Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Advent Two, 10^th of December 2023

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

Thousands of years ago the first of the three prophets we call Isaiah looked forward to the coming of a king from the line of David: ‘For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. (Isaiah 9:6) We will hear those words at Christmas, because to the first Christians it was obvious who this Prince of Peace was. In the Gospel according to Luke we are told that the angels sang at Jesus’ birth: ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’ (Luke 2:14). Today, the second Sunday of Advent, is known as Peace Sunday because peace was one of the gifts Jesus brought with him: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you’. (John 14:27) Yet this year as I prepared the liturgy for ‘Peace Sunday’ I found myself thinking of other words Jesus was recorded to have said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword’. (Matthew 10:34) This week I asked colleagues in despair how I could possibly preach peace given what is happening in the Holy Land. One of them replied, “Preach it like fire!”

She is right, of course. When Christians light candles for hope, peace, joy, and love during Advent the smallest part of that is to celebrate the hope, peace, joy, and love that was born at Christmas. The more important reason we speak of hope, peace, joy, and love during Advent is to remind ourselves of what God intends for the world, what the world will become at the eschaton when the new heavens and a new earth are revealed, and so how it is we are to live while we wait. If Christians waited until the world was at peace before preaching peace we would have been silent for the past two thousand years. It may seem naïve and futile to preach peace in a world of war, but we are following the Apostle Paul in our naivety and futility. As he wrote to the Christians in Corinth: ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.’ (1 Corinthians 1:22-25) It was to explain the wisdom in God’s foolishness and the strength in God’s weakness that the author we know as ‘Mark’ created a whole new genre of writing some two thousand years ago – a gospel.

The Gospel according to Mark is, as I said last time we journeyed through it, the shortest of the four canonical gospels, probably the earliest, and undoubtedly the strangest. It is the most terrifying because, as Brendan Byrne writes, ‘even a casual glance at Mark takes the reader into a world inhabited by demons and malign forces with which Jesus is constantly in conflict’.[1] As we follow Jesus through this gospel he is rejected first by the Pharisees and Herodians, traditional enemies who unite against him; then by his family and the people of his home town; then by the disciples who first misunderstand and later desert him; finally even by Peter, who denies him. The story of Jesus in the Gospel according to Mark is a story of failure: by Israel, the disciples, and by Jesus himself as he dies on the cross. It ends in terror, flight, and silence, with the women running from the empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone because they are too scared to speak. And yet Mark starts his writing as we hear today, ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’.

Despite the strangeness of this gospel, despite its ending in silence and fear, Mark begins by telling his reader that what he has to share is good news. The word translated as gospel, euangelion in Greek, was used by Greek writers to describe a military victory, a royal birth or a political triumph. Mark takes it and applies it to a person. The description ‘son of a god’ was used about the emperor Augustus, adopted son of the Caesar who had been recognised as a deity by the Roman Senate after his assassination. Mark takes the title and uses it for a convicted criminal executed by the Roman state. Mark can do these things because of the most important actor in the today’s reading – God. His gospel begins not with news about a baby but with the mouth of the Lord speaking to Jesus in the words of the prophets: ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’.

We are only three verses into the gospel, and we have already been told that Jesus is ‘Christ,’ the Messiah, the Son of God, the one about whom the prophets spoke, the one who can be referred to as ‘Lord,’ a title that Jews used to translate the sacred name of God. Mark does not begin his gospel with a nativity story. There are no announcements by angels or strangers coming from afar as in Matthew and Luke’s versions. Nor does Mark begin his telling of the gospel as John does, with a great hymn to the Word through whom the whole Creation came into being. But Mark leaves us in no doubt about the importance of the One who is to come.

Before Jesus appears on the scene we meet another character, John the baptizer, the one who has come to prepare the way. He is the messenger of whom the prophets wrote, and his clothing and diet are meant to remind us of Elijah. His preaching is so successful that people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem come to him to be baptised. Yet despite his success, despite his association with the great Elijah, John speaks of himself with humility. Students might carry their teacher’s sandals as a sign of respect, but to bend down and untie them was a demeaning task never to be required of a Hebrew servant. Only a foreign slave would stoop down and untie the thong of a sandal. And yet prophetic, successful, John the baptiser says that he is unworthy to do even that for the One who is to come.

I wondered how I could preach peace when war is raging in the Holy Land. Mark was writing in just such a time of war, after the rebellion against Rome that led to the defeat and destruction of Jerusalem. It is in that context in which Mark was writing; that is why Mark’s worldview is so filled with the demonic; that is why his writing of the gospel ends with human failure. But as we see in this prologue, and as we know because we are here two thousand years after Jesus’ death, humanity was not left alone in failure and despair. Had the women truly ‘said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,’ there would be no church. Mark’s version of the gospel really ends not with those words, but with how we respond to the announcement of the young man in the white robe, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.’ Do we believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the ‘one who is more powerful than’ John the Baptist, the one who baptises us with the Holy Spirit? Can we believe that, as Mark and his community did, in a world of violence? Can we take that belief, and live lives of holiness and godliness, striving to be at peace with everyone, being peacemakers in a world of war?

The people of Israel had faced such questions centuries before Jesus was born, during the Babylonian Exile, and we know how the second of the prophets we call Isaiah answered them – with words of comfort. It may seem a little strange that the message of consolation that we hear today includes the statement that: ‘All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field’. Like the grass and the flowers people wither and fade. How is that comforting? The consolation is in what Second Isaiah says next: ‘The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever’. We ourselves, by ourselves, may be withering grass and fading flowers. We ourselves, by ourselves, may look at a world of war and pain, and struggle to see hope, peace, joy, and love. We ourselves, by ourselves, may find it impossible to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and work for peace while the nations make war. But, as Isaiah told those living in exile and Mark told those who had seen Jerusalem fall, we are not by ourselves. God is with us, and God in love has joined our lives to God’s story. The good news is that God ‘will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep’. Knowing that, that we are cradled in the loving arms of God, we can be brave enough to do anything including speaking and making peace.

If we wonder that the day of God, when the new heavens and a new earth will come and all will live in peace, is so long delayed, the author of the second letter of Peter has words of reassurance. God is not being slow; God is being patient. Last week’s passage from the Gospel according to Mark talked about God gathering the elect, suggesting that there were others who were not ‘the elect’. The week before the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew talked about the nations being divided into sheep and goats. The author of today’s epistle knows that God wants everyone to be among ‘the elect’. God does not want there to be any goats. Last week we all sang, ‘weary was our heart with waiting, and the night-watch seemed so long’. When we feel that, we should instead ‘regard the patience of the Lord as salvation’.

I want to end with one of my favourite Christmas poems, which says all this better than I could ever hope to do. You may remember it because it is one that I often include in our annual Service of Readings and Carols. It is called ‘First Coming’ and was written by Madeleine L’Engle:

He did not wait till the world was ready;
till men and nations were at peace.
He came when the Heavens were unsteady,
and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.
He came when the need was great and deep.
He dined with sinners in all their grime,
turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait until the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

[1] Brendan Byrne, A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel (2008), p. x.