Monday 12/8/14

This week’s Monday Morning Bible Breakdown is on the Gospel from last night: Mark 1:1-8.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.”
John the Baptist appeared in the desert
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
People of the whole Judean countryside
and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
were going out to him
and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River
as they acknowledged their sins.
John was clothed in camel’s hair,
with a leather belt around his waist.
He fed on locusts and wild honey.
And this is what he proclaimed:
“One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water;
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Many people don’t realize that Mark’s Gospel does not include the story of the Nativity. In fact, Mark’s Gospel does not include anything of Christ’s childhood at all. It does not even start with Jesus himself, but with his cousin, John the Baptist. He starts off all business, with a reference to the Hebrew Scriptures to cement his (and our) belief that Jesus is the Messiah. He quotes Isaiah (which was yesterday’s first reading) to help frame the story of John the Baptist, who will introduce Christ to his audience.

Isaiah had long been read in synagogues, and ancient Jews would have known the story very well. It told of a suffering servant who would come to liberate Israel and save the world. Isaiah, the prophet, saw himself as the voice in the desert telling the people to prepare. Here, Mark is repurposing Isaiah’s words. He says that they apply not only to Isaiah, but also to John the Baptist. Isaiah may have started preparing people for the coming of Christ, but it was John the Baptist who prepared people immediately before Christ’s arrival.

The similarities are easy to spot. Isaiah’s voice begins in the desert; Mark’s Gospel says John the Baptist “appeared in the desert.” The voice is not concerned with itself, but with the one who comes next. In the same way, John the Baptist says “One mightier than I is coming after me.” The voice says “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” In Isaiah, that passage is taken fairly literally. It is followed with a description of mountains and valleys both being replaced by fields. In the Gospel of Mark, though, John the Baptist urges a different kind of preparation: a personal one.

John the Baptist preached repentance and conversion. He baptized people with water as a symbolic rebirth while they admitted their sins. Oftentimes movies depict the Jordan River as a slow shallow river, but the reality is that in the area where John the Baptist was baptizing, the river had a very strong current. In order to submerge and pull people out while resisting the current himself, John the Baptist must have been big and strong. He was the kind of person people expected to be the Messiah. Mark is careful to point out that John is not the Messiah, but rather the voice in the desert.

We also get a wonderful description of John the Baptist in this passage; a big man in a camel skin robe with a leather belt, living on locusts and honey. A veritable Wildman. The description of his food is actually the source of some debate among some Biblical editors. For those unfamiliar with them, locusts are basically giant grasshoppers. They are fairly gross, as is the idea of someone eating them with wild honey. There is evidence, however, that the “locusts” mentioned in Mark’s Gospel are not locusts at all, but rather locust pods, a seed pod from a desert tree. Locust pods are another word for carob, and if you have a chocolate allergy, you probably know carob well. Carob is natural chocolate substitute. I have talked about translation issues before. In this case, though, it seems to change the fundamental meaning of the text. If John the Baptist ate bugs and honey while wearing camel skin and a leather belt, we get an image of a very rough life with few rewards. The takeaway is that doing Christ’s work is a hard and often thankless job. On the other hand, if we picture John the Baptist wearing those same things but eating carob and honey we get the image of a hard life with spots of simple luxury mixed in.

When we made our pilgrimage to World Youth Day in Rio, I remarked to Father Chris one morning that although I had only been sleeping three or four hours a night (instead of my usual eight) I felt more awake and alert than ever. He told me that he had experienced the same phenomenon as the director of Camp Fatima years ago. When he mentioned it to a priest, the priest had told him, “When you’re doing God’s work, God provides.” We see this in John the Baptist’s life.

Do you see it in yours?