Preparing for Christ with John the Baptist
John the Baptist explodes onto the scene in all his dramatic fur-wearing, locust-eating glory in this week’s Gospel reading, Mark 1:1-8. His voice cuts across centuries to set the story of God’s redemption in motion. Join us around the virtual table as we talk about John the Baptist and the beginning of God’s Good News breaking into the world.
How do you prepare your heart for Christmas? Please join the conversation! Add your reflections in the comments below.
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“Locust-eating glory.” What a phrase. John seems so much like the stereotyped bearded loony depicted in old cartoons, carrying a sign saying “The end is nigh.” And my Sunday school teachers, at least , were at great pains to ensure that Jesus doesn’t seem that way. I remember a girl saying “John the Baptist is scary; he’s nuts.” Whereas, conventionally, Jesus is kind, mild, unthreatening. Did God use the “Old Testament prophet” theme to bridge the OT to the coming Messiah? I guess so. Whereas John and Jesus turned out to be equally incapable of communicating with many. Jesus rather bitterly commented on this with his famous remarks in Matthew 11 about how John came not eating and drinking, hairy and unkempt, and was rejected as a nut; the Son of Man came eating and drinking and being genial and kind and was tuned out utterly by so many. So in some ways you can’t win. Except we can, and Advent is, I suppose, the beginning of a story about how we can. If John is disconcerting, so would a guy be, no matter how genial, who insisted he was God’s son.