Today we enter into the beginning of the gospel of Mark:

Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.”

While Mark only notes Isaiah, he is actually citing three passages from the Hebrew scriptures: Exodus 23:20, Malachi 3:1, and Isaiah 40:3. Mark’s gospel shares the belief that the ultimate fulfillment of these passages from Hebrew Scripture, of “preparing the way for the Lord” are to be found through John the Baptist and Jesus Christ.

Over the course of human history there have been countless people who, like John the Baptist, have prepared the way for God to enter into our lives anew. One such person who has prepared the way for us to live into a modern Christian life is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant theologian who was seeking to follow Christ in the midst of Nazi Germany. In an effort to follow God’s call and to act on his convictions of faith, after a brief stay in New York City, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany wherein he became involved in a plot to kill Hitler. Though it seems like a clear decision now, at the time it was not easy to stand against Hitler, and it’s notable that many Christian leaders were silent at best, and supportive at worst of the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was ultimately killed for his outspoken stance against Nazi Germany.

In the context of Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom, let us consider how his understanding of baptism can help us to understand the significance of the ritual for today. Considering our gospel, it is significant that John is present baptizing the people at the beginning of this gospel, making it clear that our baptism is a part of our ongoing preparation to receive God in our midst.

In order to be born into Christ through baptism, thereby preparing the way for God to enter the world through us, Bonhoeffer argues that we must die to the old self. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer writes that baptism “demands and produces the death of the old” (231). He goes on to write, “the baptized live, not by a literal repetition of this death, but by a constant renewal of their faith in the death of Christ as his act of grace in us” (234). Therefore, through our unity with the entirety of Christ’s being we are called to renew our faith constantly.

Let us put Bonhoeffer’s understanding of baptism in conversation with his writings from prison. In his writings from prison in 1944, a year before he was executed, Bonhoeffer wrote that one day in the future the time will come for people to speak the word of God again in such a way that “the world will be changed and rewed by it.” He goes on to write that “It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with [people] and the coming of [God’s] kingdom.” (34, Leonardo Boff quoting Bonhoeffer)

Perhaps the time has come for us to understand baptism in a new and shocking way that recognizes that our ongoing baptism cannot only take place around the batisimal font, it must be fostered in our witness to Christ’s presence in the midst of our suffering world.

This constant renewal of our faith must challenge us to die to our complicities within structures of sin and oppression in our modern world. This death requires our willingness to change our perceptions while actively working to change conditions. Let us die to the false hope our capitalist society promises. We must die to “I,” the ego, and the false notion that we can live our lives detached from others. The renewal of our baptismal promises through our very lives will constantly call us to die in new ways given the concerns of our modern era.

It is only through dying that we can live in the “we,” in communal solidarity with others. This new life will be within a radically egalitarian community wherein all are “one in Christ Jesus,” and the powerful are brought down from their thrones while the lowly are lifted up. Here we learn that dying is necessary for us to live fully, not only as individuals but also as communities. Surely there are many ways in which our own church communities must die to find new life.

At the end of our gospel, John says:

“One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water;
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

John the Baptist says that the one who is to come will baptize us not with water, but with the Holy Spirit. To be baptized into the Holy Spirit is a dynamic mystery which can only reveal itself through our lives as Christians following the gospel. A gospel which provides demands, costly demands. As we live into our ongoing baptism we must continue to ask: how do we play a role in the birth of more liberative and inclusive futures?

Our first reading tells us that to prepare the way of God we cannot stay silent, on the contrary we must go to the mountaintop and “cry out at the top of your voice.” Therefore in order to prepare the way of God we must stay in touch with our humanity through bearing witness to suffering, to mourn all of the dead, and to cry out for those being killed. 

Just as John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus Christ’s liberative message to enter our world, those of us living in the American Empire must be baptized in this moment by the suffering of Palestinians. Our way must be prepared by the Palestinian people facing constant and imminent death from the state of Israel. Furthermore, we must be called toward a recognition of our complicity, as citizens of the U.S. empire, with the settler colonial Israeli state. 

As someone who is continuing to unlearn and relearn, I encourage us all to educate ourselves outside of the propaganda machine which runs so deep it doesn’t allow us to see the humanity within our Palestinian siblings. I encourage us to learn from Palestinian voices, as they are the ones suffering under oppression. 

One such voice is Rev. Mitri Raheb, who in his book Faith in the Face of Empire, states that our history and memory of the biblical narrative of Israel should not be conflated with the modern invention of the Israeli state. Raheb states the center of the conflict is as follows: “The natives of the land have been made strangers in order to make room for an invented people to occupy the land.” In making Palestinians the stranger, we have given our total allegiance to the Israeli state. 

Putting this within the frame of our baptism, dying to self must be done through dying to the ways in which we have constructed our image of self that denies the self imaging of others. In this context, we have constructed our own identities in a way that often blocks us from recognizing the humanity within the suffering of the Palestianians. However we have the opportunity to allow ourselves to be baptized through this crisis, and to open ourselves to loving Palestine through our words and actions. 

As we open ourselves to a proper understanding of the gospels, and of the history of Palestine, we can unequivocally say, alongside Jesus Christ, “Ceasefire Now” and “Free Palestine.”

Angela Manno is an artist who paints icons of endangered species. In our changing world, I invite us to pray with this icon of the Honey Bee, while we consider how, in our reading for today, John “fed on locusts and wild honey.”

Will we have a future where this gospel can still be read? Where the people hearing it will still know the taste of honey?