Preparing the way of the Lord: It’s No Party!
Mark 1:1-8
1:1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 1:2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; 1:3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'" 1:4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 1:5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 1:6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 1:7 He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 1:8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
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These verses tell me that preparing for the Lord doesn’t involve a party. We don’t have a “Jesus Shower” where we come together and play party games and exchange fun gifts. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good party. Jesus, I believe, is known to have enjoyed the company of His friends, and gone to at least one wedding party. But, I think these verses point to the fact that our faith is no frivolous matter. Because it’s about life itself. And, we need to remember that as we go about these “in-between times,” waiting for the second coming of our Lord.
The central figure in today’s Gospel passage, John, was not wearing a party hat, but he “was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” The writer of this Gospel probably wanted to invoke the image of Elijah among his Jewish readers. They believed that Elijah would come again, before the Messiah appeared. But, this is probably lost on most modern, Gentile readers. Still, the image of John the baptist is evocative. It’s wild. (The honey he ate wasn’t neatly packaged in a bottle.) The narrative is even set in the wilderness, or desert, depending on your translation. John the Baptist’s dress sense is an affront to our civilized fashion sensibilities. The scene of preparation and the protagonist of preparation are both discomforting. This is not a lovely, domesticated, Hallmark-card. It is neither fun nor reassuring. Withering heat, dust, toil and tears of frustration, withering exertion and inhospitable surroundings all come to mind, as we consider this image of a man “crying out in the wilderness.”
Rightly so, I think. And that should tell us something about the practice of our faith. I really don’t think we can prepare adequately for the Lord in a comfortable, controlled, easy environment. Such a surrounding doesn’t easily lend itself to seeking the Lord with all of our heart, and soul and mind, and neither does it encourage depending on Him. How many of us prepare ourselves for the Lord in earnest, when we’re coasting in a comfortable, easy life, where we are in complete control of our destiny? At some point in our faith lives, if we are to be truly prepared for the Lord Jesus Christ, I believe, we need time in the “wilderness” or desert: a place where we cannot make it on our own, we simply have to depend on the Lord; a place of struggle which focuses our thoughts entirely on Him; a place of starkness, where there is little to distract us from listening to Him. It isn’t necessarily a place where we will not falter, but, rather, one where, even our faltering steps “make straight” the Way of the Lord. We are called to trust Him (rather than our own direction) and depend on Him (rather than on our own resources).
To get a sense of how this might be, we can look at the people of Israel wandering in the desert for forty years, enduring hardship, completely dependent on God for food and water, for their very survival. There, they saw His power in unmistakable ways, and heard His voice in distinctive tones. There, they received the Ten Commandments, divine instruction about living in a way that pleases God. In that place, and through that time, God’s people were disciplined – sometimes harshly – in order to be cleansed of sin and brought back to the Lord. In the wilderness, through the experience of sin and judgment and God’s mercy and provision and grace, they came to know Him intimately. Before they reached the Promised Land, they learned to trust the Lord in the desert, developing a living relationship with Him. It was an unforgettable, and those who lived to tell the tale, conveyed it to generation after generation, as a building-block of faith.
And, so it will be, I believe, in our wilderness of preparation. If we resist it, if we refuse to leave our comfort zones, I think we will be the poorer for it. It doesn’t affect our salvation, but I do believe it will impair the relationship we have with the Lord; impair the level of intimacy we share with the One whom we love because He first loved us.
Listen to what God says to the Israelites, when they entered the wilderness of Sinai,: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” (Exodus 19: 4) There they were in the harsh Sinai desert, not knowing the way forward, or how they were going to make it, and God was saying in that place that He had brought them to Himself! And hear Moses song about their time in the desert: “[God] sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.” (Deuteronomy 32: 10)
What a moving, faith-enhancing experience to find yourself guarded and taken care of as the apple of God’s eye! Perhaps, this is why He gives us a wilderness time. Perhaps it is only in complete dependence on the Almighty that we discover, unmistakably, that He is faithful and that His love steadfast.
