Mass Readings for the 2nd Sunday in Advent:
Isaiah 40.1-5, 9-11 Psalm 85.8-13 2 Peter 3.8-14 Mark 1.1-8
John the Baptist cuts a distinctly curious and unique figure in the Bible – I struggle to think of anyone comparable, and men like Samson and the prophet Elijah come to mind, but even these don’t fit as being of his type. He’s this wild man, emerging from the desert, calling Israel to repentance; and he continues in his call to this day – he summons the Church to a renewal of herself in a fresh act of repentance; but he’s also calling to all of humanity.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder if he is too quickly dispensed with in this season of Advent, that we struggle to take him as seriously as we ought.
We need to get ready for Christmas, and John’s call to repent functions more like a starter’s pistol to launch us into the 100-meter dash to December 25th than a fire alarm that tells us we have a four-alarm blaze on our hands.
That comes of a widespread misunderstanding of repentance. It is so strongly associated in our minds with sin that we mistake John the Baptist’s cry of “repent” as a call to get to confession; and to be fair, that’s going to be part of it, but it’s much more about turning to God. For that is what repentance means, in Hebrew nacham which means to turn around, translated into the Greek of the New Testament, as some know, it’s metanoia, which means to change one’s thinking.
Too many of us don’t grasp that, but instead focus on the particular sins in our lives as what this is all about. So, we continue down the road we’ve chosen, at first, remembering to occasionally stop and turn long enough to say “Sorry, I’m so sorry” to the God from whom we are walking away. Eventually, we get so far from him, and we tire of shouting our guilt over the distance that we just forget about it, and either happily, or morosely continue on a path that at some point we begin to fear is taking us nowhere.
And these roads to nowhere are sometimes quite pleasant; yet a lot of people wander down some dark roads looking for answers, and quite a few, not watching at all where they are going, tumble down rabbit holes into bizarre worlds of human fantasy. And by that, I’m not talking about tinfoil hat conspiracy theory folks. I would assert that this is the majority of humanity, who all live in almost impermeable social and ideological bubbles that enclose them with the history they accept, the ideas they find appealing, and the theories and explanations that have them disregard what their very own eyes, and ears tell them about the road they are travelling. While the landscape grows bleak, and the vultures circle overhead, the promised land is always just over the next hill. There is disregard for the bodies strewn by the roadside, the suffering in the ranks of the multitude, yet none dare express a doubt that those at the head of this parade know where they are going.
From time to time, from Advent to Advent, out of that nowhere so many are journeying through comes the crazy man, blocking the way, shouting “repent!” and he scares the bejesus out of us. But if you’ve been on that road long enough, and indeed, convinced yourself it’s the right way in spite of any signs to the contrary, you’ve run into this before, and you know that we can and will laugh it off, and gently push him to one side and continue on our way. However, sometimes, we can have that lingering doubt, and wonder what he was on about, and why he seemed to be trying to tell us something, and trying to get us to turn around.
I know that as a child and youth, John seemed a little too crazy, a little to “on fire for the Lord” to my liking or for my comfort. He was like those street corner preachers I’d see on my family’s trips into Toronto to look at the Christmas window displays at Simpson’s department store. There they’d be, both comical and frightening to me, shouting over the traffic at those from whom they could get the slightest attention.
And John was also that scruffy bearded guy from my children’s illustrated Bible—a flea-bitten hippy, who didn’t look at all like someone I should be listening to, especially compared with Jesus. He seemed alien to that ancient world, let alone my world; an outsider then, and even more so now.
As to what he had to say, I understood him to be someone who, like those street preachers, had a simple loud and barely comprehendible message—Repent!
That is, John’s no St. Paul, a trained scholar, writing sophisticated epistles laying out a theology for a community trying to grapple with the meaning of Christ.
And yet, we know that John the Baptist had a considerable following, was a public preacher like Jesus, and like our Lord, came to be seen as a threat by those in authority. Indeed, when we look to the contemporary histories of his time, such as that of ancient Jewish historian Josephus, it’s John, and not Jesus who gets the attention.
So, there was more to John the Baptist than we might suppose. The gospels tell us that Jesus went to see him, and we can infer from the gospel account that he stayed with John for some period of time. Clearly, Jesus found there was more to John.
The historian Josephus who wrote within a hundred years of Jesus and John, tells us that the principal theme of John’s preaching was a call to righteousness and the practice of virtue toward both God and one’s fellow man. Insofar as there was a political aspect to his message, it lay in his public criticism of the ruler Herod Antipas as an immoral person. However, John was more than prepared to reconcile with Antipas if, indeed, he repented. So, the thrust of his preaching wasn’t political, it was moral, it was about a turn to God by everyone, great and small, but that had political consequences. John was telling people to stop going down the road after Herod Antipas, and many were listening, quietly turning on their heels and heading back to God, and Antipas noticed—indeed, as Josephus tells it, the beheading of John had nothing to do with a degenerate prince’s lust for his stepdaughter, but that it was just cold-blooded political calculation. So many of our leaders today share that jealousy. They try to herd us in this direction or that, and grow nasty, censorious, and authoritarian when the deeper instincts of the herd sense the danger ahead and refuse to answer even to the whip, but instead heed the Baptist’s call.
So, Jesus came to hear him; and for all appearances would have looked like a disciple of John’s. The gospel writers themselves seem to struggle with this; especially when Jesus presents himself to John for baptism, a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” as the scriptures describe it, which is superfluous for a man without sin. Yet Jesus submits to the baptism and explains it to us as being very much part of the turn to righteousness; indeed, necessary to its fulfilment.
And so, to this day, that ritual bath of baptism is part of Christian initiation despite our understanding that, as John himself put its, Christ baptizes not with water but the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says we must be born again of “water and the spirit.” Why do we need the water? Why did he retain the outward sign of water baptism when the spirit suffices? Because it is an echo from the past, it is the “baptism of repentance” incorporated into the sacrament. It is the sign of our turning, but not of our journeying to God, not of our practicing righteousness; just that we’ve turned and looked down that road to the Father’s house. We get cleaned up before we go visiting at the holidays. We shower, shave, put on that ugly Christmas sweater, but that does not magically transport us to our destination. We’ve still got to go out, clean the snow off the car, get in and make that winter drive.
We only get baptized once, but most of us, on entering the church dip our fingers in the holy water stoups by the church doors, and give ourselves a little splash in making the sign of the cross. That’s a reminder of our baptism, indeed, in the Holy Spirit, but also our heeding of the Baptist’s call. That we got cleaned up for a reason, cleaned off the car, and have our boots on. We’re to be going to God today, and not anywhere else. We are to live a life of repentance, of a constant turning toward God because the Lord knows how this life turns us around, and at times makes us dizzy.
So, let’s not think of this strictly in terms of sin, and confession and absolution, although that’s going to be part of it as long as we live in this world. Rather, it’s in remembering to turn to God always, in every decision, in every crisis, in every instance of fear or doubt or pain or joy. The road to God is by way of lives of holiness and godliness, it is the path that leads us to the very home of righteousness. We are all to be taking that road, but even more, to be making of it a highway that others might travel with us – the greatest public works project ever. And so, think of this Advent as the opening of a new road for a world that needs a new way, we are cutting the ribbon and inaugurating a new highway for our God. Amen.