Month: December 2023

Who are you?

Third Sunday of Advent; 17 December 2023; Advent 3B (RCL); Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8; 19-28.

Before John’s Gospel can move on to the question of who Jesus is (a question at play throughout the entire Gospel), it must settle the question of who John the Baptist is. The Evangelist uses the device of having the Pharisees question the Baptist (the rabbis would have been successors to the Pharisees, and it was to the rabbis that the Evangelist’s community had to make its defense). The Baptist begins by telling us who he is not, in emphatic terms, using the ego eimi formula (with a negative) that Jesus will use in the great I AM statements.

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A highway for our God

Second Sunday of Advent; 10 December 2023; Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8.

The textual history of Mark’s Gospel is puzzling. The most ancient manuscripts end with 16:8, which itself ends with the post-positive conjunction gar. It is simply impossible to end a sentence with a post-positive conjunction: it makes no logical sense. And the Gospel appears to begin just as abruptly. The first sentence reads like an incipit, and its text is contested in early manuscripts, some including the phrase “the Son of God,” and others omitting it, and the phrase, “as it is written in the prophet Isaiah” seeming like it should be explaining something coming before it.

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