God’s Meaning, Intention, and Self— Fully Human
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
28th December 2008: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

I am very grateful for Fr. Peter’s invitation to preach here this morning. Though I count West Seattle as my home in the U.S., I currently live in Hong Kong where I am a deacon in the Anglican/Episcopal Church there, the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, preparing to be priested this September. I currently serve as a chaplain at the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist and a lecturer in Biblical languages and literature at the Anglican Seminary there, Minghwa Theological College.

My wife and I are visiting Seattle for the holidays to be with our children and grandchildren during the holidays. All the time we have been spending with three year old Emma and six month old twins Delia and Elsie has made both of us very thoughtful this Christmas about that universal human experience, babyhood. And our need to use borrowed vehicles and snow shovels has reminded us of how much relying on others makes you closer to them. Together, the experience has made me reflect on just what it means when we Christians worship the Baby Jesus.

Frankly, it is something of a scandal. “O Come, Let us adore Him,” we sing, without a thought about what we are saying. Worship a baby? Barely born and in diapers? (That’s basically what the “swathing bands” were for.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought? How can this be?

But other lines of carols seem to have given the matter some more thought: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity,” “Of the Father’s Love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,” and “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb. Very God, begotten, not created. O Come let us adore him.”

Gerard (Gerrit) van Honthorst (1590–1656), Adoration of the Children (1620),
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Italy.

The Gospel reading today is the prologue of the Gospel of John. It cites an early Christian hymn, whose rhythm and balance is clear once you remove the interposed verses that talk about John the Baptist. The text is the source of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, and contains a sentence that sums the doctrine up: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simple—we tend to define the word God by what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish but none of them formed by a self that is in any way complete or whole. God is being itself, pure intention, pure love. We are incomplete and sick, God is wholeness and health itself. We are sinners; God is perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted and false; God is light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

The Church during the first six centuries of its existence dealt with these issues in a series of ugly arguments that are called the “Christological controversies.” In this discussion, the Church looked again and again to our text in John and to the description of Christ in Hebrews 4:15: He is wholly able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every way, suffered every trial just as we—yet was without sin.

Icon of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

The doctrine of the united Church—the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Creed—was worked out during those controversies and by those Councils. The Creed itself, together with the list of what books we accept as the Holy Bible, stand as the primary legacies of those Councils.

I can’t go into the detailed history and doctrinal differences here. What the Church gradually recognized is that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it embraced and took on in every way the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% God and 100% Human being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who stressed the oneness of God at the expense of the divinity of Jesus, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father (that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten), God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.” It is the Creed that the carol quotes when it says, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal,” and “Very God, begotten, not created.”

At the other extreme the Creed also sought to correct those who stressed the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Some believed that Christ was fully God and thus only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn these people because they “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7). Later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered. To all of these, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . he became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”

Mural of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

Popular Christian legends from those early years show some of the confusion that prevailed—many of the infancy Gospels rejected by the Councils for inclusion in the New Testament portray not a helpless, speechless baby Jesus, but one that can give his Mother sermons the day he was born and that as a child has an unfortunate tendency to miraculously kill off his playmates when they are mean to him and then equally miraculously to resurrect them when his Mother would tell him it was not nice to kill one’s playmates.

Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man.

Reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable natures—divine and human—is only part of the problem, however. The changing ways people had of understanding the historical Jesus himself was the root of the problem.

It was only over time that the people around Jesus came to understand his unique character. Today’s Gospel was a key part of that process.

From fragments here and there preserved in the Gospels, we know that the people who actually knew Jesus while he was alive had no problem seeing his human nature--

In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting normally after he began his public ministry. They do this because they believe he has gone insane. Later in the chapter we read about Jesus publicly disassociating himself with his mother and brothers and saying “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

His family wasn’t alone in thinking that he was behaving in unexpected, if not inappropriate, ways. In Matthew 13 people from his home town wonder how on earth Jesus could be so wise and work such wonders, since he was just a local boy whose father, Mother, brothers, and sisters they all knew.