So, I don’t think it’s any accident that the place of preparation for the Lord Jesus Christ is one that requires utter dependence on the Lord. And, that’s where we find ourselves in this Gospel reading.
We see that preparing for the Lord is no party. The people here are listening to the word of the Lord, proclaimed by John the Baptist. Preparing requires the hard work of making (presumably crooked) paths straight. I get the feeling that John’s entire ministry of preparation made people uncomfortable with the way they were – so uncomfortable, in fact, that they recognized that they needed God, and decided to change their lives to please Him.
John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and they heard and, repentant, came to him to be baptized, confessing their sins in the wilderness. And so it must be for us.
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Mark, shows requires repentance – an often painful process of changing one’s heart and mind, cleansing one’s soul, and changing the direction of our lives and deliberately turning to the Lord. The good news is that it leads to the forgiveness of sins.
All this makes quite an impression on me because it is so different from comfortable church-going that leads to a self-congratulating Christianity! So if the place of preparation is harsh and the work of preparation is difficult, even painful, why bother? I mean, really. Why not just seek the “good life” and stay comfortable and “pursue happiness”?
Here’s where it comes down to Jesus Christ. And that’s why, right up front, Mark says that this is about the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It’s about Him. We’re getting ready for Jesus. Either He means something to us, and makes the preparation worth it, or else, we’ll shrug our shoulders and go do something fun. But if following the Lord Jesus Christ is what we want to do with our lives, then we pay attention, because we want to prepare for Him. And, I believe, if we’ve encountered the incomparable, living Lord Jesus, if we’ve had an inkling of how much He loves us, if we’ve experienced His love for us and know the joy of His presence, then we really would want to prepare for Him…even if it means going through the struggle of the wilderness.
Can you think of a time you’ve prepared for the arrival of someone you love, and do you remember all the work you put into it because you thought it was worth it? Maybe you didn’t even think about it as work, because the focus was on the arrival of that beloved person, whether a child, a spouse, or a friend or family member. How can we be any less willing to do the required thing to prepare for Jesus?
In this reading, Jesus is conspicuous by His absence. That's striking to me. Yet, the preparation is undeniably about His coming, and you have to trust that it will be so. The good news is that (a few verses later in Mark’s Gospel) Jesus does come and, significantly, I think, to that very place of struggle and repentance in the desert. And, did you notice that this particular place and time of preparation isn’t even the beginning of this deliverance? Mark goes back in history, pointing to Isaiah’s prophesy. Way back when. Here is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ: A God-ordained timeless seam, where a remembered past, a paradoxical present, and a hopeful future converge. God acting mysteriously. People waiting. People trusting. People sustained by God’s word… and divine hope.
Please don’t miss the hope that is present in preparation. It’s not obvious, but it’s there. John baptizes by the Jordan River. That’s significant because the waters of the Jordan, by the shores of this desert place, point to God-given refreshment. Moreover, the Jordan inspires hope because it brings to mind the fact that, after years of enduring the wilderness, the people of Israel crossed over the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. That divine hope washes ashore on this wilderness of preparation.
How good it is to know that just like God brought the people of Israel “to Himself” in the Sinai desert, Jesus will bring us to Himself in our desert wanderings! Do you know Jesus Christ as the Beloved? Do you realize that you are His beloved? Something about being out in the wilderness and enduring for so long, in company with God, made Moses feel like the apple of God’s eye! Perhaps the experience is designed for just that kind of understanding about God’s love for you and me. God is crazy about us! And He wants us to know it, and to enter into a relationship with Him through His Son.
And, unlike this time and place in Mark’s Gospel, the Holy Spirit is with us. That’s good news! We are closer to the fulfillment of the good news of Jesus Christ, than to the beginning. We have been baptized with the Holy Spirit! So, while the Lord is physically absent, in our times of preparation, we are enlivened by His mystical, powerful presence.
If we love the Lord Jesus Christ and want to be His faithful followers, then let’s not despise the wilderness experience of our lives…
…It prepares us for the One Who’s crazy about us; making us fully fit for Him. And we might discover, to our great delight, that we are, indeed, the apple of of our Lord's eye!
May it be so. Amen.
