From the Daily Lectionary for Wednesday in the Third Week of Advent
Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 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. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 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. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
The Daily Lectionary has moved us into the Gospel of Mark, the very beginning of Mark. Unlike the other Synoptic writers Mark begins his account of the “Good News” with the baptism of Jesus. Matthew and Luke begin with the birth narrative. Mark is making a profound theological statement that the new world order, God’s just kingdom, begins with the solidarity of a movement, a movement committed to inclusion, compassion, and justice; a movement that speaks the truth to power.
Jesus for Mark is the exemplar of the Baptized, and thus his Gospel describes the role of the Baptized in a world wracked by the oppressive burden of sin, sin being at its heart the abuse of power. There are no resurrection appearances in Mark’s terse and dark Gospel, and yet the word for resurrection appears eight times in his narrative. The little girl raised from death to life is told to “stand;” the man with the withered hand is told to “stand” and be healed; the paralytic whose friends bring him to Jesus for healing is told to “stand” and walk… The word for “stand” in the Greek text is the same word for resurrection. So, it is the role of the baptized to bear resurrection life to the world… the beginning of the Good News. At the end of Mark’s Gospel we find a young man, not an angel, clothed in white at the empty tomb of Jesus. In the early church it was customary for the newly baptized to be clothed in white. The young man is an initiate, one of the newly baptized, pointing the way back to Galilee, the place of ministry, the place where it all began, and where it begins.
The coming of Jesus into the world is emblematic of our coming into the world. As Jesus’ ministry was to be proximate to the world’s brokenness, so too is ours. The Good News in our own day and time begins with us. Mark’s Gospel is a proclamation as to our true nature: that we are made for compassion and empathy, that it is our true nature to bring justice to our common life, and to serve the greater good, and that we have no patience for injustice and falsehood. We are in short to raise the dead of our world into lives of well-being and dignity in the face of power that would oppress and shame.
As we prepare for the birth of Jesus, let us be prepared to celebrate and nurture the birth of our own true nature, and may we have the courage to go to the Galilees of our world and bring life where there is death. Pray for a new beginning amid this dark time of the year; and pray that it will be Good News.
A Prayer for Vocation in Daily Work (BCP p. 261)
O God, you declare your glory and show forth your handiwork in the heavens and in the earth: Deliver us in our various occupations from the service of self alone, that we may do the work you give us to do in truth and beauty and for the common good: for the sake of him who came among us as one who serves, your Son Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