Even those who followed Jesus had a great difficulty coming to an understanding of who he was. When Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, this is seen as unusual. Jesus praises Simon’s acceptance of the witness of Heaven about Jesus’ identity by giving him a new name—Peter—that plays on the idea that such acceptance is the solid foundation of faith, (“You are a little stone—Petros, and upon this Bedrock—petra—I will build my Church…”)

It is about those who rejected Jesus’ mission because they could see only his human side that today’s Gospel says, “he came unto his own, and his own people rejected him.”

Clearly, Jesus’ bodily reappearance after what they all knew was his death made his disciples reconsider things and start reinterpreting what they had experienced with Jesus. After all, he was for many a close family member and friend who had said that somehow God was actively present in his person, who called God, “Father,” and said that their being right with God somehow depended on how they reacted to him.

In the Book of Acts, we read that shortly after Jesus’ death, reappearance, and final departure, his Mother and brothers had finally joined together with his disciples (Act 1:14).

Because of Easter, Jesus’ followers recognized that their Master was at the very least what the prophets of Israel had promised-- the ideal King of Israel anointed by God’s spirit to save his people and establish a kingdom of justice and peace. But this anointed one, or Messiah, had turned out to be not exactly what they had expected. He had not overthrown the foreign invaders, not brought history to an end, not set up the everlasting peaceable kingdom they had hoped for.

So their ideas of what the Messiah would have to change. They began to use one of the less common honorific terms for a king of Israel to describe him—Son of God. In the Psalms God says to the King of Israel, “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.” They now remembered that Jesus had repeatedly referred to God as “Father.”

They thus only came to recognize his true nature gradually, and as time moves on, they understand more and more, and the earlier they think it is that Jesus’ divine sonship was clearly established.

Saint Paul, whose writings are the earliest ones we have preserved in the New Testament, in about 50 C.E. says that Jesus Christ was “constituted as Son of God” as of his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1).

About two decades later, the earliest Gospel, Saint Mark, says that the “beginning of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God,” was at his baptism by John the Baptist, when God’s voice declared “You are my beloved Son,” the Spirit descended upon him.

Another decade or two later, in the late 70s and 80s, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke each tack on to the beginning of Mark’s story a couple of chapters of very divergent legendary material about the birth of Jesus.


But despite the unharmonizable differences differences in the legendary details, both Matthew and Luke agree in proclaiming the Jesus was Son of God from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb.

You see the direction of the development? The more time goes one, the earlier it is that Christians believe that Jesus was constituted as Son of God: Paul says as of his resurrection; Mark, as of his baptism; Matthew and Luke, as of his conception and birth.

The latest Gospel in the New Testament, Saint John, was written around 100 C.E. Today’s Gospel reading says that it was not at Jesus’ resurrection, nor his baptism, nor his conception, that he was constituted as God’s Son. John says that it was always that way. Jesus was always in God and of God.

The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.” The writer is referring to a word with a long background and heavy baggage, both classical and Semitic.

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.” At its root, it means whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips. The word logos in some ways includes the meanings of both the Latin words oratio “speech or utterance” and ratio “intelligence, rationality, sense.” Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”

But the Logos is not just meaning and utterance of meaning. In order to build a fence around the Law and avoid uttering “in vain” the name of God, Jews had begun to find ways of referring to God without using God’s name. The first action of God in creation is Genesis chapter one is speech. “God said, Let there be light, and light came into existence.” And so the creative active speech of God became one circumlocution for God proper, just as hashem, the name, did. But Dabar ha-Elohim “the word of God” became a powerful image of the power of God manifested in history and in personal lives as well. Later, the Aramaic term Memra “the word” became one the ways of referring to God as present, active, and discernable in the world.

I am sure that John has both images of logos, the Greek and the Semitic, in mind when he quotes this hymn about the logos who in the beginning is with God and is God.

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/or Active Principle of God took on flesh and “dwelt” among us. The choice of the word “flesh” is almost certainly deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not that separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of the covenant that God made with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason itself, Meaning itself, God’s Active Intention itself took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

The hymn softens this by adding “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “pitched his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses. I usually translate it as “he dwelt for a time in our midst.”

