Can I start by wishing you a belated happy New Year, which started last week? Happy New Year I hear you cry? He’s ahead of himself isn’t he? Well, I’m not being entirely facetious. Last Sunday was Advent Sunday, which is the start of the Church’s year. The Church’s year runs from Advent, through Christmas, and eventually to Lent, Easter and Pentecost. There’s then a gap of several months, of what the church calls ‘ordinary’ time, before the process starts again next Advent. This allows us to walk with Jesus as it were through the events of his life and ministry until their climax at the events of Easter. So as we are in Advent, at the beginning of the year. Happy New Year!
At New Year we often re-evaluate our lives and think about the changes we need to make. Usually these includes promises to ourselves about how we will eat less and do more. It’s a good thing to do and it’s useful to pause and take stock, but I’m going to suggest that now, at the beginning of Advent is a good time to do that spiritually.
There a reason why the churches year starts in Advent and not at Christmas. You might think that Christmas would be the logical place to start; the beginning of Jesus life, but the reason is that we need to prepare ourselves for Jesus coming. We prepare for Jesus coming from two perspectives. We prepare for Jesus arrival as a new-born baby in the Christmas story, but we also prepare for Jesus second coming, his return in glory. But because we have no idea when that might be, that’s the perspective that it’s easy to overlook.
Each church year, which starts in Advent, concentrates on one of the three synoptic gospels, Mathew, Mark and Luke. Last year we followed the gospel of Matthew, and this year we are going to work through Mark’s gospel, and it’s Mark’s gospel that we are starting today. It’s a reading of new beginnings, because Mark’s gospel is thought to be the oldest gospel and because it’s about the beginning of Jesus ministry.
One of the things that’s striking about Mark’s gospel is that it doesn’t mention Jesus childhood or the nativity at all. Over the next few weeks we will be reading all those familiar Christmas stories about Jesus birth, but none of them are from Mark’s gospel. In Mark’s gospel Jesus appears as an adult, just after today’s reading.
Mark’s gospel doesn’t start with the story of Jesus birth. It starts with a statement of who Jesus is; “This is the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God”. It immediately quotes from the Old Testament, announcing God’s messenger and telling people to prepare the way for the Lord. Mark then introduces John the Baptist, appearing in the desert and baptizing and preaching.
Mark’s quote is from the book of Isaiah, we had it read in full as our first reading. The book of Isaiah taken place when the people of Israel are in exile in Babylon. Mark is making a parallel between two situations. In one the people of God are in exile in Babylon, a foreign land, but their exile is soon to come to an end. In the other situation, the situation to which John was talking, the people of God are in the land of Israel, but they are still in bondage and their God seems far away. In both, the solution is the same. God is coming to their aid. “Tell the people they have suffered long enough, their sins are now forgiven…Prepare a way for the Lord in the wilderness. Clear a way in the desert for our God”
God is coming, but the people need to respond, they need to prepare the way for the Lord and make straight paths before him, and the rest of this passage is about how to do that. So this passage in Mark is partly about God and partly about how we respond to God.
John the Baptist appears in the desert, baptising and preaching. The good news bible has him saying “Turn away from your sins and be baptised; God will forgive your sins”. More traditional versions use the word repent, “Repent and be baptised”. So we prepare for God by repenting. This is where Mark starts his gospel. Not at the stories which describe Jesus childhood, but with John’s call to the people to repent.
Now the good news says ‘many’ people from Judea and Jerusalem went out to hear John. They confessed their sins and were baptised. But the bible actually says ‘all’ or ‘everybody’. Now that’s possibly just artistic exaggeration, but there’s another possibility. I think it’s worth reflecting what a cross section of Jewish society this must have been. This wasn’t the poor, rather than the rich, or the religious authorities rather than sinners, or servants rather than masters. It all without distinction, rather than all without exception. It’s poor and rich, master and servant, religiously observant and sinner. Everybody needs to repent to know God, even John the Baptist, who knows he’s not fit to even tie up Jesus sandals.
Everybody heard the same message; you need to prepare for God by repenting. It’s a call that is quite familiar to us, but it must have been something of a surprise to John’s audience. They were Jews. They were used to seeing themselves as God’s people. God’s special people, and they were, but John was still saying to them “God is coming, and you need to be ready for him. That begins with you acknowledging you need him. It begins with you acknowledging that you are living your lives in a different direction to the direction God wants you to live. God is right and you are wrong. It’s only when you repent and turn from your sins that you can begin to follow Jesus.”
And this illustrates the difference between regret, remorse and repentance. The difference between regret, remorse and repentance.
Prisons are full of people who regret what they have done, but feel no remorse and regret most of all that they were caught doing whatever it was that they did. I’m sure Andrew Mitchell regrets losing his temper with PC Rowlands at the Downing Street gates last year. What’s not to regret; it was a career altering moment, and not for the better. I’ve no idea whether he feels any remorse for his behaviour. Regret doesn’t require you to think what you did was wrong, just that you wish it had never happened.
