Second Sunday of Advent: Mark 1.1-8
On September 6, 1930— fifteen years before the Third Reich executed him under the direct orders of the Fuhrer— Dietrich Bonhoeffer set sail for America from Bremen, Germany. The young theologian had already earned two separate PhDs and had been awarded a Sloan Fellowship for a year of post-graduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Almost immediately the religious culture he found at the liberal seminary and in the mainline churches around Manhattan underwhelmed him. Christians in America, he concluded, “fashioned their beliefs the same way a man orders a car from the factory— according to taste and preference.”
In a letter to his atheist brother Karl-Friedrich, Bonhoeffer shared his astonishment at the lack of faith he found among those studying to become preachers:
“The students— on average twenty-five to thirty years old— are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become easily intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases. They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation, blithely indifferent to two thousand years of Christian thought. There is no theology here. Occasionally I have even heard students— seminarians preparing for the ministry— ask “whether one really must preach about Christ?””
As the fall semester progressed, Bonhoeffer’s frustration festered into anguish. To a friend, another Sloan Fellow from Europe, Bonhoeffer complained, “In church after church, the sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. But the Kingdom of God does not suffer lip service…In New York, they preach about virtually everything except the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Bonhoeffer lodged the same lament in a letter home to his parents, “So thank God Christmas is coming soon, just now in the middle of all this, otherwise I would fall completely into despair.”
Thank God Christmas is coming.
Notice.
It was the preaching Bonhoeffer heard during Advent that tempted him to despair. As Christmas drew near, the pulpits around him proclaimed everything but the gospel of Jesus Christ. Given the lectionary readings assigned for the season, many preachers seized on John the Baptist’s message of judgment and repentance as an opportunity to rail against the politics of the day— what the future martyr dismissed as mere “newspaper events.”
Bonhoeffer felt the difference in his body; he was literally starving for the gospel and on the verge of despondency. In other words, Bonhoeffer warns me— and Bonhoeffer invites you to expect of me— to make this scripture passage about Jesus Christ and nothing else.
He would have me give you Christ.
Just so, the question:
How is Christ Jesus different from his cousin John?
What makes the Coming One distinct from his fierce forerunner?
Every Advent, before we arrive at the manger, we must go through the wilderness. In Mark’s account of the kerygma, the appearance of John the Baptist is the very first occurrence of the word gospel, followed by the prophecy of Isaiah on John’s lips:
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the LORD, make his paths straight,”” John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”
Not only does Mark aim to get your attention by omitting the Nativity of Christ altogether, Mark trusts you to notice that he does not completely quoting the prophet Isaiah. The Gospel instead cobbles together a composite of quotes from Israel’s scriptures:
Exodus 23.30: “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the land I have prepared for you.”
Malachi 3.1: “Behold, I dispatch my messenger to make a way before me.”
Isaiah 40.3: “…a voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make his paths straight””
Critically, Mark changes Malachi’s vision of the coming Day of the LORD in two ways. Mark adds a verb: “construct” (prepare). This is Mark’s way of saying Jesus teaches no path but is himself the new way being forged in an old world. And, second, Mark lops off the rest of Malachi 3.1, which prophesies that “...the LORD whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple…”
Mark deletes the Temple portion of the prophecy and— notice— in its place Mark adds the citation from Isaiah 40.3 about the LORD’s Day appearing in the wilderness. For the Christians, the Old Testament ends with the prophet Malachi. Thus, the New Testament begins where the apostles’ scriptures concluded.
Jews in the first century believed that prophecy had ended with Malachi. God had gone silent. This quote plus Mark’s auspicious use of the word “arche” (“In the beginning…”) is Mark’s way of proclaiming that the Loquacious LORD is about to speak again, appear again, do something extraordinary.
And God would do so not in the Temple in Jerusalem but in the wilderness— the place where YHVH had sojourned with Moses and the Israelites following the exodus; the place where the prophet Elijah had found sanctuary when he was threatened by political authorities.
In just a few sentences, then, Mark introduces the competing symbolic spaces that will thread the rest of his Gospel:
Temple versus Wilderness
Jerusalem versus the Refugee Camp
Center of Powers versus the Periphery
Along with these competing symbolic spaces, Mark provides an initial contrast between John the Baptist, who like the prophets of old exhorts his hearers to repentance, and Jesus Christ who is altogether different from the prophets who augured him.
Of course, it would be easy to confuse Jesus for a prophet just like John the Baptist. After all, the Gospels all present Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering preacher, a semi-rabbi. Jesus did not carry a lunchbox full of locusts or wear a camel hair coat, but Jesus did wander from place to place proclaiming a consistent theme that complimented his cousin’s own message, the coming of the Kingdom of God.
For Christ, the Kingdom was a catch-all term, a summary name for the fulfillment of all the promises which Israel’s history with YHVH had left with her. With John the Baptist, the Old Testament prophets were once again on the scene, and just behind him Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim voiced a similar announcement, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Turn your lives around. Trust the good news!”
Just as John the Baptist sounds no different than Amos or Micah or Jeremiah, so too does Jesus’ Kingdom proclamation sound like their preaching.