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of the Only Son of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.” Perhaps a better way to express this would be “we saw his glory, as of someone from the Father who was absolutely One-of-a-kind, someone full of Grace and Truth”

It is here that for me, at least, the conflict between divine and human is resolved--Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the Glory of Meaning Itself placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

Here is the squaring of the circle and the reconciling of the polar opposites—God revealing Himself as Grace--undeserved, unconditional, one-way love, and Truth—the acceptance of things as they are with a willingness to conform to things as they ought to be. It was in this that John says Jesus was recognized as the Logos from all eternity. But he adds-- Jesus was monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We occasionally can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, He is Transcendence Itself.

John affirms in his prologue that Jesus was in God, with God, indeed, was God from the beginning. This is part of larger effort in the Gospel to play down the earthly origins of Jesus and the patent humanity he enjoyed in order to make what really mattered stand out.

In John chapter 7, some of Jesus’s opponents complain that he could not be the Messiah because they knew he was from Nazareth, and they believed a tradition that the Messiah’s origin’s. Later in the chapter, other opponents say he cannot be the Messiah because they know he is from Galilee and they believe that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. To the former, Jesus replies that the people around him do not truly know where he is from—he is from the Father above, and those about him don’t see this. To the latter, he does not say, “Oh yeah, well I was secretly born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.” What he does say is this: “You have no idea where I am from.” Again, the point is clear: he is from above, from the bosom of the Father.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”


In his Christmas Day sermon of 1611, the great Anglican divine Bishop Lancelot Andrewes commented on this chapter. Andrewes was a scholar, and was a major translator and editor of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, published earlier that year. This is what he said about the incarnation of Christ, the word being made flesh:

“I add yet farther; what flesh? The flesh of an infant. What, Verbum infans, the Word of an infant? The Word, and not be able to speak a word? How evil agreeth this!”

He uses the original Latin meaning of the word “infant,” namely, a person who is not yet able to speak, and thus portrays the Word made flesh as “the Word that cannot even speak a word.” There is something wrong in this to Andrewes: had he been speaking modern English, “how evil agreeth this!” would have been “This just isn’t right.”

The word that is unable to speak—Andrewes meant by this two things: the utter helplessness and powerlessness of God made man in a little baby, and the inexpressible depth of the revelation of God thus made.

Andrewes continues (I have updated his language a bit),

“And how was He born, how welcomed? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate? No, (here he borrows from the Gospel of Luke), but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts (rags) for His array. This was His fleshly beginning. But follow Him later on in life, it gets no better. Shivering when weather is cold; sweaty and faint when it is hot. Suffering hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. And is His end any better? It sums up his whole life—what is His flesh then? Scourged and beaten, black and blue, bloody and swollen, rent and torn, thorns and nails sticking in His flesh. When John says “became flesh and was made a human being” this is what the word “flesh” means. If the ever-lasting Word of God had been made head of all the angels, that would have been an abasement; to be a lesser angel, even worse. But listen to Old Testament passages applied to our Lord in the flesh that he was born to, “he was despised, rejected among the people,” and “I am a worm, and not even a human being.” “Born thus, clothed thus, housed thus, treated thus—this is as bad as it can get. He truly was among the lowest of the low. By thus being “made man” He was unmade. To take on this flesh, he had to lay aside much, and not merely play at lowness, but to suffer lowness by being low. I want you to think on this—why ever would He have done such a thing? Why such great indignity? What was it that made the Word thus to be made flesh? Certainly not some human motivation or principle. That already is flesh, and thus cannot provide a motive to become flesh. It was God alone, and in God nothing but love. Love alone did it. Love, as Saint Paul says, is not jealous, does not keep score, is not worried about status. And this emptying out of self is the core characteristic of love. This Love did not count costs, and thus did not worry about what flesh it would be made, but rather, how it would remake flesh.”


This helpless baby was God made one of us. We must treat all the helpless with the respect and compassion. The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this speechless and helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever steadfast. This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth, and gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God. As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.

