Advent 2, Cycle B
In each of these texts God’s grace is proclaimed in typical Advent season form in part as a gift already received and in part as a gift anticipated for the future. In Isaiah 40:1-11, in Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, in 2 Peter 3:8-15a, and in Mark 1:1-8 the hearers of the message are urged to prepare the way for the Lord to come by repenting of their sins and by being open to the grace of God.
Isaiah 40:1-11
This text is a rich source for Advent hymns and for Advent messages. The message of comfort is especially beautiful when the word usually translated as “double” in 40:2 is expressed in English as “a doubling over,” that is as a cancellation of the record of human sin, or in other words as “forgiveness” for all of the sins of the people of Jerusalem. The idea is that it is as if God takes a paper on which all of our sins and debts are recorded, doubles it over from the bottom of the page to the top and writes “forgiven” on the part that has been doubled over. This fits the context of verses 1 and 2 and of the nature of God as proclaimed throughout the traditions that we as Christians share with Jews and with Muslims far more closely than does the translation “double,” which implies a vindictive double punishment. God is not generally presented elsewhere in our traditions as being cruelly vindictive against us in our sin, imposing a double punishment upon us as payment for our sins.
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
As in Isaiah 40:1-11, restoration is the theme here. Perhaps this psalm had its life situation during a period of suffering within the restoration of Jerusalem period, some time after 538 BCE. The salvation of the Lord God is said to be readily at hand for all who fear and respect the Lord. In both of these texts from the Older Testament, salvation is perceived primarily in terms of the community of believers here in the present situation rather than as individual salvation through a resurrection from the dead at the end of time.
2 Peter 3:8-15a
The grace of God in this text is seen in the delay of the coming of the “Day of God.” Why has the Day not come? The explanation given here is that God has waited to come so that all would have an opportunity to repent and thus avoid destruction. This document, therefore, as likely the last early Christian literature to be written, which was included within the Newer Testament canon, has a message of God’s grace that is especially appropriate for us today. For us, too, the “Day” has been delayed. What reasons do we give for this prolonged delay? What is our proper response to this delay from the perspective of our faith and of our lives?
Mark 1:1-8
Here God’s grace is expressed in a very important document with its title self-designated in its opening sentence as “The Gospel (Good News) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The “gospel” that Paul and others had earlier proclaimed about life and salvation portrayed in the death of Jesus so that our sins would die with him and of God raising Jesus from death to new life to be shared with all of us is expressed here in narrative form, a new genre of ministry of Jesus. The narrative begins with a brief account about John the Baptizer.
We see in Mark 1:2 the initial example of a literary technique used frequently in Mark, that is, the bringing together of two or more quotations from various places within the Older Testament so that in their juxtaposition they say something more than that for which they had earlier been intended. “My messenger” in Malachi 3:1 almost certainly was a reference to the prophet Malachi, whose name itself means “the messenger of me,” a messenger of God. As used in Mark 1:2, “my messenger,” “the messenger of God,” is a reference to John the Baptizer, the precursor of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. The voice in the wilderness crying out “Prepare the way of the Lord” in Isaiah 40:3 was a divine voice, an oracle, a message of a prophet from a period near 538 BCE. As used in Mark 1:3, referring to John the Baptizer, a prophetic voice from an earlier period is reapplied as a prophetic voice for a period more than five centuries later. The Markan narrative documented both the Malachi tradition and the Isaiah tradition as Isaiah tradition, unacceptable documentation by our literary standards, but not only acceptable but also very appropriate here, since from the perspective of this “Gospel” narrative all of the accepted Israelite tradition is understood as one as “Word of God.”
The Matthean and Lukan redactors “corrected” the Markan narrative by not using the Malachi tradition portion of the quotation, and most copies of the Markan text centuries after its original composition “corrected” the Markan quotation itself by changing the words “in Isaiah the prophet” to “in the prophets.” If we choose to use the earliest Markan manuscripts that are available to us, we follow the original Markan intention of attributing both quotations to Isaiah in order to make it appear that God through the “Word of God” in the Isaiah tradition was writing specifically about John the Baptizer who would appear approximately 560 years later, rather than about a historical situation at the conclusion of the Israelite exilic period. This illustrates for us that the Markan narrative, the “Gospel of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God,” is primarily a theological document; not an attempt to relate or to portray history.
Information is now accessible to us from the study of Jewish literature that John the Baptizer was not the first or the only person during his time to proclaim and to perform a “baptism for the forgiveness of sins” within a gathered eschatological community. We recognize also the theological “exaggeration” inherent in Mark that “all of the people of the Judean countryside and all of the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him.” We see that these are primarily theological statements in the narrative; not primarily historical statements. By becoming aware of this at the beginning of the Markan narrative, we are enabled to have a better understanding of the nature of the “Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The clothing and behavior of John identify him as a classic prophet, a prophet outside the central religious and political sanctuaries, similar to great “peripheral” Israelite prophets of the past such as Amos and Jeremiah. See Robert R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Fortress, 1980), for a study of these “peripheral” prophets.
In the manner in which John the Baptizer is said to have placed Jesus so much higher than himself, we see efforts of early followers of Jesus to incorporate followers of John the Baptizer into their own communities. Finally, the Mark 1:1-8 text indicates, as suggested above, that the grace of God is here experienced partially as a gift already received through the baptism by John for the forgiveness of sins and partially as a gift anticipated for the future. The latter is expressed in the reference in Mark 1:8 to Jesus as “the one who will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.” We live today in this same relative position regarding God’s grace. In part we have already received it and do receive it, and in part it is a gift still to come. That is the essence of the Advent season for us. For us, as for the members of the Markan community of faith, the benefits of the baptism of Jesus for us are still to come. The futuristic element in our Advent tradition makes the season of Advent for us each year a new exciting anticipatory experience.
