Article
- Date:
- Sunday 6th December 2020
Year B, The Second Sunday of Advent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Isaiah 40.1-11
Mark 1.1-8
In our Old Testament Reading, A new author under the Isaiah brand begins to write in Chapter 40 about the new and hopeful future for God's people. The exile in Babylon of more than seventy years is about to end and the people will be free to return to Jerusalem and to re-build the Temple, enabling their ritual worship.
Although we are trying to imagine events 2500 years ago we can help ourselves if we try to imagine something of their state of mind. Strangely, you may think, the condition in which we find ourselves, primarily self-identifying as individuals rather than as communal, is an historical anomaly, so these people had no understanding of the individual as separate from the collective; but unlike other enslaved and feudal peoples, they were special and knew themselves to be special. Their history, indeed in one sense all history, began with a Covenant between Abraham and YHWH which was sealed in the physical act of circumcision, ranking the communal Covenant above the private, even the procreative. And it is this utter commitment to Covenant which explains the terror of exile and apostasy and the indescribable joy in the prospect of return. It also, incidentally, explains the almost hysterical fanaticism generated by religious dispute, recorded in the Gospels; what God meant to say mattered at every time to everything.
That is not to say that Israel was always faithful, far from it, but there is a sense throughout the Old Testament in which people knew when they were falling short; and the Prophets certainly knew it, often putting themselves in conflict with the Levitical Temple closed shop, which explains the opening of mark's Gospel.
As we know, Mark doesn't mess about; he's like the writer of a modern television or film script, always cutting as much as he can to keep the story moving on. So in the eight verses we have heard he: summarises the whole Gospel in the Good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God; cites Isaiah in his proclamation made concrete in John who declares a baptism of repentance; and then crisply summarises the outrageous submission of this "son of God" to John's ministrations.
The problem in comparing the two accounts of new beginnings is that the story of Isaiah is profoundly dramatic, promising the restoration of the Covenant in private observance as well as in public worship; whereas the account in Mark is somewhat picturesque. We only know how important it is in hindsight; we can see how people at the time might properly have wondered what was going on. They might have understood the idea of personal repentance but it did not look like a complete new start for Israel as a precursor to the greatest change the world has ever seen. Mark, and possibly John, knew that Jesus was the Messiah but the crowds being baptised certainly didn't.
Although the ranking of the individual and the family over the communal and political is a relatively recent development it has penetrated deep into our psyche but Advent gives us the opportunity to understand what it means, in contemporary jargon, to re-set. We might most readily think in terms of our personal conduct, how we might do better and do more; but the essence of the re-set should be the way we understand our relationship with God within the framework of our Covenant, for we are not just accountable for how we behave as individuals and in our families but, like the Chosen people, we are accountable in the sphere of the communal and the political. The renewal promised by Isaiah and Jesus were both fundamentally public; they both re-assert that the communal relationship with God which Covenant conditions require is that our private behaviour is not the only, nor even the principal, place where we commune with God.
Although I don't want to strain the point, this week we are coming out of our own kind of exile with a relief unparalleled since the end of the Second World War which very few of us can remember; and already our rulers are pleading special cases for their people; and groups are advancing their special claim for early vaccination; our return from exile is already being tarnished by bare-faced selfishness.
But we should behave in private as an extension of the way we behave under public Covenant conditions; the punishment of exile and the penitence of Baptism amount to the same thing; they say that the failure to maintain Covenant relations, particularly in worship, constitutes a serious breach. As I said in my sermon on the Golden Calf, a crisis of morality is a symptom of a crisis of obedience and a crisis of obedience is a symptom of a crisis of worship.
So let me try to gather all these threads together. Our two Readings speak of renewal but their emphasis, while not excluding the individual, is on the communal. Just as were the Chosen People, we too, as the Body of Christ, are in a communal, Covenant relationship with God, under-written not in circumcision but in the public act of Baptism. We are part of a church, no matter how imperfect it may be, whose task it is to provide the framework in which we can support each other to proclaim the Good News in an environment which we often think of as hostile. But, says Isaiah, in a clarion call made famous by Handel, the Lord will comfort or, better put, strengthen, his people for what is to come. Mark's clarion call through John is not merely historic; it is cosmic. This good News of Jesus the Son of God might start as a baby but it ends with an infinite explosion of love into the cosmos. It is the beginning of that awesome trajectory from a star over a stable to the re-framing of history. That is what we are waiting for.