Exodus All Over Again
THE SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 40:1-11 • Mark 1:1-8
Christmas shows up reliably each year on December 25th, whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or not. Easter also shows up every year, but its timing is less predictable. At least we know it’s always on a Sunday.
But even that level of certainty wasn’t locked in until three hundred years after the original resurrection of Jesus. Some Christians insisted that Easter always should be celebrated on a Sunday. Other Christians wanted to celebrate Easter on the exact same day as the Jewish Passover.
That’s because at the Passover, people retold the story of the Exodus, when God freed his people from slavery in Egypt by parting the waters of the Red Sea; when God nourished them in the wilderness, with bread from heaven and water from rock; when God gave them new ways to live in right relationship with one another.
This story set the pattern for how people expected God to act in human history. Some early Christians saw Christ’s passage from death to life as another exodus, freeing them from bondage to sin and death, nourishing them through Eucharistic bread, and leading them to life in the kingdom of justice and peace proclaimed by Jesus. Even today, we remind ourselves of this ancient connection by reading the story of the “O.Ex.”—as I’ll call the original Exodus, at our Easter Vigil service.
But the Red Sea crossing and the resurrection of Jesus aren’t the only examples of this pattern of God’s involvement in history. Today’s readings make connections between the O.Ex. and other exodus-like moments in the long story of God’s people.
The prophet who speaks in today’s reading from Isaiah describes a new exodus—not out of Egypt, but out of Babylon, where the people of Judah had been deported years before. When the voice of God says in today’s reading, “speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” it isn’t referring to Jerusalem’s actual occupants at the time. “Jerusalem” in this prophecy means God’s displaced people after the invasion of their homeland. The prophet gives these people hope of living again in a place of freedom and safety.
But between their place of exile and this longed-for home, between Babylon and Jerusalem, stood a wilderness of mountain ranges and gorges. A voice cries out to make a road in this wilderness—to pave an interstate, basically—that would smooth people’s long journey. Just as God once cleared a way to freedom through the Red Sea, this time the prophet calls for a way through a dangerous desert.
The author of Mark’s gospel also knew this pattern of God’s actions in history, and in this gospel, John the Baptist launches a new exodus. By this point in history, Judah was occupied territory. So this time, the people’s exodus—their “going out”—doesn’t move them toward Judah and Jerusalem; it calls them out from Judah and Jerusalem. The freedom that John the Baptist promises isn’t freedom from slavery in Egypt or exile in Babylon or even from Roman occupation alone, but from sin. (The gospel’s word for “forgiveness” here actually means “release” or “setting free.”) God sustains John the Baptist in the wilderness not with manna, but with locusts and wild honey. The people don’t cross the Red Sea, but they bathe in the Jordan, as they confess and are freed.
Today’s gospel gets this pattern so right. John the Baptist prepares a way forward for God’s people at a specific point in time, but following an enduring pattern. But there’s even better news in this gospel for us to hear, two thousand or so years later. That good news is this: even if our Scriptures get some things wrong over the years, faithful people still can get this pattern right.
Mark’s gospel does get some things wrong. If you listened carefully this morning, you may have caught an inconsistency between our first reading and our last. Our first reading, ascribed to the prophet Isaiah, describes a voice that cries out to prepare a way in the wilderness. But our gospel, which claims to quote Isaiah, describes a voice “crying out in the wilderness” to prepare a way. So, which thing is “in the wilderness”—is only the way in the wilderness, or is the voice in the wilderness crying out for a way?
In fact, the original text, according to the Hebrew Bible, describes a voice in the heavenly council calling for a way to be prepared down in the wilderness, so that people could escape from Babylon and find their way home to Judah. Over time, though, as the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek and also passed down by word of mouth, these words were misunderstood. Mark thought that the wilderness was the place where the voice cried out, rather than just the place where the way should be prepared.
Mark also made other mistakes. The quote that he says comes from the prophet Isaiah is actually a cluster of verses found in several biblical books. The bit about “I am sending a messenger ahead of you” comes from the book of Exodus, and the part about “who will prepare your way” is closest to the prophet Malachi (who also quotes Exodus).
Technically, even the part that is found in the Greek translation of the book of Isaiah—that is, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”—comes from an anonymous prophet who today we just call “Second Isaiah.” The first Isaiah threatened and condemned the inhabitants of Jerusalem before their deportation; but the second so-called “Isaiah” offered hope and consolation—and much better poetry—to people living in exile.
Later evangelists and scribes corrected some of Mark’s misunderstandings. Matthew’s gospel separates this cluster of verses, ascribing only the voice-in-the-wilderness part to Isaiah and saying vaguely of the rest, “it is written,” but it doesn’t say where.
Later manuscripts of Mark’s gospel changed the words “written in the prophet Isaiah” to the more open-ended “written in the prophets.” Scribes and copyists knew that Mark had made a mistake in assigning verses from Exodus and Malachi to Isaiah, so they tried to straighten things out.
But today’s reading from Mark, mistakes and all, bears witness to something powerful about the God we can rely on to act in our time. Mark misquoted, misattributed, and to some degree misunderstood a few Bible verses. In spite of that, Mark distilled for us a clear pattern. Mark combined a verse from the story of the very first Exodus with words from Second Isaiah, who saw God repeating the exodus by leading people home from exile. And Mark described the ministry of John the Baptist, and the coming of Jesus, as another exodus as well.
A faith based on patterns like this can avoid the pitfalls of a faith based on ancient words alone. A faith based on patterns can stay strong and clear. This faith is durable—and adaptable to new times and places. Knowing the pattern of liberation, sustenance, and new ways of life can help us to hear and respond more confidently to the prophetic cries of our time.
Knowing this exodus pattern, we can learn to see even the unexpected for what it is: God’s way of showing up in real time, meeting us where we are, giving us at least what we need, and guiding us safely through harsh territory. And, by some intersection of God’s grace with precarious history, some of us—like the elderly St. Simeon beholding the infant Jesus over in the gospel of Luke—some of us may be so blessed as to enter realms we’ll scarcely believe we lived to see.
© 2020 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas