The Beginning of the Good News

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, December 6, 2020
Mark 1:1-8


    Our family likes to go for walks around the neighborhood every day unless it’s raining.  Recently, our kids started venturing out with empty cashew cans to collect treasures on our walks.  “I’m looking for flowers for my collection,” Grace said just a few days ago.  At the beginning of December, the leaves are off of the trees, the grass is turning brown, we have yet to have our first snow, and it’s hard to imaging finding anything worthy to add to any collection on our blustery walks.  But each day, our kids manage to find pinecones, rocks, brown and red and even green leaves, and the occasional dandelion in the midst of our late-fall/early-winter wilderness.  Even if we don’t find the beautiful flowers of spring and summer, my kids set out each day convinced they’ll find something wonderful to keep for awhile.  And they always do.
    We were introduced to a year of reading the gospel of Mark last week by starting at the end, in a way, with Jesus’ foretelling his second coming in chapter thirteen.  This second Sunday of Advent, we have a flashback to the beginning—or at least, Mark’s beginning.  The gospel of Mark doesn’t start with the Christmas story of Jesus’ birth like Luke and Matthew, nor does he start from the beginning of creation like John does, but rather he starts like this: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”  And what is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ?  A voice crying out in the wilderness that the Lord is coming.  The voice is John the Baptist’s.  He and his cousin Jesus are already adults, and he is getting ready to baptize Jesus into his public ministry of teaching and healing.
In a way, John the Baptist is a great connector. He is the bridge between the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus’ good news in the New Testament. His clothing of camel hair and leather is significant because he is dressed like the prophet Elijah.  And he quotes the prophet Isaiah, from our first reading in chapter 40.  His message is consistent with these prophets of old: out of the unlikeliest of places, in the midst of our suffering and despair in the wilderness, good news will come…Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God is coming.  Like my kids who insist that you can always find good treasures, even in dead of winter, John testifies that in the desolation and the barrenness of the wilderness, new beginnings are possible!  Transformation and new life is possible!
I have yet to find a John the Baptist figurine in a Christmas nativity set, or even of Elizabeth and Zechariah, his parents, whose story coincides with the annunciation of Mary.  Yet this cousin of Jesus figures prominently in the gospels, especially in Mark.  There is no traditional Christmas story, and yet, John the Baptist’s introduction of Jesus is an important introduction to the first coming of Jesus, especially for us this year.  John the Baptist reminds us that for those of us who place our hope and trust in Christ, we can always find good news, even in the wilderness.
    What’s some good news you’ve heard lately?  What helps you keep the faith?  Early on in the pandemic, I enjoyed watching John Krasinki’s YouTube Channel, “Some Good News.” He made about 8 episodes in all, I think, including hosting a virtual wedding, prom, graduation, a Zoom performance with the original cast of the musical Hamilton, and highlighting the heroic efforts of front-line workers.  The whole idea of the show was that most of our media is focused on bad news. What if he created a channel that only featured good news?  For all of us beaten down by a year of bad news, how important to know that our faith is built on the foundation that God has good news for us.  Especially as we wander in the wilderness of isolation and headlines warn us to prepare for a “bad winter” as cases rise, we dare to profess that even out of the wilderness God can bring something good.
Perhaps one reason John the Baptist doesn’t feature prominently in our nativity scenes or retelling of the Christmas story is because he never wanted to be the main character in God’s story in the first place.  In much of Christian art and iconography, John is pictured off to the side, pointing to Christ who is in the center.  We are called to be like John the Baptist, to be a voice crying in the wilderness of people’s lives that good news is coming, pointing to Christ instead of to ourselves.  God asks us to be “good news collectors,” sharing the treasures of our faith that we have in Christ despite the barrage of bad news we encounter on a daily basis.  We don’t have to be eloquent speakers, professional preachers, or desert ascetics who only eat bugs and honey!  In the words of encouragement we share with our friends and neighbors, in the way we conduct our lives, may we point others to the hope and good news we have in Christ, our greatest treasure.
The beginning of Mark’s gospel reminds us that in the beginning, God created us and the rest of this beautiful world and called it very good.  While some deserted Christ and others denied him on the cross, we look upon our Lord’s suffering and death and in that most unlikely of events, we find incredible good news.  Out of an unimaginably painful and horrific death, God in Christ conquered sin, death, and the devil once and for all, and rose again so that we might have life with him forever.  The original Greco-Roman concept of a “gospel” or “good news” message was a letter that pronounced military victory, that the citizens were saved.  Mark repurposes this gospel genre to proclaim that in Christ, we have the victory, we are saved, no matter what our dire wilderness situation.  He begins his gospel with the confident assertion that we have already won because of Christ’s death and resurrection.  And then John the Baptist passes on the proclamation work to us – it’s our job now to go in peace and share the good news.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.