Advent 2B (RCL) – A Preacher’s Ponderings

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.

Awaiting God

Second Sunday of Advent; 6 December 2020; Advent IIB (RCL); Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8.

For over a century, biblical scholars have recognized that something shifts in the Book of Isaiah at 40:1. The voice speaking is no longer Isaiah of Jerusalem, who is speaking judgment and forecasting the siege and capture of Jerusalem as punishment for her sins. Instead, the frame of reference now shifts to post-exilic times. Jerusalem has paid for her sins, and God is returning to her.

Abrupt beginnings

10 December 2017
Second Sunday of Advent
Advent IIB (RCL)
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

It is well know that Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly. Mark 16:8 ends “ephobounto gar“, for they were afraid. The trouble is, gar is a post-positive conjunction, which can never, but never be the last word in a phrase, let alone a sentence or a book. This was so troubling so early in the transmission of the Gospel that several authors have composed alternative endings to the Gospel. Continue reading “Abrupt beginnings”