Who Needs Good News?
THE SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 40:1-11 • Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 • 2 Peter 3:8-15a • Mark 1:1-8
In 1864, the Radical Democracy Party nominated John C. Frémont as their candidate for the highest office in the land. Frustrated by Abraham Lincoln’s promise to reconcile with the southern states once the Civil War was over, the hardline abolitionists’ choice of Frémont was as incendiary as it was strategic. Frémont had previously been appointed by Lincoln as commander of the Department of the West—a prestigious military post, which Frémont then squandered by overplaying his anti-slavery tactics. After declaring martial law in all of Missouri, promising to arrest and execute any civilian found to have secessionist sympathies, and declaring the emancipation of all enslaved persons within the state two years before Lincoln himself issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frémont was relieved of his command.
When President Lincoln got word that his irascible former general had been nominated by a convention attended by only four hundred delegates, Lincoln responded by appealing to the Good Book. Quoting a passage about David running from King Saul in 1 Samuel 22, the President said, “And everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.” It was a clever way to disparage not only Frémont but also the ragtag group of disaffected Republicans that supported him, but one wonders whether likening Frémont to David, who later defeated Saul and became Israel’s greatest king, was a wise choice for a biblical allusion.
At the very beginning of Mark’s gospel account, the gospel writer quotes Isaiah 40: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” In fact, all four gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—use these words from the prophet Isaiah to define the theological content of John the Baptist’s prophecy. He was, in their understanding, the one who prepared the way of the Lord and made his paths straight. But I wonder, two thousand years later, whether we rightly remember what those words meant to Jesus and his contemporaries. To really understand the original biblical allusion, we have to go back even further, about five hundred forty years before Jesus’ birth, and not to Israel but to Babylon, where God’s people lived in exile.
At that time, God’s people were desperate for some good news. For sixty years, they had suffered under the tyranny of the Babylonian king. Jerusalem had been ransacked by invaders. The holy temple had been destroyed. The people had been carted off in captivity. Their leaders had been executed. The calamity that befell them was not only political and economic but also theological. How could they continue to believe in the God of their ancestors if that God had failed them so completely? Who could make sense of what had happened without abandoning the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel?
Into that theological void, the prophets had spoken. Prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Obadiah, had helped God’s people recognize that it was not God who had abandoned them but their leaders who had given up on God and God’s ways generations earlier. The only language the prophets could find to explain how their God had allowed such a disaster to occur was language of judgment and condemnation. God’s people had gone astray, so God punished them severely. But, after sixty years of total humiliation, God’s people had heard enough of that. They were tired of the children’s teeth being set on edge because their parents had eaten sour grapes. Something had to change. A new theology was needed.
Like a gentle breeze blowing across their face after a summer storm had passed, the prophet Isaiah brought words of consolation to God’s people: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” At last, God’s word to God’s people was, “Comfort.” The debt of their sins had been paid, including the interest that was due. God was prepared to do a new thing, and that meant salvation for God’s people.
Now the time had come for God’s people to make a highway through the wilderness—a wide and impressive boulevard like those they had seen in Babylon, but this highway would stretch through the desert places so that it might reach God’s people in their distress. For decades, they had seen their captors parade their gods up and down the city’s streets in festal processions designed to celebrate the enthronement of their deities, but now the God of their ancestors would come and reveal God’s glory—God’s magnificence and might—so that all people would see it together—so that no one would mistake which God was really in charge.
A voice said to the prophet, “Cry out!” And the prophet said, “What shall I cry? What words could I possibly say to help my people believe again—to help them have hope again?” And the voice replied, “Say that all people are grass. Remind them that, though the grass withers and the flower fades, the word of our God will stand forever. Help them see that the empire which surrounds them is here today but gone tomorrow. Tell them that their God is coming to save them and that God will lead them like a shepherd, feeding his flock with justice and gathering the lambs in his bosom and leading them so gently that even a nursing ewe can keep up.”
A half of a millennium later—after about as much time as has passed since European settlers came to this continent—God’s people were again surrounded by imperial oppressors, and the good news of Jesus Christ began to unfold with the proclamation of John the Baptist. This was God’s consolation for God’s people. Again, they were desperate for some good news, and this time it sounded like this: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
John went out into the wilderness, clothed in the prophet’s garments of camel skins and a leather belt, eating the uncivilized food of locusts and wild honey, in order to prepare a highway on which God’s people would encounter their savior. John knew that it was in the desert places, apart from the structures and institutions of the empire, out where the wounded and brokenhearted people had gathered, where God would again come to God’s people. That’s because, whenever God saves us, it is always an act of disruption—an unsettling of the status quo that has imprisoned us. And that means that the highway we must travel in order to find our savior is always the road of repentance.
Two thousand years later, we must be sure that we are hearing the biblical allusion in the right way. We must hear the invitation to repent with the same spirit of comfort and hopefulness that John the Baptist invoked two thousand years ago. It is no accident that all four gospel accounts link Isaiah’s message of comfort with John’s baptism of repentance. Repentance doesn’t mean enduring the harsh words of judgment and condemnation. It means turning away from them because they no longer have any authority in our lives.
Repentance is that great and hopeful disruption of our lives which our souls crave. Repentance is the food of the anxious spirit, the balm of the grieving countenance, the light of the wayward conscience. Repentance is daring to believe that God can and will come to save us even though the world wants us to think that God’s salvation has passed us by. Repentance means turning aside to find the one who comes to rescue us. It means believing that God’s words of comfort and reassurance are meant for each one of us. Surely that is good news that we, too, are desperate to hear.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas