Lectionary Commentaries for December 10, 2023
Second Sunday of Advent

WAKE UP!

Like a splash of cold water on the face, Mark’s Gospel begins with a jarring, almost en media res proclamation that this is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This sets the stage for the entirety of Mark’s Gospel, the shortest of the four and the most fast-paced, with its short sentences, action verbs, and a narrative that focuses more on what Jesus says than what he does. After a quick orientation with a scripture from Isaiah, John “appears” in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. There is no birth narrative, no poetic pericope describing Jesus’ heavenly origins, just a quick dive into the work of John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. 

On this second Sunday of Advent, we might learn from the urgency of this text. We may not know exactly what we are preparing for, but whatever it is, it is for RIGHT NOW! There is no time to waste in this endeavor. And the people in the text weren’t wasting much time making their way to John either. Something was beginning. 

Advent is a time of new beginnings for our contexts, for a reminder of the foundations of our faith, a recommitment to what defines us, and an opportunity for us to wake up and make pathways straight for Jesus to come into our communities anew. Sermons from this introductory passage might attempt to help communities and congregations WAKE UP to where Jesus needs to be (re)introduced. Are there issues or community struggles that need an Advent reexamination? What is missing and needs a genesis in our contexts? What resets are necessary in our spaces? This urgent beginning can serve as a springboard to new beginnings in our congregation, new opportunities for good news to take root.

John the attractive

Since John merely appears in this passage, we are left to speculate about what made John, and John’s baptism, so popular to the masses. And while hyperbole is clearly at play in this text, the notion that multitudes of people were flocking to John for his baptism is curious. Why John’s baptism? What about John and his baptism made them special? Why trust him or his baptism? What makes one approachable or trustworthy in this context? 

His location in the wilderness and his peculiar clothing did signal a certain kind of prophetic bona fides. His camel-hair frock and leather belt would have signified a connection to Elijah (2 Kings 1:8). The peculiar diet, locusts and honey, also would have nodded to Elijah as they demonstrated a kind of desperate dependence on God for sustenance that mirrors what Elijah went through by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:4–6). 

But still, what made him special enough for the multitudes to flock to him? Sermons that attempt to describe why John or his baptism was so attractive would help our communities prepare for the Advent season. What made John’s baptism attractive is what our communities need in this season: something to motivate return, repentance, and rededication. 

One thing that seems clear, though, is that the people were passionate about something that would affect them right then and there. This was not a baptism or even evangelism that pointed toward an afterlife; they were rushing to the wilderness for something that would change their lives at that moment. The good news then, by extension, might also be something that we talk about primarily as affecting our communities right here and right now. What good news can we proclaim for our people that will excite them about Advent today? 

Maybe it wasn’t John at all that they were interested in. Maybe it was the idea of confessing. The people were excited not only about getting to John, receiving the baptism, but also about confessing their sins. It seems that the combination of the baptism ritual and the confession of their sins was a cleansing process that allowed them to return to their communities not only with a newfound commitment to their faith but also free of the burden of those sins. 

With all the rituals and traditions that we have for Advent, might confessions be amplified in our liturgies during this season? Or, particularly on this Sunday in Advent, possibly even worked into the confines of the sermon, might we offer more opportunities for confession so that our congregations will have an opportunity to find this same kind of excitement and release? 

Sandal-strap fear and trembling

Though we find the reference to John’s unworthiness to untie Jesus’ sandals elsewhere, the way that it is presented in Mark’s Gospel offers a direct reference to power that makes me wonder about the reactions that he may have received. John says in verse 7, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals.” John is making an exaggerated statement minimizing his own worthiness in order to amplify Jesus’ status. The addition of the detail about untying the strap is a further step in minimizing his status. 

But there is something about naming that the one coming next has more power that makes me wonder what kind of responses those getting baptized, or first readers of the Gospel, may have had. Meeting and interacting with someone with so much power that I can’t even perform the lowly duty that a slave would perform for their master is not an attractive statement. I might be afraid, bewildered, perplexed, or maybe hesitantly excited. Would I even want the baptism that someone with that kind of power or status offered? Could it be that the things that were attractive about John and his baptism might not be present in this secondary baptism? 

Preachers have an opportunity to play with the myriad of reactions one might have to this implied invitation, an apropos endeavor as we acknowledge that not everyone will find the gospel message attractive.  

