Both our first reading and our reading from the Mark speak of good news. Isaiah speaks of "glad tidings" and Mark of "the gospel". Isaiah's reason for celebration was that God himself was going to come to his people, to rule and reward and shepherd them. And the content of Mark's gospel was precisely the fulfillment of this promise, the coming of Jesus the anointed one, the true Son of God most high.
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.”
In both Isaiah and Mark the good news is proclaimed for the sake of preparation. Without such preparations, which God himself makes possible, we tend to look to merely human sources for good news. When those sources eventually leave us disappointed we resign ourselves to doom scrolling through bad news instead. Without preparation our spiritual sensitivity is too unrefined to take much notice of the good news of the gospel. Thus the call to prepare and make way for the Lord is among other things a call to a new way of thinking where we learn to recognize as care about the good news more and to deprioritize other competing options. The good news is in fact so good that it is easy for jaded and frequently disappointed humans to dismiss. But we are jaded and disappointed because we have been seeking and wrong things or sometimes the right things but in the wrong way or to the wrong degree. We need a sufficient break with the life of the city where such distractions hold sway that we benefit from a spiritual journey into the desert together with John the Baptist. There we can hear the call for the mountains of self-aggrandizement to be made low and the valleys of learned helpless can be raised.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her
that her service is at an end,
her guilt is expiated;
indeed, she has received from the hand of the LORD
double for all her sins.
The good news of repentance really is good news because it is fundamentally a break with a lifestyle that was never going to be able to satisfy us to begin with. It was a service that had no natural end point if God hadn't step in to give us a new direction. Given the condition in which God finds us the best thing for us to do is make way for God himself to build a highway in our hearts, demonstrating the priority of his coming and his presence for us.
Things in the world will continue to be imperfect, to go wrong, and sometimes very wrong. But those things are not the final story, and we live amidst them as pilgrims journeying to a homeland. Our baptism points to the future when we will cross the waters into the true promised land of the Kingdom, the new heaven and earth promised in the second letter of Peter. However, the good news is not something that only makes a difference later, in the distant future. It has consequences even here and now that make it worthy of infectious excitement. It is a hope that gives a new character to everything we do and everyone we meet since in all things we are preparing and making way and even "hastening" the coming of our hope. In addition, it does not mean we live with indifference or sloppy laziness. Rather, repenting, embracing that which matters most implies a higher standard of conduct even amidst the temporary and passing things of this life: "Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace".
Near indeed is his salvation to those who fear him,
glory dwelling in our land.
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