1:1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 1:2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; 1:3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'" 1:4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 1:5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 1:6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 1:7 He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 1:8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
-------------------------------------
These verses tell me that preparing for the Lord doesn’t involve a party. We don’t have a “Jesus Shower” where we come together and play party games and exchange fun gifts. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good party. Jesus, I believe, is known to have enjoyed the company of His friends, and gone to at least one wedding party. But, I think these verses point to the fact that our faith is no frivolous matter. Because it’s about life itself. And, we need to remember that as we go about these “in-between times,” waiting for the second coming of our Lord.
The central figure in today’s Gospel passage, John, was not wearing a party hat, but he “was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” The writer of this Gospel probably wanted to invoke the image of Elijah among his Jewish readers. They believed that Elijah would come again, before the Messiah appeared. But, this is probably lost on most modern, Gentile readers. Still, the image of John the baptist is evocative. It’s wild. (The honey he ate wasn’t neatly packaged in a bottle.) The narrative is even set in the wilderness, or desert, depending on your translation. John the Baptist’s dress sense is an affront to our civilized fashion sensibilities. The scene of preparation and the protagonist of preparation are both discomforting. This is not a lovely, domesticated, Hallmark-card. It is neither fun nor reassuring. Withering heat, dust, toil and tears of frustration, withering exertion and inhospitable surroundings all come to mind, as we consider this image of a man “crying out in the wilderness.”
Rightly so, I think. And that should tell us something about the practice of our faith. I really don’t think we can prepare adequately for the Lord in a comfortable, controlled, easy environment. Such a surrounding doesn’t easily lend itself to seeking the Lord with all of our heart, and soul and mind, and neither does it encourage depending on Him. How many of us prepare ourselves for the Lord in earnest, when we’re coasting in a comfortable, easy life, where we are in complete control of our destiny? At some point in our faith lives, if we are to be truly prepared for the Lord Jesus Christ, I believe, we need time in the “wilderness” or desert: a place where we cannot make it on our own, we simply have to depend on the Lord; a place of struggle which focuses our thoughts entirely on Him; a place of starkness, where there is little to distract us from listening to Him. It isn’t necessarily a place where we will not falter, but, rather, one where, even our faltering steps “make straight” the Way of the Lord. We are called to trust Him (rather than our own direction) and depend on Him (rather than on our own resources).
To get a sense of how this might be, we can look at the people of Israel wandering in the desert for forty years, enduring hardship, completely dependent on God for food and water, for their very survival. There, they saw His power in unmistakable ways, and heard His voice in distinctive tones. There, they received the Ten Commandments, divine instruction about living in a way that pleases God. In that place, and through that time, God’s people were disciplined – sometimes harshly – in order to be cleansed of sin and brought back to the Lord. In the wilderness, through the experience of sin and judgment and God’s mercy and provision and grace, they came to know Him intimately. Before they reached the Promised Land, they learned to trust the Lord in the desert, developing a living relationship with Him. It was an unforgettable, and those who lived to tell the tale, conveyed it to generation after generation, as a building-block of faith.
And, so it will be, I believe, in our wilderness of preparation. If we resist it, if we refuse to leave our comfort zones, I think we will be the poorer for it. It doesn’t affect our salvation, but I do believe it will impair the relationship we have with the Lord; impair the level of intimacy we share with the One whom we love because He first loved us.
Listen to what God says to the Israelites, when they entered the wilderness of Sinai,: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” (Exodus 19: 4) There they were in the harsh Sinai desert, not knowing the way forward, or how they were going to make it, and God was saying in that place that He had brought them to Himself! And hear Moses song about their time in the desert: “[God] sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.” (Deuteronomy 32: 10)
What a moving, faith-enhancing experience to find yourself guarded and taken care of as the apple of God’s eye! Perhaps, this is why He gives us a wilderness time. Perhaps it is only in complete dependence on the Almighty that we discover, unmistakably, that He is faithful and that His love steadfast.
So, I don’t think it’s any accident that the place of preparation for the Lord Jesus Christ is one that requires utter dependence on the Lord. And, that’s where we find ourselves in this Gospel reading.
