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…’” (Mark 1:1-3)
So… right at the outset, in Mark
the earliest of the gospels, we find that the good news, God’s Good News, in
Mark’s Greek the euaggelion, requires a messenger, in Greek an aggelos.[1] Each word comes from the same Greek root. Jesus is himself the euaggelion, the
Good News… John the Baptist appears, bearing this news in the world… he is the aggelos,
the messenger. And the good news is that
is God is not our enemy or adversary or examiner or competitor, that God creates
and recreates in love and mercy… the good news is that what we see in Jesus is what
we may see in God… Jesus is, in St Paul’s later words, the icon of the
invisible God.[2]
But the point this morning is the
messenger, the aggelos. The messenger
now, moving along to 2021, is not John the Baptist. The messenger, the aggelos, is you or
me… whoever, like John, recognises in Jesus God’s love, God’s word, God’s good
news. For better, and sometimes
undoubtedly for worse, we bear the euaggelion. And therefore, like John, the more authentic
we are, the truer we are, the more we may seem strange, even inconvenient, in
the world at times… and the more, like John, we see ourselves receding so that
Christ may proceed.[3] And like John, our ministry is as it were in
the deserts of human life, in the world, where we find our task, in any of a
multitude of ways, being one of making the desert blossom, making paths
straight, living Jesus’s way in response to him.
It is never a question of being
good enough, or any of the humble hesitations by which we excuse ourselves…
being an aggelos, a disciple or follower, is a matter of living in a
bond with him, and with his people. This
bond is variously described in our scriptures as being in Christ, or
mutually abiding, simply following…[4] Walter Brueggemann, one of the truly great Christian
theologians of the Hebrew scriptures of our day, wrote: The prophetic tasks
of the church (that is to say, what we are here to do) are to tell the
truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that
practises denial, and to express hope in a society that lives in despair. It has become a costly ministry in many
places in recent times… as it turned out indeed for John.
But there, each year, right in
the middle of Advent, comes the Messenger, John the Baptist, the aggelos. We assume the mantel of the aggelos,
not because we are good at it, or because we’re saintly or wise, but because of
the bond that changes us, an inner abiding of love and obedience. It is the way we live. Or as Jesus puts it, it is where our treasure
is and therefore where our hearts are also.[5]
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