We talked last week about this kind of tension there can be during the season of Advent between the business and excitement around us, and the quiet, contemplative, and sometimes gloomy atmosphere we find at church, both in our liturgy and in our readings. Last Sunday, we talked about Isaiah and how he prophetized at a time where people experienced the absence of God in their exile from Jerusalem, and the mood was rather dark if you remember. Isaiah’s main point is that if God is hidden, it is the people’s own doing. They have caused God to forsake them because of their sins, God has rejected them because they have rejected God in the first place. Yet there is a glimmer of hope: The prophet, anticipating in that Christ’s work of redemption, stands in the gap between God and the people and, by his own sacrifice of prayer and lamentation, opens a space where God and the people can be brought together again. And this is what our lessons help us to explore a little more today, both our passage from the book Isaiah and the beginning of the Gospel according to Mark. We’ve already talked about Isaiah, so let’s start with Mark.
From the first verse of his Gospel, Mark announces us what it is all about, it’s “(…) the good news of Jesus-Christ [the son of God]“. Nonetheless he opens the scene with this rather strange character, John the Baptist, who is calling people to repentance in the wilderness. Now you’ll notice I am not making up the parallelism between Isaiah and John the Baptist, Mark quotes the prophet in the second verse of the text, he wants us to make this connection between the two men: They both prepare the way for the Lord. They both stand in this gap between God and the people, they stand in between their relationship broken by sin, and because they stand there, in the wilderness, in the brokenness, they provide a space where God and the people can meet. It is very important for us to notice that they can do that, as we have just mentioned, because of their sacrifice of prayer and lamentation. This is very clear in Mark’s Gospel: John the Baptist may at first sight look like a strange character, but his weirdness, his non conformity with the social and religious standards and expectations of his culture, points towards his holiness. It would have been rather self explanatory to the readers of the Gospel in the first century. John didn’t wear camel hair and ate locusts and wild honey because he was weird, he was fasting and abstaining from any kind of comfort and wealth. Deeper than that, we also know from Luke’s Gospel that John was a priest, because his father Zechariah was a priest (Priesthood at the time was inherited), yet instead of wearing fine vestments to worship in the Temple with the other religious authorities, we find John preaching half naked to crowds of peasants and lepers in the wilderness. John not only renounced the pleasures of the world, he also disregarded the prestige and reputation a religion well practiced in the eyes of men could have given him. If John called the people to repentance, he himself embodied what repentance was all about.
So what is this message of repentance all about?
Mark starts by telling us that repentance is for the “forgiveness of sins” and John asks the people to “confess [their] sins“. If we look at the meaning of the word “repentance” in Greek, it also means to return, to go back. The idea is that, like the Hebrews went back to Jerusalem after the Exile, the people are called to return to God after the separation sin has created between them. I find it interesting that the first thing John asks people isn’t to make up for their sins or to change their lives right away. The first thing they have to do is to turn to God, to face the truth about themselves, and what I find even more remarkable is that this repentance that Mark announces is actually the beginning of the good news, in the same way that Isaiah announced the “good tidings” in the midst of the Exile, when people were called to contemplate their own mortality and unworthiness: “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field“. Sin is the wilderness, but repentance is the way out. Repentance per se does not make God show up, but it opens the way for God to show up. We often hear today that there are many ways to find God, but if we open the Bible obviously the highway is repentance. And this is good news. This is good news. Repentance and joy don’t exclude each other, rather repentance is the path to joy because it is the path to abundance of life. A theologian I like comments: “Sin is a problem {not because it angers God but] because it kills. It kills us. Why? Because sin is a refusal to become fully human. It’s anything that interferes with the opening up of our whole hearts to God, to others, to creation, and to ourselves. Sin is estrangement, disconnection, sterility, disharmony.It’s the slow accumulation of dust, choking the soul.“
And so, repentance understood this way isn’t about being punished by God or about punishing ourselves, it’s about looking for liberation, actually it’s about receiving liberation. I think a good way to understand this can be to think about our personal relationships, and how acknowledging our wrongs, or having someone who hurt us acknowledges their wrongs, can bring comfort and new life to both sides. The main problem according to the prophets is that we have broken relationships with God, and as a consequence we have broken relationships with each other and with the whole of creation, the only thing we really need for joy and abundant life is reconciliation and this reconciliation cannot happen if we don’t repent and turn away from our sins. We cannot make it happen, only God can make this reconciliation happen, and we believe this is what God did in Jesus-Christ, but repentance is needed to open up to this possibility, accepting the gift of reconciliation from God. This is why people had to repent before the coming of Christ, otherwise (and we see that in many places all over the Gospels), they wouldn’t be able to receive the forgiveness, healing and newness of life Christ brought to them.
So how does this invitation look like for us today?
– The first thing I would like for us to notice is that, even if we have been baptized, with water and Holy Spirit, we are still asked to go back (repent) to the grace of our baptism again and again. Actually, sometimes the problem when we are baptized and practicing Christians is that we may end up taking God for granted. Yes, God’s grace is always available to us but it’s not available like tap water or a light switch. We may lose the sense of God’s presence in our life when we do things that aren’t compatible with God’s holiness. It’s like any other relationship, it takes efforts to keep it alive and it takes efforts to find again trust and intimacy when things go wrong. If we look for reconciliation, it starts with acknowledging what destroys or damages the relationship. We are invited to ask ourselves what is it that damages our relationship with God: Is it something we cannot forget or cannot forgive, forgiving ourselves included, is it our tendency to put ourselves first or on the other way around is it our desire to always please people, is it our own incapacity to accept who we are or to accept our need of God?
– As we think about all that can separate us from God, do we just ruminate, accusing circumstances or accusing ourselves, or do we accept the invitation to pray about it, to talk to God about it asking that God, or one of his prophets, the Scriptures, or one of God’s many messengers, would show us our wrongs and are we ready to hear what they have to say to us? How do we take criticism, how ready are we to listen to those whom we have hurt or to those who tell us the truth about ourselves? Will we let them show us the way we need to take to find reconciliation? And are we ready to take the first step?
– Repentance is indeed responding to this invitation to take a first step. As we do so, do we trust God to help us to change or do we cling to the belief that it is what it is, that what was done is done and there is no way back. When we contemplate the wrongs we have done, do we have a sense of despair if not indifference, instead of trying to find how God can bring restoration and new life? Isaiah invites us to believe that: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain“. In the end, the question may be: Do we believe in God’s goodness and God’s offer of forgiveness?