I love the beginning of Mark’s gospel. It’s simple and clear and nevertheless raises many questions: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Now, I suppose professional commentators would tell us that Mark 1:1 is really just a title or introduction to the work as a whole (I don’t know, I didn’t check), but what always strikes me about this verse is the audacity of the gospel writer in beginning this way, and the abrupt transition from v. 1 to the story of John the Baptizer.
Mark doesn’t give us the biographical details that Matthew and Luke provide; he doesn’t give the theological background that John does. He simply begins, inviting us to ask questions: What is the good news? Who is this Jesus Christ? Those are the questions we will ask throughout the gospel, and the questions that will remain at its end, because the ending is as abrupt as the beginning.
This year, as I reflect on the juxtaposition of Isaiah 40 and Mark 1, I’m intrigued by the role of the wilderness. The story of the good news Jesus Christ begins in the wilderness (with John the Baptizer) just as the prophet proclaims the way of the Lord in the wilderness. In the Isaiah passage, written from exile in Babylon, the promise of comfort to a ruined and desolate Jerusalem comes by way of a procession through a wilderness that is made hospitable and a journey made easy.
The idea of wilderness captures our imagination even if we rarely directly experience such places. The desert of the ancient Near East was a foreboding place, threatening existence with its sparse food and water. It was a barren place, a place of exile and a place where civilization and culture were absent. Still it beckoned to those who lived in cities and towns; it could offer refuge for those on the run, and it could be a place of innovation. The crowds came to hear John in the wilderness, perhaps as a curiosity, but also, likely, because many believed religious truth could be found there.
In later centuries, Christians would go repeatedly into the wilderness in their search for God. The monastic movement began with the flight to the desert of Anthony the Great and ever since, monastic communities have sought and found God in the desert, far away from culture and civilization.
Our lives often seem to us to be deserts or wildernesses, places of loneliness and barrenness, places where we cannot find nourishment. And they can be that. But as scripture and great spiritual teachers tell us, deserts can be places where we encounter God, where we can hear the good news of Jesus Christ.
Sometimes it is only when our lives are stripped bare of all essentials, when we are left completely alone in a dry and barren place, that we can encounter and experience God. Sometimes though, even when we are in those places–at our wits’ end–we seem abandoned even by God. Sometimes the promise of comfort rings hollow and meaningless.
In those times, being open to the possibility of God’s presence can be difficult, even almost impossible. The desert can be both forbidding and beautiful and our perspective can allow us to experience something new and powerfully creative in what might seem, from a different angle, nothing at all.
Advent invites us to explore and experience in new ways the wildernesses and deserts in our lives. It invites us to look for good news and comfort in difficult and forbidding places and invites us to rejoice that God is coming to make things new. And that means, even our lives!
Preaching Grace on the Square 