Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8-28

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT | December 10, 2023 | Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8-28 | Paula Murray |

All Biblical citations are from the English Standard Version.

Today’s Scripture readings are a rich feast for the soul, and the gentleman guiding us through this spiritual menu is yet another critical witness to the love that came down at Jesus’ birth, John the Baptist.  We begin, though, with the seventh-century BC prophet Isaiah, who acts as the Baptizer’s sous chef, pronouncing God’s forgiveness of Israel’s many sins against Him and the covenant He made with them.  “Comfort, comfort my people,” says God through His prophet to the suffering remnant left after the Assyrians plundered Judea and laid siege to Jerusalem.  “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” God continued, “and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”  In plainer English, Judea’s tribulations have come to an end, because God has determined that His faithless people have learned their lesson.  He has let them out of their room, for they remember now who is God and who is not, in a way similar to that by which a toddler might be reminded who is the parent, and who is not.  That does not mean that God is done with His people, for what normal parent would fail to offer his or her child guidance as to the right way to get along after the child has learned the consequences of behaving in the wrong way?  

Through the prophet, our everlasting Father teaches His people to listen to those who speak for Him and obey. “A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”  This is quite the chore God has set before His children.  You have heard before that the words are modeled after the procession of a king through the territories of his kingdom.  The local governor would want to make a  good impression, so the king would not think the money coming into his accounts from taxes was being misused for the governor’s benefit.  The road upon which the king would ride would be smoothed out with backbreaking labor; the workers filling in the holes in the road with dirt scraped from the bumps in the roads or even the hills through which the road ran.  

But God was not speaking of actual, physical labor.  The roads of which He spoke through His prophets were those roads that run right through our spirits.  John the Baptist, seven centuries after Isaiah, will take up the theme, but not where Isaiah left off.  Isaiah concludes his prophecy where he began, with a comforting reassurance that God will be as tender to us as a shepherd to his flock.  John the Baptizer takes another tact, though he begins his Gospel with many of the same words, “Prepare the way,” he shouts, “make His paths straight.  

John the Baptist is like the guy you always thought was your crazy uncle until you discover that he really was a Cold War spy.  So, yes, all his James Bond-like tools and gold cuff links were not just the playthings of a weird man looking for attention.  The Baptist wears the formless skin of an animal belted around his waist with a strip of raw leather, and eats honey and locusts in the wilderness some distance from civilization.  Again, like the uncle retired from spy craft, John the Baptist’s diet and dress serve two immediate purposes.  They demonstrate his total dependence on God for everything he needs in a desolate place and identify him with the greatest prophet Israel had ever known.  In his dress and his diet, John the Baptist brings the prophet Elijah to the minds of the sinners who come to him in the desert seeking freedom from their burden of sin.  Elijah, fled to the wilderness to escape the murderous rage of Queen Jezebel and King Ahaz after he destroyed their puppet prophets and idolatrous priests, and who was sustained there by the angels sent by God.  

But there is a third purpose, as well, one not as immediate as John’s need to establish his credentials as one who is the mouth of the Lord, but which those who left comfortable homes in comfortable places to signal their sorrow for their sin and their need of God’s mercy, would know.  Let me introduce the fourth prophet of the day, the prophet Malachi, who not only affirmed Israel’s understanding in the fourth chapter of his collected prophesies about the coming Day of the Lord and its fiery character but also predicted that the prophet Elijah would return before the coming of the Messiah.  

In John the Baptist, then, the faithful people of Judea saw the coming fulfillment of the long-awaited promise of the Messiah, the One, the King Who would redeem them, freeing them from the oppression of sin and other nations.  They looked for a Son of the house of David, a warrior king to boot Rome from the premises and restore Israel to its former glory.  But the Messiah God sent them was far more than a jumped-up general.  He sent Emmanuel, God with us, true God from true God, begotten but not made, immortal Spirit wrapped in mortal flesh and spoken into a virgin’s womb.  Love came down from heaven that first Christmas, a love willing to lay aside immortality to suffer birth, the pangs of life as well as its joys, and the bitterness of an unearned death.  Love came down, that a final and lasting sacrifice for sin might be made, and the promise of everlasting life was foreshadowed by an empty tomb.  

And, also, by the witness of those who we have reflected on this day.  They laid out for us the straight pathways of which Isaiah and John the Baptist spoke.  They gave their witness to the works of God, including those having to do with our salvation.  That work is laid before us, too.  When God uses His prophets to tell us to make straight the pathway, we know that He is asking us to fill in the potholes and obliterate the bumps on our highways of faith, and not just for us but for all.  Most of all, we must keep an eye on that pathway; visit it daily, more than once, in prayer, in Scripture,  in holy acts meant for others to make sure that it points to Jesus and has not wandered off elsewhere, pointing, perhaps, to a graceless would be Savior, a vice often repeated, or the blank space where the cross should be had we not emptied ourselves of faith.  Advent allows us to do this before the business and the happiness of the holy day if we give it the time.  If we don’t skip in our heads and hearts to Christmas business, but rather sit down with a cup of coffee, read the Bible and pray for guidance on straightening those pathways Christ has laid out for us, that we might know Him and love Him.