦ.” and launched into the story. This is why Mark’s attribute – the symbol that is used to represent this Gospel – is a lion, because it begins with all the force of a roaring lion. In case you can’t tell, when it comes to talking about Mark, I can do this all day!
I find it somewhat humorous that in this week's Gospel we hear Mark start off with a proclamation that this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but we don’t actually hear from Jesus. Instead, we are introduced to John the Baptizer, a person we will learn later in the Gospel of Luke, is Jesus’ cousin, himself born to parents who had given up all hope of that ever happening. John, we’re told in these opening moments, appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance – the Greek word is metanoia, which means to turn oneself around. John was likely part of a group called the Essenes, which, like the Pharisees and Sadducees, were a group of Jews with their own ideas and practices, and in their case, they had grown weary of city life and its various corruptions, and moved into the wilderness because, after all, that’s where the Israelites had met God in the first place (remember Exodus?). The ascetic practices of the Essenees fascinated the folks left behind, and so they headed out to seek wisdom from these desert-dwellers like John, who compelled them to be baptized – the Hebrew word is mikvah, a ritual bath that cleansed a person, both on the inside and outside.
To be sure, John wasn’t exactly patient, or even friendly. Not many folks, I suspect, would want to call John the Baptizer as their Rector! He called people out for their hypocrisy and warned them against merely coasting by on what they thought to be true. But in Mark’s introduction of this itinerant preacher, there’s something that characterizes John’s proclamation to the people, and that’s hopeful anticipation. John looks ahead to the promised time of one coming who was more powerful than he, who would baptize with the Holy Spirit, as John had baptized with water.
This hopeful anticipation is a theme that runs through all of our Scriptures from this past Sunday. The despair of last week is replaced with the assurance that God’s mercy is soon to be made manifest in a fresh, new way. Isaiah writes in anticipation of the exiled Jews going home (Isaiah 40: 1-11). Several decades after Mark’s Gospel, the author of the second Letter of Peter reassures the faithful that, despite Jesus not having come back yet, God’s timing isn’t ours, and that that promised day of salvation is still on its way (II Peter 3: 8-15a). Even the Psalmist recalls God’s saving grace in the past and looks with hope for that to happen once again (Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13). This is the same hopeful anticipation that Mark’s Gospel roars at its listeners out of the gate.
Hopeful anticipation often starts small and then builds into something unstoppable. A great way I’ve seen this play out was with the 2011 revival of the musical Godspell. It was done at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City, which, as the name implies, is a theatre-in-the-round. The show opens with a moving number called Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord set out in the wilderness where John is baptizing. In the revival production, the baptismal waters were depicted as a single drop that came down from the rafters into a small pool underneath the stage’s floorboards. But as the song picked up, more and more people joined, and eventually that drop turned into a full-on waterfall by the time Jesus showed up to receive his own baptism. Hope may start small – like the lone voice of one wild man in the wilderness crying out for people to turn themselves around – but when nurtured by God it grows and grows until the point that nothing’s gonna stand in its way. That’s how hope works, and it is mighty powerful.
God knows we need some hope right now, something positive for which to anticipate. As the war between Israel and Gaza intensifies along with bigotry at home, we need some hope. As we hear news of yet another mass shooting, this one at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, we need some hope. As many of us prepare our hearts for the first Christmas without someone we love, we need some hope. Dare I say, we need a John the Baptizer to speak truth to power, to proclaim a hope that is more than surface-level and that anticipates God’s light and love breaking through.
I’d like to think the folks who went out into the wilderness to hear John went back into their city lives changed somehow, eager to prepare the way themselves. I’d like to think the same thing about us, we who are the ones to prepare for the second Advent as John did the first. How?
We are, simultaneously, the messengers and the message; as we say where I come from, you might be the only Bible anyone ever reads; for good or ill. We try to listen for what is ours to do, but it can be so very hard to hear, can’t it? Are we to take the lead now and call forth others to follow, or wait and see how things play out? Are we to lay down old expectations, old hurts and habits, in order to heed a new way, a new idea, a new message? This is discernment, the process of listening for our place, our call into something new that God is doing in our midst.
This Jesus, whom we love, for whom we listen and look, is quite fond of the new; and to be sure, the comfortable lives we’ve been living mean little when compared with whatever new hope God is bringing to life right now. How will we respond?
Prepare a path for the new, you who are inheritors of the Baptizer’s message and bearers of a newfangled one. Be submerged into the waters of hopeful anticipation cannot be quenched, that cleanse you from the inside-out. Turn yourselves around and see Jesus staring back at you, you who are a roaring lion, called to fiercely proclaim by word and example the evangelion, the good news, the Gospel, of Jesus that is coming into the world. Let’s get down to business.
