December 10, 2023

Advent 2, Year B

The Gospel of Mark promises to be good news, and then it rather tests our patience, as we wait for that good news to make itself clear. Maybe Mark is having a bit of a joke at our expense? After all, this Gospel begins with a wild-eyed prophet in the wilderness, preaching repentance and the coming of the Messiah. It ends with both the prophet and the Messiah murdered by the authorities, and with no clear path forward for those who believed in the movement they began. There is some good news along the way, especially for those who are broken in body or spirit, but there is also pervasive conflict and a gathering storm of betrayal and inevitable death.

So what is Mark getting at when he calls this story good news? To answer this, as Julie Andrews might advise, let’s start at the very beginning, a very nice place to start.

You’ll notice that there is no preamble in Mark, no annunciation to the Virgin Mary, no nativity story. Mark’s Gospel begins with a nod to the prophet Isaiah and then immediately plunges us into the ministry of John the Baptist, a ministry focused on preparing the way for the Jesus, the one who is to come.

Perhaps most striking of all, this opening passage reminds us of an enduring truth, revealed time and again in many parts of Scripture: The Good News begins in the wilderness.

Most of us have some funny ideas about wilderness. In a world as urbanized and technologized as ours, we often long for wilderness, watching nature shows on TV and arranging vacations that take us as far away from the hustle and bustle as we can afford to get. Wilderness is seen as something pristine, something valuable and worth preserving. A lot of wilderness spaces today are the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and privileged, who can indulge in glamping expeditions and the best high-tech gear and clothing that money can buy.

Wilderness is valuable to us precisely because it has become so rare; as humanity’s reach has spread farther and farther into what used to be remote places, those of us seeking the beauty and peace we associate with wilderness have to work harder and harder to find it.

For people in the time of Jesus and John the Baptist, wilderness meant something else entirely. To a people who made their home in a desert region, it was wilderness that threatened to encroach on cultivated, civilized spaces, not the other way around. A great city like Jerusalem was the rarity; most people lived rural or semi-nomadic lives, where a tent and a campfire might be the only thing standing between you and the vast and menacing wilderness that was all around.

It follows, then, that John the Baptist, in choosing to go out into the wilderness, was not seeking adventure or the chance to soak in a beautiful landscape. This was no escape from reality, but rather a plunge into its depths. John was deliberately putting himself in a risky situation. His location in the wilderness is a sign, a signal to those who follow him that he is throwing himself entirely on God’s mercy. He wears the most basic clothing possible—no high-tech performance fabrics for him!—and eats the little that he can forage for himself. Locusts and honey are subsistence foods, requiring neither cultivation nor community effort of any kind to procure or prepare. You can survive on them, in a pinch, but they’re not exactly filling. His diet, his clothing, and most of all his location are witness to his utter reliance on God.

John’s emphasis on repentance is also appropriate for a wilderness location. Even for us today, time in the wilderness is seen as a kind of spiritual re-set. The lack of creature comforts and the smallness that we often feel in the face of nature can help us put things into perspective. Repentance requires that shift in perspective, helping us see patterns and habits in new ways, recognizing how they no longer serve us, or how they might be getting in the way of a relationship with God. Without that re-set, we are usually too comfortable sticking with our usual ways, even when they are far from healthy or fulfilling.

Of course, many of us know all too well that you don’t have to leave civilization to find yourself in a spiritual wilderness—in fact, you don’t even have to leave your house. The first several months of the pandemic were a kind of collective wilderness experience, even when we were in lockdown and couldn’t go anywhere. Grief can feel like a wilderness that you have to navigate alone, no matter how many people indicate they have walked that road before you.

Times of loss, disruption, upheaval: all of those can be feel like a time in wilderness. They can be frightening and uncomfortable, but they can also be opportunities. They help us, sometimes in painful and awful ways, find out what we can and can’t live without, what is truly essential, and what endures after “everything else has been worn away by sand and stone” and glaring sun, to paraphrase the poet Jan Richardson. Perhaps nobody wants lessons like these, but nonetheless they happen to us all sooner or later. Advent is a time that asks us to honor these hard-won lessons, now etched on our hearts, even if they make us look weak or vulnerable to the rest of the world.

Scholar and writer Kate Bowler has written a blessing that seems especially appropriate for Advent, or any time that we are beckoned into the wilderness.

Blessed are we, the incomplete
standing at the edge of what could be,
in this perpetual season of waiting
and looking and longing
for the fulfillment of hope.
Blessed are we, the restless
grieving what’s over, but isn’t done
what is gone, but isn’t finished. […]

Blessed are we who suddenly find
that while we weren’t looking,
the Lord appeared saying,
“Peace, be still.”

This is the clearing
where the light shines through,
where the new can begin.
Never doubt it.
God is writing you into the story
of the world’s healing.
And your own.

Advent asks us to journey into the wilderness precisely so we can find that clearing, that place where the light shines through and our faith and hope are renewed.

It is there that we will find our Good News. The Good News that God has promised to lead us through the wilderness, to be with us on our journey, and even to gather us in his arms and carry us to safety. The Good News that salvation is very near to us, and peace will be a pathway for our feet. The Good News that God has prepared a way for us, and that way is known as Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. The Good News that soon the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people shall see it together. Amen.

• Quote from Jessica Richie and Kate Bowler, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Lives (Convergent Books, 2023), 188.