A Voice in the Desert

St. John the Baptist

A Voice in the Desert
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
Second Sunday of Advent (Year B)
Homily delivered at St. John's Cathedral, Hong Kong
7th December 2008: 2:00pm Said Eucharist

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

The readings for this Sunday and next tell us about the voice in the wilderness, John the Baptist. They see John as the forerunner of Jesus, the beginning of the fulfillment of the hope of the Hebrew Scripture: the hope for a day in the future when God will destroy and punish all that is wrong with the world and set up in its place a new world, one of justice, peace, fullness of life, and joy, where all that is right with our current world will continue, a world renewed and purified, where good things are no longer mixed with the bad as we see in most of our daily life now. In the Hebrew Scriptures, those who suffer under this world’s injustices and yearn for the good will rejoice at the coming Day of God as a Day of Vindication, Freedom, and Justice. Oppressors and those who oppose God, however, fear the Day of God as a Day of Wrath, of Burning, of Condemnation.

A key idea in today’s readings is the image of a messenger bringing the “good news,” or “happy tidings” of the nearness of this Day of God.

The Gospel passage opens the Gospel of Mark. It depends on a play on words. The word Gospel in Greek is euangelion, good news, happy tidings, a message of joy (whether a victory in war, and end to a war, or a royal birth). The word messenger in Greek is angelos (from where we get our word angel). Mark begins, “The beginning of the message of joy (euangelion) about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it was written in Isaiah (Mark also quotes Malachi here)—‘Look, I am sending my messenger (angelos) ahead . . . [to] prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”

Mark sees these words fulfilled in the appearance of John the Baptist, whose preaching in the wilderness of Judea near the north of the Dead Sea preceded the ministry of Jesus. Mark sees John the Baptist as the messenger sent before the Lord to prepare his way, a voice of comfort and joy, bringing a message of happy news, a gospel. In this sense his story is the beginning of the good news of Jesus.

But oddly, this picture of a happy messenger seems to be the opposite of the way John himself is actually portrayed. In all four of the Gospels, John is portrayed as a somewhat stern and forbidding character-- more a voice of judgment calling for repentance and amendment of life rather than a messenger of joy with glad tidings.

The contrast brings into sharp focus this question—how can a day of wrath and judgment be the occasion for joy?

Since we read these texts during Advent, we tend to use the two-fold nature of the season as a means of avoiding this key question. In Advent, we look back to the things anticipating and leading to the coming of Jesus in the flesh, his life, death, and resurrection. But we also look forward to the great and terrible day when Jesus will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead, just as we affirm every week in the creed. Advent, then, celebrates both the once and future comings of our king. Because of this, we tend to think that it is all about then, either past or future, and not now. That is how we bracket away the question of why joy and judgment seem to be confused in these texts.

What we do is this: we lump all the happy feelings—the message of Joy—in with the first coming of Jesus. After all, in a couple of weeks, we’re going to be celebrating Christmas, and singing “Joy to the World,” “tidings of comfort and joy,” and “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” We wrap the stories of Jesus’ coming 2000 years ago in a package of warm and fuzzy sentimentality, and rob the stories of the real challenge and risk they presented when they were told originally.

The coming Day of Judgment, on the other hand, is not usually seen as a day of joy. It is the ultimate disaster—the end of civilization and history. It is the day when we who have pierced Jesus will look upon his glorious scars, recognize them as wounds we inflicted upon him, and weep. Even the old English name of the day—Doomsday—means for us a day of horror and doom and gloom, rather than its original sense of the day on which all scores are settled, all accounts cleared.

As a result, we tend to bracket out Judgment Day by placing it into what seems an almost mythological future, or at least to a future that just seems to get further and further away the more time goes on. And as to the founding of God’s country, the establishment of true and universal justice and prosperity, the setting up of the peaceable kingdom—we treat these as mere metaphors. It refers to the Church—after all, don’t we call it “God’s Kingdom on earth?” Or perhaps we use it to refer to our efforts at establishing social justice or economic fairness, political movements, after all, that only partially embody the ideals yearned for in the stories. In so doing, we cheapen the images and tame them, and make them available as tools for self-justification, or possible ways to sell our own political schemes or religious preferences.

But this is not really how we should react to these stories.

The Prophet Isaiah (from the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes by Michelangelo)

First, let’s look at the Isaiah passage. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:1-2).

The setting is the end of the Exile in Babylon of the Jewish people. In 586 BCE, a great national disaster overtook ancient Judaism—Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered and destroyed Jerusalem and transported its inhabitants en masse to Babylon. All that Jews had hoped for, their confidence that God would keep his promise that the Davidic royal house would continue uniteruppted forever, their desire that God would repeat against the Babylonians his miraculous delivery of the city against the Assyrians a century before, their hope that if they turned to God, God would turn to them and save them—all of this was crushed with the destruction of the city and the deportation of the nation’s leading classes.

