Advent 2   December 6, 2020

Mark 1:1-14, Isaiah 40  

Comfort for God’s People

INTRO

** There is no doubt that there will be a veritable stream of Victorians Heading north on the Hume in summer– that straight highway which heads through some rugged, dry, isolated and summer bleached pastureland… reminds me of this passage from Isaiah which also headlines Mark’s Gospel.

What a fascinating array of metaphors in this pivotal text.

It combines images of

·        comfort with declarations of sin,

·        the fragility of grass on the steppe with the enduring power of the divine,

·        road-making in a desert wilderness, and, my favourite juxtaposition,

·        a warrior God who holds lambs tenderly against the divine chest.

BACKGROUND

This evocative poem opens the second part of the book of Isaiah, which contains poems reflecting the impact of Persian expansion under Cyrus the Great on the peoples living in exile after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.

Cyrus, who is explicitly named three times in Isaiah 44-45, ruled more than 150 years after the historical Isaiah served as an advisor to king Hezekiah during the Assyrian defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel. The oracles of condemnation in Isaiah 1-39 reflect this period of destruction, while the poems in chapter 40-55 are filled with hope and joy because Cyrus allowed the exiles to return home.

>>> These past couple of weeks it feels like we are reclaiming Melbourne as ours once again.  We can certainly identify with this sense of returning home as we take some faltering and as yet uncertain steps out of lockdown and our own period of exile and isolation…

Isaiah 40:1-11 provides a joyful refrain that introduces their unexpected reversal of fortunes. To be sure, Persia maintained colonial control over the peoples in the ancient Near East, but people were to be allowed to live in their native lands as long as they remained loyal to the Persian government. Isaiah does not hesitate to attribute this foreign policy to the workings of their God, Yahweh, who now chooses to change the status of the displaced Jews. The poem opens with a messenger crying out the unexpected message.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

 “Comfort! Comfort!” rings not as command but rather as joyful astonishment. The path home becomes a level highway at the sound of the messenger. This will be no forty years trudging through a desert. The return will be a pilgrimage along a well-kept thoroughfare.

And yet, Isaiah boldly speaks his words of comfort at a time of great calamity, loss and chaos. The way things had been were now changed and gone forever, and the future was bleak and unknown.

>> How these words resonate in our own world with the ravages of Covid-19… We can find the same comfort in these uncertain time with an uncertain future@!

Isaiah speaks words of comfort NOT because PEOPLE are resilient, strong, courageous, resourceful, hard-working, dedicated, etc. Indeed, Isaiah reminds us of an inescapable reality – people are like flowers and grass that wither and fade. And so too our resilience, strength, courage, resourcefulness, hard work, dedication, etc. also wither and fade with us. No. Isaiah finds comfort only in the one thing that does not wither and fade – the word of promise from God.

But wait, there’s more!  Because the focus of the poem quickly turns to the God who doesn’t just promise, but delivers!

God commands the querulous messenger to proclaim God’s entrance onto the scene in Isaiah 40:6-9.

⁶ A voice says, “Cry out.”    And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
⁷ The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them.  Surely the people are grass.
⁸ The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of our God endures forever.”

The contrasting images serve to highlight the chasm between Yahweh and the people.

·        They have sinned, but God has stayed true.

·        They are fragile, but God is powerful.

·        The poem focuses on the declaration of the human condition (we know all too well): grass withers, flowers fall, a reality too well known by the ancient audience.

·        Their own inter-generational experience of exile has demonstrated that God does not seem to care whether they live or die. They are no more than blades of grass crushed by the warrior rushing to glory.

In the Bible, the word of God is also God’s action. And so the word "Comfort" in Verse 1 becomes God’s action in verse 11.

You who bring good news to Zion,
    go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good news to Jerusalem,^[c]
    lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
    say to the towns of Judah,
    “Here is your God!”
¹⁰ See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power,
    and he rules with a mighty arm.
See, his reward is with him,
    and his recompense accompanies him.
¹¹ He tends his flock like a shepherd:
    He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
    he gently leads those that have young.

It is crucial to note that the arm of God which "rules" in Verse 10 is not used to punish and smite, but to comfort. The strength of God is always used to restore relationships and make the whole earth harmonious.

Here is Comfort. That’s what this poem is about. That divine warrior, with arm outstretched to slay an enemy, instead bends down and scoops the little lambs into the divine bosom. If only lambs could purr.

So… Why is This Passage important at Advent?

This poem is often read in the second week of Advent in part because the gospel writers used it to convey what was in their time a similar instance of wholly unexpected, unearned and unprecedented divine compassion: i.e.

The entrance of Jesus onto the world stage.

Advent is not just about waiting for a baby. It’s about waiting for a whole new reality which takes hold of us by first taking our hearts and souls hostage to its justice and grace. And then, because we cannot help but live by its magnetic force, it lays its claim on the whole world through us!

The evangelists identify John the Baptist as the messenger, and Jesus as the one who comes with power and tenderness, with comfort and justice. In trying to describe the indescribable, they turned to this passage from Isaiah as a way to illustrate their experience.

Mark 1

You get the feeling as you read the opening verses of this Gospel that Peter is dictating to Mark in a terrible rush, that he can't wait to reach the place where he feels the Gospel really begins.