We see that preparing for the Lord is no party. The people here are listening to the word of the Lord, proclaimed by John the Baptist. Preparing requires the hard work of making (presumably crooked) paths straight. I get the feeling that John’s entire ministry of preparation made people uncomfortable with the way they were – so uncomfortable, in fact, that they recognized that they needed God, and decided to change their lives to please Him.
John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and they heard and, repentant, came to him to be baptized, confessing their sins in the wilderness. And so it must be for us.
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Mark, shows requires repentance – an often painful process of changing one’s heart and mind, cleansing one’s soul, and changing the direction of our lives and deliberately turning to the Lord. The good news is that it leads to the forgiveness of sins.
All this makes quite an impression on me because it is so different from comfortable church-going that leads to a self-congratulating Christianity! So if the place of preparation is harsh and the work of preparation is difficult, even painful, why bother? I mean, really. Why not just seek the “good life” and stay comfortable and “pursue happiness”?
Here’s where it comes down to Jesus Christ. And that’s why, right up front, Mark says that this is about the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It’s about Him. We’re getting ready for Jesus. Either He means something to us, and makes the preparation worth it, or else, we’ll shrug our shoulders and go do something fun. But if following the Lord Jesus Christ is what we want to do with our lives, then we pay attention, because we want to prepare for Him. And, I believe, if we’ve encountered the incomparable, living Lord Jesus, if we’ve had an inkling of how much He loves us, if we’ve experienced His love for us and know the joy of His presence, then we really would want to prepare for Him…even if it means going through the struggle of the wilderness.
Can you think of a time you’ve prepared for the arrival of someone you love, and do you remember all the work you put into it because you thought it was worth it? Maybe you didn’t even think about it as work, because the focus was on the arrival of that beloved person, whether a child, a spouse, or a friend or family member. How can we be any less willing to do the required thing to prepare for Jesus?
In this reading, Jesus is conspicuous by His absence. That's striking to me. Yet, the preparation is undeniably about His coming, and you have to trust that it will be so. The good news is that (a few verses later in Mark’s Gospel) Jesus does come and, significantly, I think, to that very place of struggle and repentance in the desert. And, did you notice that this particular place and time of preparation isn’t even the beginning of this deliverance? Mark goes back in history, pointing to Isaiah’s prophesy. Way back when. Here is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ: A God-ordained timeless seam, where a remembered past, a paradoxical present, and a hopeful future converge. God acting mysteriously. People waiting. People trusting. People sustained by God’s word… and divine hope.
Please don’t miss the hope that is present in preparation. It’s not obvious, but it’s there. John baptizes by the Jordan River. That’s significant because the waters of the Jordan, by the shores of this desert place, point to God-given refreshment. Moreover, the Jordan inspires hope because it brings to mind the fact that, after years of enduring the wilderness, the people of Israel crossed over the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. That divine hope washes ashore on this wilderness of preparation.
How good it is to know that just like God brought the people of Israel “to Himself” in the Sinai desert, Jesus will bring us to Himself in our desert wanderings! Do you know Jesus Christ as the Beloved? Do you realize that you are His beloved? Something about being out in the wilderness and enduring for so long, in company with God, made Moses feel like the apple of God’s eye! Perhaps the experience is designed for just that kind of understanding about God’s love for you and me. God is crazy about us! And He wants us to know it, and to enter into a relationship with Him through His Son.
And, unlike this time and place in Mark’s Gospel, the Holy Spirit is with us. That’s good news! We are closer to the fulfillment of the good news of Jesus Christ, than to the beginning. We have been baptized with the Holy Spirit! So, while the Lord is physically absent, in our times of preparation, we are enlivened by His mystical, powerful presence.
If we love the Lord Jesus Christ and want to be His faithful followers, then let’s not despise the wilderness experience of our lives…
…It prepares us for the One Who’s crazy about us; making us fully fit for Him. And we might discover, to our great delight, that we are, indeed, the apple of of our Lord's eye!
May it be so. Amen.
posted by Ruth at 9:28 AM
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