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.
The best explanation (pure conjecture, of course) I have heard is that the outside sheet of the autograph copy was lost before any copies could be made. If one imagines Mark’s community fleeing Jerusalem after its fall, one can imagine that happening to their treasured Gospel. That means we are missing something at the beginning as well as at the end, and no one has seen fit to try to provide it (as others have provided endings). So, we simply have the abrupt quote (or misquote) of Isaiah. It’s actually a mash-up of Malachi 3:1, and Isaiah 40:3. Christians have arranged their Old Testament so that Malachi comes last, just before their New Testament, so that we can’t miss the connection between John the Baptist and the messenger sent before God’s face.
And, Mark places his quotation marks in the wrong place (ancient Greek had no such thing). Isaiah says, “A voice cries out, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.'” Mark says, “A voice in the wilderness cries out, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.'” Again, Mark is slotting John the Baptist into the role of the voice crying out.
In fact, in Isaiah, the voice belongs to one of the members of the divine council. When God speaks, and says, “Comfort, o comfort, my people,” God is directing the whole council to announce comfort (the hymn has it right, “Comfort, comfort ye, my people” ye being the plural you in English). Another voice on the council directs the preparation of a way in the wilderness for God’s return to Jerusalem. I suspect this may indeed have been the content of John’s proclamation. Baptizing people in the Jordan made a political statement — a new people is being formed in the wilderness to enter and take possession of the land, entering with God at their head. The powers in Jerusalem would not have taken kindly to such a message.
Mark connects John the Baptist of Malachi 3 in order to de-center John, and have John serve as an announcement to Jesus, and specifically Jesus as God returning to Jerusalem along the desert highway. It’s a stunning theological move, and sets us up to read Mark in a particular way. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem forms a kind of hinge in Mark’s Gospel between the Galilean ministry, and the revelation of Jesus divine status in his trial, crucifixion and (missing) resurrection. And it allows Mark to handle the destruction of Jerusalem, not as a theological catastrophe, since he is awaiting Jesus’ return from God’s right hand. God departed the Temple when the curtain was torn in two at Jesus’ death.
Mark’s agenda aside, we can read Isaiah’s poem as indeed true comfort. God does return to God’s people, just not along a highway prepared for a king through the wilderness, but through the Incarnation of Jesus. Our repentance is to turn from Christian triumphalism to train ourselves to see God in the refugee (as Matthew does), or in the oppressed, in the poor and marginalized (as do many of the saints of Christian history), bearing as they do, the likeness of Christ.
Paul adopts the understanding of Jesus’ incarnation as God’s return to God’s people, and the inauguration of God’s setting things to rights (see the first chapter of Romans), and God’s proclamation of the forgiveness of sins (God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to Godself). We continue to hope for the fulfillment of what God has begun in Jesus, but we see it as the restoration of the whole creation (Romans 8), rather than simply some form of escape from the sufferings of this world.