In Babylon, Jews found other grounds to hope in God, and Judaism reformed and deepened. After the Babylonians themselves had been defeated by the Persians, a return to Palestine was possible.

The oracle starts as a dialog between God and the members of his court on high—the Hebrew verbs are in the plural, as you will notice from the King James’ version, “Comfort ye, Comfort ye, my people.” God is telling the angels to prepare things for the consolation of Judah: “Comfort my people, speak tenderly to them that their term is ended, that they have received double for all their sins.”

The angels are to reassure the Jews they are still God’s own, “my people.” God does not disown them, despite their sins. Their punishment is over, and they are now ready to be forgiven and restored to their homeland and Jerusalem.

An angelic member of the court now responds to God’s announcement of liberation and cries out, “In the wilderness prepare the Lord’s road, make straight in the desert God’s highway” (40:3).

The angels pronounce that the return will be easy and swift—symbolized by a highway from Babylon to Jerusalem that runs straight through the desert, with all the hills and valleys smoothed out. The exiles, being dragged in chains to Babylon, had stumbled and fallen over the high mountains, the deep valleys, and the dry desert on their way to a city they hated. Now, they are returning to the city that they love, but returning over a highway going through a country marvelously leveled by God—every valley shall be lifted high, and every mountain and hill flattened. “Prepare” and “make straight” means “to remove all obstacles.”

This return to Jerusalem is portrayed as the future Day of God. He not only makes the way easy for his exiled people, but he also expects his people to prepare for his intended kingdom (62:10) “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (40:5). God’s liberating work is not intended only for Judah, but for all peoples. Those nations will see the miraculous deliverance of God’s people from Babylonian bondage and their unlikely return. So they too will join in the celebration, and embrace Yahweh and his kingdom of peace, justice, and prosperity for all.

And here is where Second Isaiah’s commissioning begins. A member of the angelic host commands him to “Cry out”. And for the first time, the prophet speaks. “What shall I cry?” (40:6)

We expect him to cry out joy and happiness at God’s great act.

And he does not. Once he has found his voice, the prophet continues not immediately with a message of joy or comfort, but a pronouncement of the sorry condition we find ourselves in. “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass” (40:6b-7).

Second Isaiah’s proclamation of judgment at the moment of joy and restoration provides a counterpoint to the question about why John the Baptist—who proclaims judgment and demands repentance—is portrayed as a messenger of joy.

HOW CAN WE REJOICE AT THE PROSPECT OF JUDGMENT? WHY PROCLAIM JUDGMENT AT THE MOMENT OF JOY AND RESTORATION OF HOPE?

Second Isaiah’s answer to this question is not “Rejoice. We were oppressed, and now the oppressors are getting their just deserts. Let’s take pleasure in their punishment, now at long last!” It is not the petty satisfaction of a child vindicated or a plaintiff recompensed.

It is also not “We were punished. What we have suffered is our just deserts! Now God owes it to us to restore us.”

It is not “How can I share this joyful news with my people? This Babylonian exile has proven to them how completely helpless, vulnerable and incompetent we really are.”

The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsa)

Rather, he declares that all people are grass, not just those who are about that have the tables turned in their favor. His argument is about all human beings, regardless of their condition. “All people are grass. We are about as constant as wildflowers that last a day.”

His point is that the Exile has shown a truth that is universal about all people—even the Babylonian victors who carried the Judeans off, they themselves have been conquered in turn.

To be human is to be temporary. To be human is to have a life span than is shorter than your imagination. To be human is to fall short, to be imperfect, to be powerless about ultimate things.

Human glory passes away. But so also does human suffering. We in a very real way are all helpless, vulnerable, incompetent, and devastated. The fate we suffer is as variable as a wind, a breath from God.

In the most essential way, we are all victims of our mortal condition. This does not mean that the wrongs we commit, the oppressions we practice, are in any way less serious or in need of being set to right.

But it does mean that it just might be possible that the Day of God—the Day which will set all things right—in some way should be expected to benefit not just what we call “the wretched of the earth.” For in some ways, all are wretched.