·        He says absolutely nothing about how Jesus was born.

·        He gets through the baptism in no time at all.

·        He barely mentions the temptation in the wilderness.

And only then, after racing through those first fourteen verses, does he get where he seems to have been racing to--the real beginning as he sees it--and that is the opening words of Jesus himself. Up to that point it has all gone so fast that hardly anybody except John the Baptist knows who Jesus really is yet, (just as it might be said that most of the time hardly any of us knows who Jesus really is yet either.)

¹⁴ Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God…

Jesus is destined to have a greater impact on the next two thousand years of human history than anybody else in history--we know that now--but here at the beginning of Mark nobody knows it yet. Not a single syllable has escaped his lips yet, as Mark tells it.

The ant lays down her crumb to listen. The very stars in the sky hold their breath. Nobody in the world knows what Jesus is going to say yet, and maybe it's worthwhile pretending we don't know either--pretending we've never heard him yet ourselves, which may be closer to the truth than we think.

"The time is fulfilled," he says, "and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." That is how he launches the gospel--his first recorded words. There is a kind of breathlessness in those three short, urgent sentences. The question is, what do they urgently mean to us who know them so well that we hardly hear them anymore? If they mean anything to us at all, urgent or otherwise, what in God's name is it?

At least there is no great mystery about what "the time is fulfilled" means, I think. "The time is fulfilled" means the time is up. That is the dark side of it anyway, saving the bright side of it till later. It means that it is possible we are living in the last days. There was a time when you could laugh that kind of message off if you saw some bearded crazy parading through the city streets with it painted on a sandwich board, but you have to be crazy yourself to laugh at it in our experience though this Pandemic...

In other words, a lot of the kinds of things that happen at the ends of civilizations are happening today in our civilization, and there are moments when it is hard to avoid feeling not only that our time is up, but that it is high time for our time to be up. That we're ready to fall from the branch like overripe fruit under the weight of our own decay. Something like that, I think, is the shadow side of what Jesus means when he says that the time is fulfilled.

But Jesus says something else too. Thank God for that. He says our time is up, but he also says that the Kingdom of God is at hand. The Kingdom of God is so close we can almost reach out our hands and touch it. It is so close that sometimes it almost reaches out and takes us by the hand. The Kingdom of God, that is. Not a human kingdom or any of the kingdoms that worry like us about counting calories while hundreds of thousands starve to death. Bur God's Kingdom. Jesus says it is the Kingdom of God that is at hand. If anybody else said it, we would boo him off the stage. But it is Jesus who says it. Even people who have long since written him off can't help listening to him.

What he seems to be saying is that the Kingdom of God is the time, or a time beyond time, when it will no longer be humans in their lunacy who are in charge of the world but God in his mercy who will be in charge of the world. It's the time above all else for wild rejoicing--like getting out of jail, like being cured of cancer, like finally, at long last, coming home. And it is at hand, Jesus says.

SO WHAT?

What does startling and unexpected comfort look like today? How do these prophetic words of Isiah, echoed in the gospel resonate and reveal in our world today?

** News of an potentially effective vaccine has brought a renewed sense of hope and comfort to many…

Like a vaccine, this the Prophet’s poem does not promise that all suffering will cease. It does not deny or change the brokenness of the human condition. It suggests that some of us may be called to be messengers of a declaration, which others may find hard to fathom. But no matter where we locate ourselves in this poem, it ultimately reminds us that the unexpected can happen: God still sends comfort into our short and frail lives.

It is God alone who brings about his Kingdom. Even with the best will in the world and out of our noblest impulses, we can't do that. But there is something that we can do and must do, Jesus says, and that is repent. Biblically speaking, to repent doesn't mean to feel sorry about, to regret. It means to turn, to turn around 180 degrees. It means to undergo a complete change of mind, heart, direction. To individuals and to nations both, Jesus says the same thing. Turn away from madness, cruelty, shallowness, blindness. Turn toward that tolerance, compassion, sanity, hope, justice that we all have in us at our best.

We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out spring-like shoots of compassion as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen. That slowly rejuvenating city. Whose people of every colour, class, condition, can eat their sandwiches together in a quiet place. The clown and the child. The antipodean bright sunlight that lights up everybody in those teeming streets like a superstar. The hopeful Christmas traffic surging all around us and the beautiful things that we can feel surging inside ourselves, in that holy place that is inside all of us. We can Turn that way. Everybody. While there is still time. We can Pray for the Kingdom. Watch for signs of it. Live as though it is here already because there are moments when it almost is…

And finally"Believe in the gospel." That's the last of those first words that Jesus speaks. Believe in the good news.

The power that is in Jesus, and before which all other powers on earth and in heaven give way, the power that holds all things in existence from the sparrow's eye to the farthest star, is above all else a loving power. That means we are loved even in our lostness. That means we are precious, every one of us, even as we pass on the street without so much as noticing each other's faces. Every city is precious. The world is precious. Someday the precious time will be up for each of us. But the Kingdom of God is at hand. Nothing is different and everything is different. It reaches out to each of our precious hands while there's still time.

Repent and believe in the gospel, Jesus says. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.

Amen, and come, Lord Jesus.