Sometimes, though not always, regret leads to remorse. Remorseful people not only regret what they have done, but acknowledge that it was morally wrong too. But it’s more than just an intellectual acknowledgement. You don’t think remorse, you feel remorse, and that feeling can range from mild discomfort to profound, debilitating distress. Unrelieved remorse can be a terrible, terrible thing. Judas Iscariot died a remorseful man. “When Judas, who had betrayed Jesus, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse” Remorse didn’t save him though, it drove him to his death.
I remember watching a documentary a few years ago about the troubles in Northern Ireland. It was about ten years after the conflict ended. One of the men being interviewed was a former protestant paramilitary who had killed, who had murdered, a close catholic friend of his at the height of the troubles. This was years before, but he was still twisted up inside, still ashamed of what he had done, still felt guilty and remorseful for it. As the end credits went up it was revealed that after filming the programme he had taking his own life. The pain, the guilt and shame, the remorse had been too much for him. Remorse didn’t save him and it didn’t lead him to God. Like Judas, remorse drove him to his death. The tragedy was that he never came to understand that the love of God, would have forgiven even his appalling act.
We aren’t called to regret, and we’re not called to remorse. We’re called to repentance, and repentance is more than just regret or remorse. We’re called to repent and be baptised. Remorse is more that an intellectual acknowledgement that we have done wrong, it’s a feeling, and repentance is more than a feeling; it’s an action. The good news translates repentance as “Turn away from your sins”. It means we have to acknowledge that we have sins and we have to consciously turn from them. It means we have to ask for forgiveness from God.
That’s what John is saying here. Firstly, turn from your sins, secondly, be baptised and, thirdly, God will forgive your sins, and that’s the joy of repentance, we are turning to a God who already loves us. He doesn’t love us because we are good, he loves us despite the fact that we are not. It’s only when we turn to God acknowledging what we are, not what we pretend to be, that God can begin to work in us, and with us, and through us.
Repentance is an action, not just a feeling. It’s a total change of mind and direction, away from our own beliefs and values, towards God’s. This is underlined by the baptism offered by John. The people of Judea and Jerusalem confessed their sins and John baptised them in the river Jordan.
Baptism means to plunge or immerse, and no one had ever baptised the way that John was doing here. There are two Old Testament practices that John seems to have adapted. The first was a kind or ritual washing that people would undertake when they had become ritually impure, for example temple priests had to ritually wash themselves after they had come into contact with a dead body. Ritual washing is still a part of Jewish and Moslem worship, but people do it to themselves, and most significantly it’s temporary. It doesn’t last. People need do it time after time; whenever they have become ritually impure.
The second way that immersion was used was when a gentile converted to Judaism. This was done once, because you only convert once, but it wasn’t performed on people born as Jews, because as a Jew you were kept clean through the sacrifices that the priests offered for you in the temple.
John’s ritual combined these practices into a ritual that was performed once and once only, and was carried out on Jews, not only Gentiles. In all cases it symbolised the washing away of sin. This is what was so central about what John the Baptist was doing. He was telling people to repent, and as an act of repentance, an act of turning from sin, he was telling them to be baptised. The baptism symbolised both the repentance of the person being baptised but it also symbolised the forgiveness of God. Unlike the ritual washing it’s permanent
John called on people to repent. He baptised in the river Jordan, but thirdly he pointed people towards Jesus, because without Jesus these things were not enough. There is nothing magical about being immersed in water. John says; “The man who comes after me is much greater than I am. I am not good enough even to bend down and untie his sandals. I baptise you with water, but he will baptise with the Holy Spirit.
I was struck reading this passage how these eight verses in Mark summarise the good news about Jesus Christ. In a very real sense this passage here sums up everything not just in Mark’s gospel but in all the other gospels. The rest of mark’s gospel and the other gospels tell us more about the values of Jesus and the Father, and it goes into much more detail about the cost of forgiveness to God, it tells us about the cross, and it tells us about the joy of reconciliation with God, but in many ways the gospel is “Repent and be baptised and God will forgive you” and that’s all here in these eight verses.
So where does this leave us. At the beginning of the sermon I wished you a happy new year and encouraged you to prepare yourself for Jesus birth and his return. It’s going to be a busy few weeks, my wife tells me. There’s cards to write, presents to buy, meetings with family and friends to arrange. I pray that we might all have a joyful Christmas but I pray also that we might all meet with Jesus over Christmas. I pray that with quiet gratitude for all that he has done for us, and with great joy at what he is going to do with us we might meet with him. I pray that we might bring all the rubbish in our life, all the regrets we still carry, all the remorse for past mistakes and foolishness, all the guilt and shame we still so often feel, and surrender it to him. In Jesus name. Amen
Holy and loving God,
we have dwelt in darkness
and preferred it to the light.
We have been proud of our accomplishments
and despaired over our shortcomings.
Smooth down the mountains of our pride,
and lift up the valleys of our doubts.
Open a path in the wilderness of our lives
that we might find our way to you again.
Refine us and prepare us once again
for life in your kingdom.
Now and forever
Amen
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Location:Stafford
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