This lection vibrates with the infectious energy of change. Brooking neither argument nor hesitation, a rapid-fire sequence of commands urges imminent action, speech, and movement. 

“Comfort, O comfort …” (40:1). “Speak … cry …” (40:2). “… prepare … make straight …” (40:3). “… Cry out!” (40:6). “… Get you up … lift up your voice … lift it up, do not fear; say …” (40:9).

While English translations effectively convey the urgency and excitement of these commands, grammatical differences between Hebrew and English mean that they also unintentionally obscure an important set of details about their addressees. Each of the imperatives in 40:1–3 has a plural subject: they are addressed to a group, not an individual. Their grammatically masculine plural form might address a group of males but can also readily address a group that is mixed with respect to gender. The subject of the imperative in verse 6, meanwhile, is masculine singular. The subject of the five commands in verse 9, namely Zion, is grammatically feminine singular. 

That is to say, the passage contains not one commission but three. Its inclusion of masculine and feminine, singular and plural subjects yields a broadly inclusive call to action and proclamation. God’s plan for salvation, restoration, and return is collaborative.

The multiple addressees don’t only span differences of gender and number. The commands range across space, addressing audiences in exile and in the homeland, separated by hundreds of miles. And they speak to an audience in the space between, whose activity will make possible the reunion of compatriots long separated from one another.

This inclusive exhortation furnishes an opportunity for the preacher and congregation alike. Each member of the community, both present and absent, receives a commission to preach and transform the very landscape to make possible the shared experience of redemption and return. But another ministry precedes and encompasses these, and it is given pride of place in the initial, emphatic, and repeated charge to comfort God’s people (40:1). 

The Hebrew word here translated “comfort,” naḥămû, has a more basic meaning: to reverse one’s mind- or feeling-state. Thus, depending on context and conjugation, the same verb might be translated “to change one’s mind,” “to have a change of heart,” “to regret,” “to be sorry or repent,” even “to mourn.” For the people who have suffered captivity, exile, and dispersion, loss of loved ones, loss of homeland and freedoms, their reversal will be one from anguish to comfort. From fear to hope, sorrow to joy, shame to self-love. From insecurity and uncertainty to the assurance of divine providence and care.

This is what the proclamation must achieve. Whatever good news is planned, it must speak first to the heart. It must see, acknowledge, and touch the very core of the people’s sufferings, confusions, and fears to prompt and make possible a set of radical reversals. It will not matter if valleys are lifted up and mountains leveled to the ground if this heart-work is not done first. None will choose to come home.

The work of comforting is a collaboration in a further way. It is not just the work of the book’s audience. Repeatedly in the latter chapters of Isaiah, it is also explicitly named as God’s work. “The LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones” (49:13). “The LORD will comfort Zion; [the LORD] will comfort all her waste places … joy and gladness will be found in her” (51:3). “I am [the one] who comforts you” (51:12). “The LORD has comforted [the LORD’s] people, [the LORD] has redeemed Jerusalem” (52:9). “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 66:13). This detail yields two key insights.

First, we do not undertake the ministry of comfort alone; we do not need to be sufficient to the task. Lack of credentials does not disqualify. The command to “comfort my people” invites us to participate in God’s work, which means that God is its guarantor and perfector. Second, the work will be iterative. The radical reversal is not once for all. God’s redemptive work of comforting manifests itself in past, present, and future.

The content of Zion’s commanded proclamation calls attention precisely to God’s presence, rule, and provident care (40:9–11). This proclamation is directed outward to all the cities of Yehud. The opening verses of Lamentations had portrayed Zion as a woman seated upon the ground, bereft and alone, weeping, forsaken, with none to comfort her (Lamentations 1:1–2). In Isaiah 40:2, it was her heart (in other words, Jerusalem’s) that was to receive tender consolation. From the reversal of her sorrow and fear follows the reversal of her status. It manifests in her agency and empowerment. She is to abandon her lowly place upon the ground and ascend “a high mountain” (40:9). Now she who received comfort becomes prophet and proclaimer. Using vivid imagery, she announces the redemptive work of a God in motion.

