The Proclamation of John the Baptist
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’
Luke 3:1-6
This is the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, the second Sunday of Advent. Yes, including the part at the beginning with the names of various, mostly long forgotten, leaders. Why did Luke include that? Why didn’t I miss that bit out here? Because it sets these events in a context, it places them in the geopolitical landscape of the early 1st century. And this says to us that time and place matters. Our time and our place matters. If we view the events of our faith, including the story of John the Baptist, including the story of Jesus, as something completely separate from our own context we miss an important point: God acts in time, through concrete events, real people, and actual places.
And so then we get to John the Baptist. He’s the forerunner, the advance party, the one sent ahead to get people ready to encounter Jesus. We read this in Advent, because that’s the time in the Church year when we ourselves are getting ready to encounter Jesus – as he comes to us as a baby in Bethlehem, and as he will come again in glory at the end of time. What do we need to do to get ready for Jesus? (The answer’s possibly not “put up a tree inside.”)
John was there “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” That’s about renewal, and helping people deal with the things that had gone wrong in their lives – getting back in touch with God’s purposes, repairing broken relationships (including our relationship with God). What might we need to put right? Which parts of our life need to hear that comment from the GPS in our cars when we’ve taken a wrong turning, “route recalculation”?
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