Word to the Wise
Sunday, December 10, 2023 - 2nd Sunday of Advent - B
[Isa 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Pet 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8]A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! [Isaiah] "One mightier than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." [Mark]
Prophetic figures are often unusual figures. John the Baptist was almost a caricature of a prophet, crying out in the desert, wearing camel skins, eating locusts and wild honey, and preaching a kind of baptism of repentance. Christian tradition has identified John the Baptist with the prophetic words of Isaiah from the first scripture for today. His proclamation is rather apocalyptic and vivid, but as the great Southern author, Flannery O'Connor has said of the prophetic task, "[To] the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
What the scriptures for this Second Sunday of Advent in Cycle B do is to pull us closer to history in the making. Isaiah's ministry took place hundreds of years before Jesus. 2 Peter is almost a hundred years after and aims at Jesus' "second coming". The Gospel of Mark introduces us to the beginning of Jesus' adult life ministry. We are living between the first coming and the second coming - between, as it were, "the tick and the tock." The Advent scriptures try to capture the anticipation that existed before the first coming. This anticipation competes with the secular anticipation going on around us. The "reason for the season" can be lost in the "Ho, Ho, Ho!" and dreams of a white Christmas!
Jesus did not exactly fit the description that John the Baptist gives us, but John the Baptist can give us someone to look forward to. "Looking forward" can be the watchword for today. AMEN