Just as the passage’s multiple commissions span people and places, so Zion’s proclamation encompasses multiple aspects of God’s being and activity. God is powerful and gentle, just and merciful. The climactic image portrays God as the great comforter, feeding the hungry, gathering in God’s arms the vulnerable, small, meek, and lost. If the promise of a highway in the desert brought apprehension, Zion promises that there will be nothing to fear. God will take responsibility for guiding them home, and God will carry any who need help for the journey. 

As you prepare to preach this week, consider how you might extend the commission of this passage to those in your community. Perhaps you will choose to share your pulpit, to invite into that space those who have imagined they lack the training or credentials to proclaim God’s word. Embolden and empower them to undertake the work of comforting God’s people. 

The opening line of this psalm is indicative of its tangible vision of salvation that includes all of creation. The psalmist remembers a time when the ground on which he stood was fecund. This likely included a predictable turning of the seasons and ideal weather for new life to “spring up from the ground” (verse 11) at the appropriate time, for what comes from above directly impacts what is below. Standing between the rich earth and the lifegiving sky, the psalmist witnessed the dwelling of God’s glory, which is God’s salvation.

God’s salvific presence was also felt through forgiveness. (This is a noteworthy reminder for Christians that God did not begin forgiving people when Jesus walked the earth; God has been gracious and merciful from the beginning.) God’s forgiveness was not a fact separate from the psalmist that he intellectually knew had taken place without it touching him. Instead, God’s forgiveness was an experience both inside the psalmist at the level of the heart and outside of him in a way that permeated the entire life of the community. God is a God of relationship whose very presence invites healing and restoration. 

Forgiveness was not an idea suggesting that actions didn’t matter because there would be no punishment. It was an experience of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness reaching through humanity’s hardness of heart to soften and turn their hearts toward God, with inevitable consequences for reconciling past actions and making a path toward a more humane future. Forgiveness was palpable. This is why it was recognizable to the psalmist and his community when God’s glory was no longer dwelling in their land, which they interpreted as God’s anger. The verses included in the lectionary do not include mention of God’s anger. The preacher may wish to follow the lectionary’s lead if exploring this theme would not be fruitful at this time in the congregation’s life. 

On the other hand, including the excised verses (verses 3–7) may allow the preacher to present a more complex picture of God, who is often presented in sermons as passively (not biblically) peaceful in a way that isn’t strong enough to hold the depth of suffering and destruction in this world. Anger is often treated as an unacceptable emotion ideally suppressed in mainstream American culture, perhaps especially in churches. This is understandable. Anger can quickly lead to sin if acted upon impulsively and left unchecked. It often demands that we face an uncomfortable issue we would rather go on ignoring because the required change feels too vulnerable. 

However, in its demand, anger provides vital information; it reveals what matters to us. Anger arises when something we value is threatened, when something important to us is at stake. This is not a sin; it is an alarm, a warning. Someone who never felt anger would have to be numb, indifferent, and devoid of sympathy and empathy. While human beings’ values are often not holy, with the result that their anger is expressed in unholy ways, it is not so with God. Therefore, for God to feel anger is very good news for humanity. It means that God cares when the values of the kingdom of God are not being embodied, when the good creation and creatures God called upon humans to care for are harmed. God’s anger need not remain unnamable from the pulpit.

Including the excised verses may also give the concluding verses (verses 8–13) more weight. It is easy to shrug our shoulders at God’s salvation if there is nothing from which we need saving, or at least nothing beyond the power of human beings to solve. As Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17). In verses 3–7, the psalmist expresses his dismay and confusion in questions and demands. His community needs restoration that only God can provide, but God is not acting like the “God of our salvation” (verse 4). He dares to suggest that God has been angry too long and that it is becoming difficult to rejoice in God (verses 5–6). 

This honest speech grounds the concluding verses that are full of hope for God’s salvation within the experience of real life in a sinful world. Without recognizing despair, heavenly visions of righteousness and peace kissing one another may seem too fanciful or abstract to be meaningful. Poetic language is needed at times of heightened emotion, not when everything is fine. 

Even if the preacher and her congregation would not interpret their own struggles as a consequence of God’s anger, the psalmist’s language in verses 3–7 may give them permission to acknowledge and name their experiences of struggle in the presence of God rather than remaining silent about them, and skipping to the promise of salvation that then seems unnecessary. In a culture that often interprets strong emotion as immaturity, Psalms can liberate our congregations to feel what they feel, trusting that their emotions are a gift from God, who is big enough to receive them. Honest expression before God can also open the door to deeper relationship with God, who can respond to and transform the cries of our hearts.

