Second Sunday of Advent; 5 December 2021; Advent 2C (RCL); Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6.
The image of a straight highway through the desert is woven throughout exilic and post-exilic literature. When God restores the fortunes of Zion, then the people will return, not wandering forty years in the wilderness, but along a broad, straight highway. There will be water aplenty along the road, and shade trees. The lame will be carried (or walk again), and not even fools can go astray.
All of the synoptic Gospels begin with the figure of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord (a clever misquote of a verse in Isaiah, in which the voice cries, “Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.”). John, of course, is baptizing at the Jordan, a profoundly political act. The people being baptized in the Jordan are re-entering the promised land from the wilderness, just as they did originally with Joshua (which transliterates into Greek as the word we translate Jesus). The authorities in Jerusalem would well have understood the statement being made — they were illegitimate inhabitants of God’s holy land, and this rabble at the edges was claiming a re-conquest.
Baruch, like other prophets, is also imagining a return to the holy land (although likely written during the period when the second temple already stood). What we read on this occasion is a poem of encouragement for Jerusalem, but the book begins with an extended prayer of repentance. If the people had been carried away into captivity because of the sins of the people, then confession and contrition were necessary preconditions to their return.
John is baptizing with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. We are not to understand individual peccadilloes, but the corporate sins of the people. It is only with that baptism that the way can be made straight for the return of God’s righteousness, and the restoration of the just community which God had intended the people to establish within the borders of the land. When Jesus shows up and begins his own ministry, he begins with the proclamation, “Repent, for the reign of God is at hand” (or has arrived).
Repentance, in Greek, means something like re-training. It means literally a change of intention (μετάνοια, metanoia), but the nous was the part of the mind that one trained by going to school. Repentance, then, is a process of retraining — John is inviting his hearers to start over establishing the reign of righteousness in the land. By receiving his baptism, they were setting out on the new wilderness way which God was establishing for a return to the land. They would be walking with God anew into God’s promises, regardless of what the authorities in Jerusalem were up to.
I think we seriously misunderstand Paul, when we understand righteousness as a characteristic applied to individuals. We are not made righteous by faith as individuals, but God’s faithfulness in Jesus reestablishes the righteous community the law was intended to create. Of all his communities, the church at Philippi seems to have got it. Paul is willing to trust them to figure things out on their own: “this is my prayer for you, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless having produced a harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory of God.”
Note that all the “yous” in this sentence are second person plural — you all. The way is simple, use love overflowing to knowledge and insight to determine what is best, and repent of all the rest.