Prepare the Way

The job of a prophet is to ‘tell it as it is’, or rather, to tell it as God sees it.
Sometimes their message is one of hope and encouragement and something to look forward to, but often it is rather more sobering:
a charge to change entrenched behaviour,
a warning against impending judgement or
a call to a particular course of action.

Prophets, as the saying goes, are rarely welcome in their own country.
And as a consequence, they tend to get rather a raw deal.
Some of them get stoned or beheaded, and others simply become social pariahs.
And most seem eccentric to us at the very least. 
Although John the Baptist, with his diet of locusts and wild honey and unconventional camel-based fashion, probably wouldn’t look all that out-of-place in some of the circles I move in today.

But it can appear as if prophets live by a different set of rules to the rest of us because they’ve seen something which gives them a vision beyond the mortal eye.
And they have such a single focus, that nothing in life can compromise their mission.
There are, of course, a few reluctant prophets to read about, but still, ultimately, they can seem rather uncompromising people with an inflexible message because they know that what they have to say is far more important than people’s perception of them.

Now depending on which Advent schema you follow, this second week of Advent is the time we contemplate the Prophets of both Testaments, and their message.
Not only in foretelling the birth of Christ, but in calling us all to prepare for his coming again.

John the Baptist is mentioned here in our Gospel reading to set the scene
(next week we will consider him more-fully) but here he actually quotes another prophecy; that of Isaiah saying:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, 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.’

This idea of ‘preparing the way’ appeals to a custom in the Ancient Near East of heralding the arrival of a monarch as they came to visit a particular town or city. They would send out a messenger ahead of them into the desert, and the smaller villages and settlements around, to alert people to the monarch’s anticipated arrival. This would also often trigger a major construction project where roads were created by literally levelling hills and raising up valleys to allow the monarch and their entourage to travel smoothly on their route.

So John the Baptist is framed here in the wider prophetic tradition of those messengers who have been heralding the coming of the King for some time.
Except, now it’s feeling rather more urgent.

The day that we hear about in Malachi; with the promised coming of the Lord preceded by the refining and purifying of the descendants of Levi, is, for John getting worrying close.
In fact, he says, the day is upon us – we have to act now!

John has hyper-focus. He’s a man on a mission and he is preaching an uncomfortable message to those who need to move heaven and earth to make the path straight for the coming king.

John’s message is for everyone to be alert to, but it particularly concerns those who, despite professing to follow the way of God, have actually turned away from his core commandments and tied others up in increasingly tangled knots trying to follow them.
Because, for the Prophets, it’s all very simple and straightforward. Now is the time to turn to God (repent) and take God’s opportunity to start afresh .

To repent means to ‘re-turn’, to re-orient ourselves towards God and his purposes. 
St Ignatius of Loyola in his work on Discernment, reminds us that if we are oriented towards God, he needs only to speak in a whisper to get our attention and to quietly beckon us closer to him;
but if we are oriented away from God, we cannot pick up on this subtlety and he has to start shouting to get our attention.

This is probably why most prophets seem to ‘come on so strong’.
But if we spend all our time criticising their delivery or difference, we risk missing the critical message at the heart of what they are saying.
There is an important place for taking time to test those who present us with difficult messages (and we must be alert to the possibility that some prophets may indeed be false) but tone-policing anyone, prophet or not, rarely furthers a debate.
The way to test a prophet and their message for truth, is by examining their fruit.
Does this person’s life demonstrate integrity and holiness?
Are their actions and proposals life-giving, however stark the warning may be?
Do they help us to turn towards God and towards good and to create a world which is more Christlike: compassionate, merciful and life-giving?
Stark warnings are not always well received - just look at the way some world leaders have responded to Greta Thunberg - but they are sometimes the wake-up call that we need.
A wake-up call to turn away from the things which lure us away from a healthy relationship with God and neighbour and planet.
To stop the literal doom scrolling through content which distorts our image of God and self.
To resist the subtle lies which tell us we’ve gone too far down the road to do anything about it so we might as well carry on in chosen ignorance.

At the beginning of the Gospel passage, Luke is meticulous in his historical detail – not as a side note to what he really wants to tell us – but in order to locate the urgency of John’s message in a social, political and religious situation of deep unrest and turmoil. Jesus is coming because the world needs sorting out.
We can choose to accept brokenness as the status quo and plod on trying to look the other way…
or we can heed the call to return to God who promises to do something about it.

We cannot fix the worlds problems, but we know someone who can, and he invites us to work with him until the whole earth is renewed. 
But renewal has to start somewhere, and John’s challenge to us, is to let it start with ourselves.
What are the hills and valleys of our hearts that could do with straightening out?
What are we trying to ignore (in ourselves or in the institutions, work places and communities of which we are part) which needs attention?
What needs re-orienting in our relationship with God, and neighbour, and world?

Malachi tells us that this process might feel a bit like a refiner’s fire at times,
and anyone who has gone through counselling or spiritual direction might find that parallel resonates, but that is only because we are like gold and silver to God….
We are treasured by God and nothing that we do, or that is done to us, can change that.
Preparing the way might mean different things to each of us.
It might mean confessing and letting go of something which is tying us in knots that we don’t need to be hanging on to,
It might mean tending our wounds and treating ourselves more kindly,
It might mean being honest about our relationships and working on making them more life-giving,
Or it might mean challenging something in the world which we know is not right and not how God would want it to be. 
But whatever we need to do to prepare the way to receive Christ afresh in this season, it begins with the act of turning to God and trusting in his promise to help us get ourselves and our world back on track.
This is what Jesus came to do, and this Way, not by our own strength, but by God’s grace, salvation lies ahead.
Amen.