This year, Advent 2014 to Christ the King 2015, is the year when we study Mark’s gospel. It is strange to go through Advent in the year of Mark because he has, of course, no birth stories: no Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph and Bethlehem, no shepherds “abiding in the field.” Indeed, we only read Mark on the first two Sundays in the season, last week and this. Next week we go on to John the Evangelist’s picture of John the Baptist and the week after we are with Luke.

But Mark is not diminished because of his lack of birth stories. His adult Jesus bursts onto the stage shortly after we are introduced to John the Baptist, whom Mark very much sees as an Elijah figure. From the very first verse Mark tells us exactly what his story is about:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1:1)

The subject is Jesus Christ who is the Son of God and this is good news. You can’t put it more bluntly or straightforwardly than that!

What I didn’t realise until a week ago is that this seemingly straightforward introductory verse, is really very subversive – or it was when it was written (and perhaps if we really took on board what it says, it would be just as subversive now.)

Augustus Caesar was Roman Emperor from 27BC to 14AD. He had himself made a god and on the Prine monument (so called because it was discovered in Prine, Turkey) the following inscription was found in Greek.

Caesar, [when he was manifest], transcended the expectations of [all who had anticipated the good news], not only by surpassing the benefits conferred by his predecessors but by leaving no expectation of surpassing him to those who would come after him, with the result that the birthday of our God signalled the beginning of Good News for the world because of him

Now the word “evangelion”, Good News or gospel or good tidings in Greek, was rarely used in pre-Christian times and when it was, it was it was employed in the sacred language use in the Imperial Cult. So when Mark choses to open his gospel as he does, using the words “Good News” alongside “Son of God”, he is really throwing down the gauntlet to Roman power, culture and beliefs. He is taking Roman language and making it speak of Christ instead. It is not Augustus Caesar who brings Good News for the world, it is a Jewish preacher and prophet from Nazareth whom the Romans have executed.

Mark probably wrote his gospel after the terrible time for Christians of Emperor Nero’s persecutions but before the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. He probably wrote for a beleaguered community who perhaps foresaw that the writing was on the wall for the destruction of their beloved city and temple. Despite this, Mark is not afraid. In the tradition of the prophets before him, he gives his one verse of introduction and then points to John the Baptist who himself points to Jesus. If you want to know what God looks like, says Mark, read what follows and prepare.

 

You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait, for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we are to go, who will be with us, and what we must do.  So thank you … for the waiting time.

John Bell, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers, compiled by Dorothy M. Stewart

 

Advent: the time of waiting.  Most of us are not very good at waiting, and I speak as one who is not.  I am a horrible passenger in a motorway traffic jam – you ask my husband.  I am  forever saying that we are in the wrong lane and if only we move into that  lane we will go faster – then we do – and you know what happens: the lane we have been in begins to move and the one we have moved to gets stuck.  I used to get irritable in supermarkets for the same reason.  The queue I was in always seemed to be the slow one.  The more I let my mind dwell on it the more annoying it seemed; it was unjust!  Sometimes, of course, waiting is difficult because we are very busy.  Time is short and will actually run out on us before we have finished doing what we had planned to do if the person in front doesn’t hurry up.

 

There is, of course, another kind of waiting which tastes different.  This is the waiting for the good thing that you know will inevitably come but not yet.  This is the waiting that goes alongside longing and expectancy.  This is the delicious waiting that children (and grown up children) feel when looking forward to Christmas, or a lover feels in anticipation of seeing the beloved.  And then there is the harrowing or painful waiting that we live in when knowing that a loved one is dying or we are waiting for potentially disturbing news or looking forward to something difficult.  Finally there is the waiting of not knowing.  Is he alive or dead?  Will she ring me or ignore me?

 

Waiting as described above seems to be an “in between time” between the real parts of our lives – something we want to get through (or sometimes not) to reach reality.  But that is not how John Bell sees it as quoted above.  Nor is it as R S Thomas saw it in his poem, Kneeling.  There he tells us, “the meaning is in the waiting.”

 

We all have to learn to wait but waiting time is still time which we can “waste” or “kill”, or “make” or “fill.”  If we learn to see life as a gift, even the hard bits; if we learn to see time as sacred and give our attention to living not restlessly waiting for what is to come but attuned to what is now, we begin to be able to receive the gift of waiting.  One of the most precious ways of praying, contemplative prayer, is all about waiting on God without knowing most of the time if there is any response from the God we seek, but just waiting, patiently, longingly.

 

Waiting is something we have to learn how to do.  The mother waits for the baby inside her to grow, at first not even conscious that it is there.  Waiting time which is consciously given to God either in set aside times of prayer or in attentiveness to his presence and the gift of life of each moment, also bears fruit.  It teaches us gratitude, rather than frustration.  It teaches us to listen, to observe, to perceive what is really happening inside and out.  Over time it teaches wisdom.

 

So may I invite you not to use the time of Advent, simply as a period to be got through so that we can get to Christmas, but as the season it is – the waiting time, longing time, time of expectancy, God’s time, in which he will teach us that the meaning is to be found, actually, in the waiting.