The prophet Isaiah is much heard in this Advent season, with words originally addressed to those who’d been wrenched from their homes and exiled to Babylon.   While the suffering of these exiles has much in common with the pain endured centuries before by the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, there is also a key difference.   The Bible makes it clear that the oppression Pharaoh visited on the people of Israel was unwarranted and undeserved, but the later exile was self-inflicted, and a consequence of the nation of Israel straying from God’s ways. 

These Isaiah readings are especially poignant, therefore, for those of us with pain in our lives caused by our own words or actions, who are aware of our part in broken relationships, and who in various ways live with the consequences of our frailties.  They are poignant also for communities and indeed nations suffering through their own mistakes.  To all of these, God speaks welcome words through His prophet: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people… Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.. her penalty is paid.’  

No wonder all four Gospels quote from this chapter of Isaiah, when speaking of the coming of Christ into occupied Palestine, laboring under the oppressive armies of Rome.  For all the toughness of this year, we in England have not experienced what it felt like to live in Israel when John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness.   John, of course, is no emperor or governor or ruler, but a wild man with a wild man’s clothing and diet.  But it is to John the word of God comes, and not to the occupying powers, nor to the religious leaders of Israel.

God is unpredictable, and often works through those in the wilderness, on the edge of things, who speak uncomfortable truths.  And so here is John, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  Now baptism was usually one of the rituals by which Gentiles were brought into Judaism as converts.  But these were not Gentiles John was baptising, but Jews.  John was treating Jews as though they were lost sinners, in need of salvation. 

In a time of oppression, a prophet like John might have been expected to lambast the Romans.  But here he is, telling the nation to look first not at the undoubted faults of others, but – echoes of the exile in Babylon - to what was wrong in their own lives.  And there’s more.  This repentance is by way of preparing for the coming of God, who will bring hope and salvation. 

How is this to happen?  Just eight days and two Sundays into the new Church year, we hear the opening nine verses of Mark's Gospel.  Mark gets straight to the point: the good news is bound up with the figure of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  But having said that straight out in verse one, we then hear not about Jesus, but about John the Baptist.   In both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we have two whole chapters before we get to this point in the story. 

The biblical scholar Richard Burridge has shown that in the ancient world, many biographies of famous figures began like Mark, passing over the early lives of their subjects, and moving swiftly to the hero’s arrival on the public scene. So it is that Mark's Gospel begins with Jesus’s name as he arrives, fully grown and of indeterminate age, to be baptized by John in the river Jordan.    

From the start there is a sense of urgency.  Luke’s Gospel carefully anchors his account with references to historical events and dates, while Matthew explains (at length) Jesus’s family tree.  In Mark, however, things are done differently.   Within a few verses John, who is preparing the way for his Lord, proclaims a baptism of repentance.  Only six verses further on, Jesus is uttering the first words of his public ministry; ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’.  In Mark the time is always now, and the time is urgent. 

Mark has begun his Gospel by announcing the ‘Son of God’, but we don’t discover the full meaning of this title until near the end.   As Jesus dies, abandoned and alone, a Roman centurion looks on and says, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’  This is the very first time a human being has used this phrase of Jesus, and strikingly it is not a disciple or a religious leader, but a soldier and a foreigner. 

We also learn much later in Mark, the full meaning of the baptism carried out by John.  Jesus uses baptism as a metaphor for his death, asking James and John (who want seats of honour in the coming Kingdom) if they can be baptised with the baptism he is to be baptised with – referring to the way he will be handed over to his enemies and crucified.  This is the cost of bringing good news into the world; this is what the Son of God must undergo to fulfill his mission of rescue and salvation. 

This salvation is about the healing of our hurts, and the fulfilling of our hopes.  Our situation is not Roman occupied Palestine, or contemporary Syria, but we still suffer from relationships that aren’t what they should be, patterns of living that fall short of what God requires, in a society rent with Covid related hardship and pain, and in our own ways bear the various crosses that life has dealt us.  Advent is about bringing our hurting world, and the hurts and sins in our lives, to the God who is coming soon with good news for all.  And the time is urgent, and the time is now.

The Church, and individual Christians, are frequently flawed, but nonetheless the good news of Jesus Christ offers genuine hope; hope born of costly suffering: for only so can our hurts and hearts find healing.  We are called, individually and corporately, to live lives shaped by the Kingdom Christ proclaimed. Fortunately for us, the urgency of the time is qualified by the mercy of God: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people.’

John the baptizer, the wild man of the wilderness, doesn’t come across as the merciful sort.  Fortunately John recognized the priority of Jesus Christ, who shows us mercy and compassion despite our imperfect response to his call, as this Advent he coaxes and loves us into greater faithfulness and deeper discipleship.   AMEN