All of Israel’s prophets called God’s people to repentance.
Just like John does.
And so does Jesus.
All of Israel’s prophets proclaimed the Day of the LORD.
They all announced the turning of the ages.
So too does John the Baptist.
And so does Jesus.
What is the difference Jesus makes? How is Christ different from his cousin? In what way is Jesus unique from his forerunner?
“So thank God Christmas is coming soon, just now in the middle of all this, otherwise I would fall completely into despair.” Despite his experience of the liberal mainline churches in New York, Bonhoeffer did hear the gospel in America.
Indeed he experienced a profound, life-altering encounter with Christ; Jesus met Bonhoeffer in a poor black church somewhere in the Jim Crow South. As a consequence of his being met by the Risen Jesus, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany absolutely convinced that the Sermon on the Mount is at the heart of the Christian faith.
“Follow me,” Bonhoeffer notes, is not an invitation.
It is an imperative.
Commenting on Christ’s call of Peter and Andrew, Bonhoeffer observes that as soon as Jesus says to them “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,” the “bridges are torn down.”
That is, there’s no escape; there’s no going back.
They have no where to go but ahead with him. “Thus the call to discipleship,” Bonhoeffer writes, “immediately creates a new situation.”
“The time is short. The judgment of God is at hand. The kingdom is almost upon us. Change your lives now, before it is too late. If you do, you will partake of the goodness and blessings of the reign of God; if you do not, you will know only tribulation and condemnation.”
No less than his cousin, Christ also preached in this register.
How is Jesus different than John?
The difference is not in what Jesus proclaimed.
The difference is in the way Jesus proclaimed it.
As Robert Jenson puts it:
“Although what Jesus said about the Kingdom was not new, there was something new in the way he said it. The normal, law-like, pattern of utterance and life posits a span of time between my present and whatever future I am concerned with: the “then …” clause poses a future possibility, and the “if …” clause establishes a space of controllable time in which to take care of the indicated conditions…
The interval can be used for postponement. “Repent,” said the prophets; “Next year we will indeed,” said most of the people. But it can also be used for frantic preparations, for the “works of the Law.” This was the pattern of the Pharisees, a lay movement that had developed the religion of the Law to a consistency and sincerity nearly past our conceiving. They made a life’s work of looking for conditions of the Kingdom and fulfilling them.
Jesus so spoke the Kingdom at the existence of his hearers as to short-circuit both responses, as to take away the space of time between the moment of their hearing him and the future he promised.
He left them no time to get ready; instead he made the Kingdom the decisive reality for the decisions and hopes and fears which were the then-and-there of their lives.
When men heard Jesus’ call to the Kingdom, they either were thereby called into its citizenship, or found they had already rejected it.
They either found that all other values defined themselves by the hope of the Kingdom (“they left all and followed him” [Matt 5:11]), or that they had already chosen to prefer other things (“and he went sadly away, for he had many possessions.”
In other words, unlike John the Baptist and the prophets of Israel, Jesus did not prophesy the Kingdom; he presented it. Jesus did not announce the Kingdom; he embodied it. He allowed no time for decision because in him the Future had already arrived.
Jesus is the Kingdom.
That’s the difference between Christ and his cousin.
Jesus is the Kingdom.
“So thank God Christmas is coming soon, just now in the middle of all this, otherwise I would fall completely into despair.”
After Bonhoeffer finished his post-graduate year in the United States, he served briefly as a pastor in London before returning to Nazi Germany where he would eventually be martyred.
On the Second Sunday of Advent in 1933, nearly a year after Hitler had assumed power in Germany, Bonhoeffer preached on the assigned Gospel text.
In his sermon, he said:
“The one great, decisive question that Advent puts to us is this: Do you want to be redeemed? If not, then what do you ask of Advent? What do you want from Christmas? A little sentimentality? A little uplift within? A nice atmosphere? Why not instead just be obedient and listen to the word that comes to us, “Repent for Christ the Kingdom has come near.”
The Kingdom of God does not suffer lip service.
Therefore, I’ll make Bonhoeffer’s Advent question, my question.
Do you want to be redeemed?
Forget for a moment what the newspaper says. Never mind creation’s captivity to Sin and Death. Set aside the world’s darkness and depravity. I am well- aware of our present moment’s villains, but none of them are here today!
So instead I am asking you: do you want to be redeemed?
And fair warning, when Christ is before you in his word— in this word, in my words— there is no longer any bridge behind you. There’s no escape. There’s no going back. There’s no time to pause, to ponder or prepare.
There is no where to go but forward.
To follow him.
So come to the table.
The Kingdom does not suffer lip service.
And the King does not ask for your opinion.
Or even your belief.
He asks for your life.
And you give it to him by taking the bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood and making it your own.
Christmas is coming soon, but Christ is here.
Why not just be obedient?
Remember, the purpose of Bethlehem’s manger was to hold food.
Mary was not wrong to lay him in it.
Do you want to be redeemed? Do you want to be holy? Do you want to be free from the sins that bind you, fully alive, as human as God is human?
Then take and eat.