Then comes the most powerful line in the story. Second Isaiah, or maybe one of the angelic host replying to him adds—“The grass indeed withers; the flower certainly fades– but the word of our God will stand forever.”

God’s word—his active meaning in the world, his meaning that acts in the world, his intention that spoke the universe into existence, that proclaimed to Pharaoh “Set my people free”, that created a people out of social outcasts and marginals, that word now proclaims return to Jerusalem as a sign to the whole world of God’s never-failing promise of assurance to all victims.

So the return to Jerusalem, to Mount Zion, is a sign of hope for all: “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, messenger of happy news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, your God is at work here!” (40:9). “He feeds his flock like a shepherd; he gathers the lambs in his arms, and carries them in his bosom, and gently leads the mother sheep.” (40:11).

In this passage, the return from Babylonian exile is seen not so much as a release from bondage as God’s giving us a new opportunity to come to him and fulfill the measure of what he intended in creating us—to create upon the earth people, a nation and a worldwide humanity living in the way God calls us to live –God’s Kingdom on this earth. “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all mankind shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (40:5).

It is the very fact that we recognize our helplessness and our hopelessness that allows the joyful news to make any sense to us. Only when we know we are grass, mere wildflowers, only when we have heard and truly believe, “you are but dust, and to dust you shall return,” can we truly hope for the salvation of God. Only then are we willing to do anything necessary to receive it. Only the hungry truly appreciate food. Only the downcast and the oppressed rejoice in news that finally things are being set at right.

The first letter of St. John says “in Love, there is no judgment.” That is true in every sense. If it is truly love, there are no conditions, and no implied standard against which you are being measured.

But the fact remains that we are so made that without a reciprocal condition-free response, without our total surrender, we cannot receive love when offered. And for most of us, the feeling of despair caused by judgment is a prerequisite for us to surrender to accept love. As St. Augustine says, those who have their hands full cannot accept a gift.

Second Isaiah transcends nationalism and sectarianism by seeing the return as not merely a national restoration or a religious rebirth, but also God’s act of invitation to the whole world. This is one of the reasons Mark uses it as a type to introduce the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist.

When we turn to the opening verses of Mark, we see how the theme has been adapted and expanded, both by the author of Mark and by the character of John the Baptist.

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that ritual and moral impurity could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Law of Moses—for many of these the remedy was to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period. Since there were many gentiles interested in Jewish monotheism, and some of these wanted to become Jews, the various schools of Judaism of the period began to practice washing purification rites for people desiring to join to God’s people to purge the general impurity of living as a gentile. This was in addition to circumcision for men. Such proselyte baptism was basically another kind of ritual washing provided for in the law, albeit one practiced for the first time and as an initiatory rite.

A Mikveh from Khirbet Qumran.

The sect at Qumran rejected the validity of the Temple priesthood and sacrifices, and as a result practiced their own washings and purity rules. Simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough, you had to accept the right belief system and practice the right ritual system. As a result, it appears that they practiced some form of proselyte initiatory washing for even other Jews who joined the community. There is even a passage in the Qumran Manual of Discipline that says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart in the person if it were to be valid. It states that a person cannot become clean if he fails to obey God's commandments in addition to following the cleansing rituals. "For it is through the spirit of God's true counsel concerning the ways of man that all his sins be expiated," observes the Manual, "and when his flesh is sprinkled with purifying water, it shall be made clean by the humble submission of his soul to all the precepts of God."

Members of the Qumran community also had a clear hope for a cataclysmic future intervention by God on their behalf. Having endured centuries of foreign rule, these Jews longed for freedom from oppression, and their writings pine for the arrival of Israel's messiah. The Manual requires that those wishing to enter Qumran "shall go into the wilderness to prepare there the way of Him; as it is written, Prepare in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a path for our God."

It is this same passage from Isaiah that Mark quotes and applies to John the Baptist, and in a way very reminiscent of how the Dead Sea Scrolls quote Hebrew Scripture.

