Advent’s stubborn hope is that good news is coming. We need it, desperately. Each day stirs up a maelstrom of dread. But how can we dare to believe in good news? Especially in our fractured moment in which the very category of news, not to mention truth, has become swallowed whole by an abyss of hate-filled chaos? Might this good news of Jesus be fake, or a teflon-like political flip-flop? Might it be ideologically driven? Might it be imperial power masquerading as religion? All of this is possible.
Yet Gospel writer Mark’s first verse still gleams, like an arrow piercing through all that is false: “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The season of Advent reminds us that good news is coming.
For such good news to arrive, however, requires preparation. We’re so used to bad news that receiving good news takes cultivation, practice, and defiance. This gospel good news starts with the call to prepare, which is a message straight from the prophet of preparation himself, 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.”
It must be said, though, that Christmas preparations are not the same as Christ preparations. We ready ourselves for the coming of an adult Christ at Christmas rather than a sweet baby Jesus. Babies, like Christ, bring a whole new world to our lives, but it’s too easy for the birthday of baby Jesus to be sentimentalized. Every Advent, I am reminded of Will Ferrell’s satirical prayer as Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights, who addresses the Baby Jesus while saying grace at table. “Sweet Baby Jesus,” he says. “We thank you for this bountiful harvest of Dominos, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.” But the coming of Christ is far more than fast-food product placement tacked onto a Pampers commercial. We are readying ourselves for the realm, or dream, of God to arrive right here, smack dab in reality.
Yet in the conflicted meaning-making of our moment, the good news of one is the terrible news of another. Who’s to judge what is good, and how can we know it, much less prepare for it? And yet this conflict over truth is not new. It’s ancient. Good news—or gospel—in Mark’s day (in Greek, euangelion) is a loaded term.
Good news is the propaganda slogan of peace and security that the Roman emperor supposedly brings. It is not only Jesus’s birthday toward which we lean, but also Caesar’s birthday. A building inscription circa 6 BCE demonstrates as much: “The birthday of the god (Caesar Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of good news concerning him.” (quoted in Jesus for President, page 70). The Gospel writer Mark enters the fray and directly opposes the fake good news of the Empire, not by arguing but by telling a counter-story of the Son of God’s birthday—the one who brings true and lasting peace and joy.
Mark, for one, refuses to accept Caesar’s new normal. And what’s more is that Mark does not counter Caesar and Rome’s grandiosity with rants or arguments. As though sending a tweet changes hearts and minds. Instead, Mark tells a story—a story of life, of healing, of justice for the poor and excluded; it’s a story of a person, Jesus, who represents and reminds us of a new realm from heaven that has always been aligning with earth. Some even think Mark’s use of “good news” creates a new genre: the genre of Gospel.
How does one prepare for a new world, for a new consciousness? I always appreciate the lectionary’s wisdom each First Sunday of Advent, because it begins the season with an apocalyptic passage, as if to declare that if we are not prepared, the in-breaking of Christ will end our worlds. The newness of love and justice cuts that deep—at least if we’re not ready. And this is the reason John the Baptizer is on the Advent scene as a messenger of preparedness. His whole presence—from locusts buzzing to fingers sticky with honey to camel hair curling in all directions—shakes us out of the new normal. He’s not bringing change simply for change’s sake, jumping on the new Messiah bandwagon as if it were the latest iPhone model. Rather, John seeks to prepare the way for Christ, and his method of preparation is through something called, a bit clunkily, I’ll admit, a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
But can we even use these words anymore, laden as they are with religious baggage? Isn’t repentance the favorite theme of the street-corner preacher’s shout? Isn’t repentance code for the salvation-from-hellfire decision to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior? If I thought I was going to burn eternally, I’d choose Jesus, too. And I did, for many years. Isn’t the phrase “forgiveness of sins” a holdover from blood atonement, imagining a God who forgives sins through shed animal or beloved-son blood? Many think salvation is at its heart vengeful, or at least about saying the right words to initiate a soul-destination escape from punishment. But no simple prayer—other than the complex and utterly holy living of a life—can prepare us for whatever mystery is beyond this bodily reality.
Repentance. Forgiveness of sins. These words have been coopted and smeared by people for whom extremist, authoritarian politics masquerade as gospel. Maybe it makes sense to have a moratorium on their English translations, just so we can forge new neural associations? Repentance, in Greek metanoia, is nothing more and nothing less than radical transformation. Repentance is the decisive day you decide to stop drinking. Repentance is when you realize that your life is not about you; when you start volunteering at the food pantry; when you first stand up for the rights of immigrants; when, as a privileged person, you first witness real poverty and realize your life will never be the same. Repentance is turning around the direction of your life and choices and values to be about a larger story—God’s larger story.
Here’s the thorny part of preparation, though: good news comes to those who are ready for it. Preparing for Christ first means identifying those ways in which we have not prepared for Christ—or for love, or for justice, or for peace. It means aligning our inner and outer desires with God’s desires. And we surely have not made a straight path for the new world, the new selves, that God seeks to birth in, around, and through us.
This Christmas, our world needs us to take preparation seriously. And there’s a way in which even the arrival of Christ itself is contingent on our preparation. We don’t cause Christ to come, because God is free, and we’re not that important. But if we do not prepare for this arrival, then we will surely fail to recognize good news when it comes. So whenever we pray the Advent prayer “Come, Lord Jesus,” we are also pledging to prepare, to repent, to turn our lives—and our country, and our world—around for love.
Adapted from a 2017 sermon preached at First Congregational Church, Williamstown, MA.
Thank you, Mark…when I first started practicing Centering prayer years ago, it was a relief to me to read Thomas Keating referring to “repentance” as changing our sight…where are we looking for happiness & fulfillment and “sin” as our separation from God.
As a Catholic, these explanations surely seem more in line with who Jesus is & His mission here, as you have so well described🙏🏼
Mark, This adaptation of your 2017 sermon is what I need to hear in Advent 2025. Every sentence speaks to me. Thank, thank you, thank you! your brother, john mcmahon