Admittedly, it is an evangelical understatement
to suggest that
he is not an especially attractive character.
That assessment is confirmed by the fact
that probably none of you have a John the Baptist figure
as part of your lawn decorations …
as he’d repel the carolers and frighten the children.
But he does so not because of his celebrated and bizarre costume,
or at least not only because of it.
Actually, it is more about his attitude than his attire.
The disruptively honest Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way: “Everything I know about him makes me think
I would have gone out of my way not to see him.
He sounds too much like those street evangelists
who wave their bibles at you and tell you
that you are going straight to hell
if you do not repent now.”
However, as she continues, there is one big difference
between your bible thumping street evangelist and John.
She writes:
“[S]elf-appointed prophets tend to plant themselves right in your way, so you have to cross to the other side of the street to avoid them. They get in your face and dare you to ignore them.
[However, she continues], John planted himself in the middle of nowhere. He set up shop in the wilderness and anyone who wanted to hear what he had to say had to go to a lot of trouble to get there, borrowing the neighbor’s donkey or setting out on foot with enough water for the journey, which led down lonely trails infested with bandits.”[i]
Why would somebody expend that kind of energy,
especially if they lived in Jerusalem?
The Temple was there, with its Holy of Holies
crawling with priests and Levites and
filled with gift shops where you could buy turtle doves
or whatever else you needed for an important sacrifice.
Why take a chance on a crazy man
who could only be reached
after a risky trek into the wilderness?
In view of the eccentric, even unsavory nature of this prophet
it is fair to ask why Mark, in the first place,
features him so prominently
right at the start of his gospel …
actually right at the start of all the gospels
since Mark actually invented the genre.
And straight-to-the-point-Mark, doesn’t even cushion
John bulldozing his way into the gospel spotlight
with a gentle preamble or cautionary word.
Rather, this literary pioneer matches John’s abrupt entrance
with an equally abrupt and quite unimaginative opening:
“the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the son of God.”
No elegant genealogy as in Matthew.
No friend-to-friend introduction as in Luke.
No hymning of the Word as in John.
One commentator bluntly remarked:
“what a lame opening …
like he couldn’t get any more creative than saying
‘this is the beginning?’”
Is that really going to spark enough interest
for reading the rest of the tale?
On the other hand, if we chance a trek into the mystery,
we might discover that Mark is not the inept scribe
that he might first appear to be,
and instead is a very astute theologian
and a gifted student of scripture.
While easy to miss, Mark is actually in creation mode here,
mimicking key elements from the first chapter of Genesis.
In narrating the creation of the world, the Genesis author
also begins with the obvious, announcing: “in the beginning.”
The world is then described as formless and empty
with the Spirit of God hovering over the deep.
The morally formless and spiritual empty world for Mark
is symbolized by that distant wilderness
where God’s Spirit hovers over the unlikely prophet.
And just as the creation in Genesis begins with a voice –
the voice of God saying let there be light –
so Mark’s proclamation of the creation of a new kingdom
also begins with a voice:
first that of the ancient diviner Isaiah
and then that of the newly minted truth teller John:
prophetic words preparing the way
for the Word made flesh.
It’s more than a cliché to suggest that the Advent season
is a time of waiting: temporal waiting for December 25th
and spiritual waiting for Christ’s return at the end of time.
What happens, however, if we take Mark’s lead,
follow the crazy man into the wilderness,
and grasp Advent not as an interlude of waiting
but as a season of creation,
a sacred opportunity for a fresh genesis:
birthing new separations of light from darkness,
conceiving the formless and foreboding
as joyously remade into an arena of kinship
in which the vision of today’s Psalm comes to pass
so that kindness and truth actually meet
and a world of justice embraces peace.
A number of years ago I read Jack Miles’ audacious and
Pulitzer prize-winning book: God: A Biography.
While Miles does have Roman academic credentials,
alum status from Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages from Harvard,
this publication is not so much theology as biography
in which Miles uses the Hebrew Scriptures
for writing about God as an historical character
continuously evolving, morphing, and developing.
Biblical scholars universally agree
that the passage we get from Isaiah today, chapter 40,
is actually one of many “in the beginning” parts of the bible.
Known as Second Isaiah, it was written
by a different prophet and at a different time,
distinctive from the first 39 chapters of this book.
Now I know that brings you to the edge of your pew.
But, unlike some of my preaching there is actually a point here,
and it comes from Jack Miles who suggests
that, in this new beginning, this new Isaiah,
there is a fresh creation …
but surprisingly it is not a creation by God but of God
who, for the first time,
reveals himself as a passionate lover of humanity.[ii]
As Miles contends, until this point in scripture,
“The Lord God has never loved.
Love has never been predicated of him in the text
Either as an action or as a motive ….
He has been wrathful, vengeful, remorseful … fiercely loyal …
But these emotions fall well short of love.”
This is especially revealed in Second Isaiah’s unexpected
“comfort language,” which no one was quite prepared for,
but which George Frideric Handel capitalized upon
in his celebrated Oratorio the Messiah.
The Lord God has never spoken of comfort before,
but apparently, in Second Isaiah,
the Godhead has actually awoken to human pain.
While in some ways, the world might feel
like we are still at the beginning of it all –
with the globe a formless and uninhabitable void
of chaos and war
of greed, prejudice and exclusion –
the prophetic duo of Second Isaiah and John the Baptizer
rejects that gloomy assessment-
as long as we take up the creative work,
engage in gospel comfort and care,
and recognize that this and every moment
in the life of a Christian is, as Mark so wisely noted:
“The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel often told the story:
“[There once was a] small kingdom whose only industry was agriculture. Everyone was happy and had plenty to eat – until one year, it was discovered to everyone’s horror, that something terrible had gone wrong with that year’s crops, and anyone who ate them went insane. The kingdom was in an uproar. So the monarch hurriedly gathered all her wise counselors who proposed this solution: “All the people will eat the crazy-making crop, but 12 people will be set aside, who will only eat the old crop now in storage. The twelve will serve the very important function of reminding the rest of us that we are, indeed, crazy.”
I would contend that John the Baptist was the first of those twelve.
He’s not the crazy one … He just looks crazy to us …
because so many of us are eating the crazy-making crops:
the crops that keep us from conducting ourselves
in holiness and devotion, as our second reading stresses,
the crops that inhibit us from the genesis work of beginning again “The gospel according to Jesus Christ” in our own lives.
As God’s spirit brooded over the unformed earth,
over the wilderness of ancient Israel,
she broods over our city, country, and mother earth as well,
searching for co-creators in shaping a just global village,
a peaceable kingdom,
and an unbreakable kinship
that binds us together in God’s prophetic comfort,
God’s tender care,
Through Christ our Lord.
[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way (Cambridge-Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), 11-12.
[ii] Jack Miles, God: a biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 237ff.