John was baptizing in the Jordan just a few kilometers from the Qumran mother House. The fact that both John and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of Jerusalem stems from the importance of the image of the desert in Hebrew biblical history. It was where God met with his people and/or with the “man of God” to help form and shape him into the one God had called him to be. God meets Moses in the desert (Exodus 2:11—4:31), and purifies his people there as they wander for 40 years after the Exodus. He meets Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).

And the wilderness is important in another sense. The wilderness represents the “periphery”, the “margins”, the “edge of the world” to Jew and Gentile alike. To Jews, the hub of the world where everything of significance happened was Jerusalem. And the center of Jerusalem was the Temple. It was the Temple that was the symbol to all Jews, not only of the religious center of worldwide Judaism, but its political and economic center, as well. It was the abode of those who were the leaders of Israel and of the systems that both governed Israel and set the priorities of the Jewish presence in society. If the center had become corrupted, it was only from the periphery that reform could come.

St. John the Baptist

It is here that John appears, nearly as a wild man, clothed in camel hair and a leather belt, eating wild honey and locusts. He preaches a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins.” A better way to translate it, I think, would be, “a washing or immersion signifying your change of heart that results in the setting aside of your sins.”

It is something like what the Qumran sectarians practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect. People flock to Jordan and crowds accept his teaching. But he is not preaching a cheap grace.

He charges the people he has thus washed to “go out and produce fruit worthy of repentance.” What he is saying is, “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts, a change of direction. It is only thus that your sins can be set aside by God and by you.”

In the gospels in Luke and Matthew, he is quoted as giving examples of what such tangible evidence is—if you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.

I wonder what John the Baptist would say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ? Stop abusing spouses and children? Belittling employees or subordinates? Stop making fun of those who differ from us? Would he ask us to stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods that are based on the exploitation of others? Would he simply ask us to stop doing things that bother our conscience?

John applied this need to have a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of direction, to all, regardless of condition or family background. He says (again in Matthew and Luke) “Repent! Being Abraham’s children is not enough—God can raise up children of Abraham from the very rocks if he needed to! What is needed is a change of heart!”

Some would say that Mark has misquoted Isaiah, and that John is a very different figure from the announcer of the return from Exile in Second Isaiah. I am not so sure. We are dealing with typology here, with deep images with many resonances and layers.

The fact is that God is a God who acts. And when God acts, certain patterns and issues repeat themselves.

We must not delude ourselves into thinking that we do not need to repent. We must listen to the voice crying in the desert, “prepare the Lord’s way, Make his paths straight.” It is only by our recognizing our own wrongs and oppressions that we throw ourselves, again helpless and hopeless, on this God who speaks, acts, and saves, and tenderly treats his own as a shepherd treats little lambs. God had called us as his own. He will not abandon us. It is God who moves us in our hearts as we hear his voice. We must receive his gift and heed his call.

John knew that judgment and turning from our sin was not the whole story. He calls us to give tangible evidence in our behavior that we have indeed changed our hearts.

In all the Gospel accounts, he points to one who is greater than he is that will follow, one that will baptize not just with water but with holy spirit. Again, the parallel to Qumran is clear. What he means is his washing that shows a change of heart and results in forgiveness or setting aside of sin can only purge away guilt. But what is needed is more, the actual power to live as God wants us to live. It is for that greater messenger, whose sandal straps John is seen as saying he is unworthy to untie, that he is preparing the way.

In this season of Advent, several prayers are useful in helping us hear the solemn warning, that voice of judgment that is at the same time a messenger of joy. I read some here by way of reminder for us all [taken from the Oxford Book of Prayers.]

Almighty and eternal God, who drew out a fountain of living water in the desert for your people, draw from the hardness of our hearts tears of compunction, that we may be able to lament our sins, and may receive you in your mercy.
Latin, late 14th century

O God our Father, help us to nail to the cross of your dear Son the whole body of our death, the wrong desires of the heart, the sinful devisings of the mind, the corrupt apprehensions of the eyes, the cruel words of the tongue, the ill employment of hands and feet; that the old man being crucified and done away, the new man may live and grow into the glorious likeness of the same your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.
Eric Milner-White, 1884-1964

One is the collect for the first Sunday in Advent, a collect we all should be repeating in our private prayers throughout the season:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Finally, perhaps the simplest and most important prayer of all,

Lord Jesus, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, a Sinner.

In the name of God, Amen.