Good News, or Not?

Message for the Second Sunday of Advent, Year B (12/6/2020)

Isaiah 40:1-11

Mark 1:1-8

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol always seems to come to mind as I think about the questions that arise in the readings for Advent. Maybe it was Dickens’ intent to evoke the scriptures. Maybe it’s because I spent my childhood holidays watching the 1970 British musical film adaptation, Scrooge, so the story is fixed in my memory like the scent of evergreen boughs. In any case, this year I’m struck by a scene from A Christmas Carol that echoes a theme in our readings for today.

It’s Christmas Eve in London in the early 19^th century. Ebenezer Scrooge, the solitary and irritable miser, returns home to discover that the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, has come to visit him. At first, he refuses to acknowledge Marley’s presence. “Humbug, I tell you; humbug!” he says, at which point the specter raises a frightful cry and removes the bandage wrapped around his head, allowing his lower jaw to fall to his chest.

Scrooge drops to his knees, finally convinced of Marley’s existence, and turns his attention to the great chain the ghost is doomed to wear as he wanders the land of the living in eternity. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley explains, lamenting the joy he might have shared but did not. As it turns out, his chain is the consequence of years of greed and gloom. “[I] never walked beyond our counting-house–mark me;–in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole.” Then he turns to Scrooge: “Would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this [when I died] seven Christmas-eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

Needless to say, Marley is not a herald of good tidings. In his fear, Scrooge pleads with the ghost: “Jacob Marley, tell me more! Speak comfort to me, Jacob!” But his old friend replies, “I have none to give…. [Comfort] comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men.” All Marley has to offer Scrooge is “a chance and hope” –  three more spirits would arrive that night, he explains, to return with Scrooge to Christmases past, examine with him the present Christmas, and foreshadow a Christmas yet to come, all with an eye to helping him avoid his terrible fate. Still, Scrooge isn’t sure. “I think I’d rather not,” he says.

No kidding. I can’t imagine that any of us would want to spend Christmas Eve revisiting old hurts and failures, staring at the suffering we’ve caused, and contemplating loneliness and death. Scrooge doesn’t want the truth; he’d rather be reassured: “Speak comfort to me, Jacob!” But instead, Marley compels him to see things as they really are, to confess his complicity, and to repent.

That sounds like John the Baptizer, doesn’t it? Appearing suddenly on the scene at the outset of Mark’s Gospel, John plays the role of the prophet, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Isaiah had prophesied that the Lord’s future was a cause for hope: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God…. prepare the way of the Lord…. 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. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together….”

But, as John’s ministry makes clear, the comfort of that promise is no assurance that all is well in the present. No, John came “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” The Common English Bible renders that same phrase, “John was in the wilderness calling for people to be baptized to show that they were changing their hearts and lives and wanted God to forgive their sins.” Mark titles his Gospel “The Beginning of the Good News,” but is John’s proclamation really good news? Is it a comfort to be confronted with the way things really are and called to change our hearts and lives for the sake of the world as God intends it to be?

I’m reminded of an adage based on a famous phrase in the Fourth Gospel, but with a twist: The truth will make you free, but first it will make you miserable. When we’re met with the reality of our broken world, it’s not easy to admit the ways we’re implicated in the brokenness and imagine what it will take to mend it. Martin Luther King, Jr. played the role of the prophet, too, when he wrote to fellow clergy from Birmingham City Jail in 1963: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that [the Black community’s] great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice….”[1] That is to say, there is no peace without justice; there is no comfort without repentance.

Friends, there is no Christmas in the Gospel of Mark, no family history, no quiet birth story, no shepherds gazing and angels singing. In Mark, the only prologue to Jesus’ arrival is the prophet’s strident call to come out to the wilderness. And, although we usually conceive of the wilderness as a hard place, a place to be avoided, this Second Sunday of Advent can we reimagine it as a place of possibility? Can we reclaim repentance as a chance and hope for real change? After all, “The way to freedom runs through the wilderness,”[2] as one interpreter observes, recalling the people’s desert passage from enslavement to the Promised Land and from exile back home. To borrow the words of another commentator, “The wilderness is a place of struggle and Spirit, both problematic and promising.”[3]

The bad news is that there are no shortcuts.[4] Advent demands an honest accounting of the condition of our hearts and lives and social structures, and courageous change. The gift is that by smoothing out the rough places, we prepare the way for none other than the Lord, the one who will baptize us again with the Spirit in order that we might truly live.

[1] “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” A Testament of Hope, 295.

[2] Edward Schillebeeckx, in Homilies for the Christian People, 78-79.

[3] Courtney V. Buggs, paraphrasing Delores S Williams, www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-advent-2/commentary-on-mark-11-8-5.

[4] Martin B. Copenhaver, in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 1, 47.