Mark 1:1-8

Like many within my own tradition and others like it, the Christian year is not something I grew up observing. It wasn’t until I attended university that I knew the first thing about the Christian year and every year since, new layers of meaning and significance have unfolded as I have given myself over to the practice of keeping time in this way.

Advent has always been my favourite season of the Christian year, but it is only in the last couple of years that something significant has clicked for me. Advent is a season of anticipation, hope, and preparation for the coming of Christ. This is easily understood in relationship to the remembrance and celebration of Christ’s first coming at Christmas, but the radical nature of Advent comes to the fore when we orient our anticipation and preparation towards Christ’s second coming.

The final Sunday of the Christian year is Christ the King Sunday, when Christ’s reign over all of creation is proclaimed, even if we might be tempted to believe otherwise. While one might expect to go immediately back to the birth of Christ to begin the cycle again, we instead enter a season of waiting. Advent’s dual orientation to both Christmas and Christ’s second coming make Advent neither a beginning nor an ending, but instead make it a season of living in the in-between, of living in the already and the not-yet.

The gospel reading for this second Sunday of Advent introduces us to John the Baptist. John bursts onto the scene of Mark’s gospel at the very beginning, taking up the mantle of the one who Isaiah said would prepare the way for the messiah. John sets up shop in the wilderness, issuing a call for people to repent and be baptised for the forgiveness of sins.

I cannot help but be drawn to the presence of baptism in this passage. Baptism might seem a strange place to focus for a sermon on the second Sunday of Advent, but they dovetail perfectly. A crucial facet of Advent observance is the confession of our need for help from outside of human history to change the course of things. We need an apocalyptic intervention. Humanity is so lost in the darkness that without the light of Christ, we cannot simply feel our way out of the maze of Sin and Death. So, when John the Baptist comes to prepare the way of the Lord, he does not rally an army of warriors. Nor does he seek influence and sway with those in positions of authority to grease the wheels of the established political systems. He goes out into the wilderness, into no-man’s-land, outside of the political and religious systems of power of his world, and calls people to repent, to wake up to the reality of their captivity to Sin.

John’s introduction is saturated with language and imagery from the Old Testament that remind us of God’s creative activity: for Mark, these events are the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ; John appears in the wilderness; there is an exodus of people from the countryside of Judea and Jerusalem out to the wilderness, amassing at the Jordan river to step into it and be baptised; and John’s appearance is an echo of Elijah’s. For God’s people to speak of God as creator was not simply to refer to the creation accounts on the first few pages of Genesis. Rather, to speak of God’s creative power was to speak of God’s redemptive power, God’s ability to make a way when there was no way, to do something completely new and unexpected.

The good news of Jesus Christ is news of a transition from one age to another— from this age to the age to come: from creation to new creation. John the Baptist helps us to remember that as Jesus’ followers, as the baptised, we are citizens of the new creation. While we live and move in this age, we do so with an awareness that our salvation cannot be found in anything this world offers us. Nothing we can buy, no experience we can have, no politician we can elect will save us. The movement of God will not radiate out from centres of power but will instead come from the margins. As you prepare to preach or teach this Sunday, may God give you grace to flee to the wilderness, away from the world as we know it, away from the power games and illusions of control and influence, and to find the space necessary to discern the in-breaking of the age to come.