Bible Reading: Isaiah 40:1-11 & Mark 1:1-8
Dear Friends
There’s waiting and then there’s waiting. Do you know what I mean? Some waiting is, well, just waiting, the pointless exercise we all have to endure from time to time. Like sitting in the doctor’s office, just waiting for your name to be called for your flu injection. But other waiting seems to matter. Like waiting in the doctor’s office for the results of the biopsy to come back or waiting to see the ultrasound of your coming baby. I suspect you know what I mean. Some waiting feels empty and pointless, while other waiting is weighty, significant, and really matters. Too often, I think, the kind of waiting we talk about in Advent seems like the former. Waiting to sing Christmas carols. Waiting to decorate the church narthex or chancel. Waiting for Christmas generally, as if we’ll spoil it if we don’t wait just right.
But I don’t think that’s the kind of waiting Advent seeks to invite at all. To get at that, it helps to realize that Advent is all about promises. And not just Advent, of course, but the whole Gospel. Given that most scholars consider the terse, descriptive opening verse of Mark “The beginning of the good news of Jesus, the Son of God” not to be, actually, the first line of the book but rather its title, Mark literally begins his account with a promise of Isaiah. It’s the promise of Isaiah to desperate Israel at one of the low points of its history. And while Mark clearly invites us to see John the Baptist as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise that one will come crying out in the wilderness, it’s the whole of Isaiah’s promise of comfort, deliverance, and renewal that Mark is claiming happens in the ministry of the one John heralds.
And the thing about promises is that they are not static. Not ever. Rather, promises if you hear and believe them create an expectation about the future and set something in motion. When you promise to call someone after a date, that person typically anticipates the call. And when a friend promises you a ride home after a function, you don’t make other arrangements why should you; you’ve got a promise.
Promises create an expectation about the future and that future expectation sets something in motion right here and right now in the present. The same is true about God’s promise. Truth be told, even more so. And that, perhaps, is the key message of Advent. That in the stable at Bethlehem God is not only keeping promises God made to Israel but also making promises to us. That in Jesus, God hears our cries of fear and concern and doubt at our lowest points and responds.
Notice that Mark doesn’t call his book, “The Good News (Gospel) of Jesus.” Rather, he titles it “The Beginning of the Good News….” Which means that everything Mark has to say about Jesus all the healing, preaching, teaching, exorcising, and even Jesus’ death and resurrection is only the beginning of the good news. There’s still more to come. Which means we are all invited to continue the story of the good news of Jesus as God continues to write the Gospel of Jesus in and through our lives as individuals and communities. We don’t have to wait passively but are invited to throw ourselves into that venture both trusting God’s promises and living them right here, right now.
This is the kind of active, involved, participatory waiting Advent invites. And why not get started now. After all, and as Mark says in the first words of the passage we read, this story about all those wonderful things that happened long ago? It’s just the beginning, and the story continues to unfold both around us and through us.
Solomzi