Oh, for the placement of a comma!
Is John the Baptist “one crying out in the wilderness?”(as Hymn 75 in the Episcopal hymnal would have it), or is he one crying out, “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord?” The lack of punctuation in New Testament Greek leaves plenty of room for confusion. Luckily in this case, the gospel is quoting from a section of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
The comma confusion has always left me an impression of John as a lone voice crying in the wilderness for God’s people to repent and return to their Lord. Clarification reminds me that his invitation is to prepare a way for God in the wilderness. And that generates all kinds of other questions. Why in the wilderness? Why make straight a highway for God in the desert? Is there too much clutter in our urban and suburban lives, too much noise to hear a voice crying out, “Prepare the way?”
Or shall we take “wilderness” as a metaphor, internalizing it to represent the chaos of our multiply-committed lives? Wilderness can suggest a stark emptiness. It can also invoke chaos, lack of order. Which description better fits your inner landscape today?
Perhaps preparing a way for God in our wilderness means locating the wild, untamed places within ourselves, our most essential “me-ness.” That is surely the place God’s spirit best meets our own. Or maybe it means that the messiest parts of our lives are where we are invited to prepare a way for the Lord – de-cluttering in order to access our most essential selves.
It is also possible that we are quite cut off from our own wilderness, so distracted by our tasks and data, our commitments and the priorities others impose upon us, that we haven’t dealt with or dwelt in our own wilderness for quite some time. Advent offers a particular invitation to do that – to intensify the spiritual practices that connect us to God and to ourselves; to take some retreat time either daily or going on an actual retreat, to rediscover the desert within and straighten out the highway for God’s presence to enter our lives with more fullness.
(If you live nearby, please join Christ the Healer's Advent retreat morning this coming Saturday, Dec 6th, starting with a hot breakfast at 8:30 and ending by 12:30. You can reserve online here...)
Lots of questions today – where did they hit you? Where did you feel yourself reacting? What invitation to prayer do you discern out of your reflection on inner wilderness? Where in yourself do you want to “prepare the way for the Lord, make straight a highway for our God?”
Suddenly I get the image of a community-service gang in orange jumpsuits, clearing up litter by the side of the highway. Not a bad Advent image for us to entertain today; we are all prisoners of our selves, to some degree, on the way to liberation. Why not clear a highway for our Liberator to hasten our freedom?
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