Finally, Psalm 85 invites us to see the ways in which salvation has broken into our communities and is doing so even now. In congregations that tend to relegate salvation to something that may or may not happen when we die, or that tend to see salvation as happening on an individual rather than a creation-wide basis, this could be a gift. As we prepare for the birth of Jesus, we prepare for one whose presence left nothing untouched, from the stars in the sky (see also Matthew 2:2) to “the wind and the sea” (Mark 4:41). We prepare for one whose glory came to “dwell in our land” (Psalm 85:9b). This is not a metaphor. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, this glory continues even today.

The second reading assigned for the Second Sunday of Advent in the lectionary can seem like liturgical whiplash. The lection for the First Sunday was the introduction of one of Paul’s letters, paired with texts focusing on Christ’s second coming. This Sunday’s lection appears to be the exact opposite: the conclusion of a letter paired with the beginning of the gospel message from John the Baptizer. Yet, the juxtaposition of beginning and ending makes complete sense during this Advent season, as we both bid farewell to the old liturgical year and welcome in the new, and as we hold together the coming of Christ in past, present, and future.

Most images of waiting conjure up annoyance and irritation: being placed on hold when talking with the insurance company, standing in line while checking out at the supermarket, sitting in the doctor’s office awaiting lab test results, and the list goes on. In today’s culture of instant purchases through Amazon Prime and the 24-hour news cycle that tells us what is happening around the world at all times, waiting is the ultimate countercultural action (or possibly non-action).

Yet, the Christian life is characterized by (sometimes inconvenient) waiting. Twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich describes it this way in his book The Shaking of the Foundations:

Our time is a time of waiting; waiting is its special destiny. And every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time runs forward. All time, both history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, waiting not for another time, but for that which is eternal.¹

The waiting of which Tillich speaks is the waiting to which the author of 2 Peter calls us during this season of Advent.

We want things to happen on our own time; we want God to fit into our timelines; we want to dictate when things start and when they finish. Advent is a reminder that not everything is in our control, and calls us to question those things we think are in our control. Advent is an opportunity to rethink our relationship with time.

And that is what the author of 2 Peter is calling his reader to do: reorient with regard to time. God’s time is not our time, and our time is not God’s time. Seasoned preachers have undoubtedly preached a sermon (or multiple) on the distinction between kairos and kronos—God’s eternal time and our chronological/linear time. While the author does not make this lexicographical distinction, the text lends itself to this interpretation.

The promises of God do not happen on our timeline, for we are not in charge of what God has promised; rather, God makes promises which we are not to doubt, even if they do not happen when we expect that they should. As Tillich noted, our life is one of expectation, but even that consists of waiting.

The promises that God enacts are not new. By drawing on Psalm 90, the author of 2 Peter concretely reminds his readers that God is eternal and has been enacting promises since the very beginning of time.

Yet, the fulfillment of these promises on God’s timeline is no reason for running amok; instead, Christians are to inhabit this time of waiting by being at peace, “leading lives of holiness and godliness” (verse 11). Some may cringe at such language, but it is important to remember that it is God who is the one who is acting. Lutherans will recall Luther’s explanation of the third article of the Apostles’ Creed, that it is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for that work.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus also describes the coming of the Lord like a “thief in the night” (see also 1 Thessalonians 5:2), again reinforcing that we are not fully in control of how God reveals God’s self in time. The regular rhythm of the liturgical year does us a disservice here, as we know that God will reveal God’s self in the birth of Christ in a couple of weeks. Yet, the patience of waiting does not mean we remain uncertain. Rather, waiting in God’s kairos means living confident in God’s promises. We do not remain what we were in the past, but we look ahead, as the Rule of Taizé notes:

Renouncing henceforth all thoughts of looking back, and joyful with infinite gratitude, never fear to precede the dawn: to praise and bless and sing Christ your Lord.²

We look ahead to hearing again of God made flesh and dwelling among us, which leads us into constant song.

Notes

1. Quoted in An Advent Sourcebook, ed. Thomas J. O’Gorman (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1988), 5.
2. Quoted in An Advent Sourcebook, 142.