One of my favorite musical works is the sublime Messiah by George Friedrich Handel. When I was in college, I listened to numerous recordings of it before buying two different versions: Antal Dorati’s clean and complete 1974 recording and Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 recording, filled with his revisions.
I would stand when listening, enraptured by the combination of exquisite music and biblical quotations. This was how those passages ought to be read. With beauty. With majesty. The Dublin Journal review of the first performance on April 13, 1742 included this praise, “The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”
The libretto was comprised of biblical quotes compiled by one of Handel’s friends and supporters, the British aristocrat and Shakespeare scholar Charles Jennens. Jennens did something fascinating and insightful: Instead of quoting Mark 1:2-3, he did what any good scholar would do, he quoted the two texts behind those verses and he put them in their larger context. Instead of just giving us Malachi 3:1, which is echoed in Mark 1:2, and Isaiah 40:3, which is echoed in Mark 1:3, he gave us Malachi 3:1-3 and Isaiah 40:1-5.
We’ll look at how Mark uses the Malachi 3 passage in this post and the Isaiah 40 passage in the next post.
READ
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,
who will prepare your way,
the voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight’” (Mark 1:2-3).
Even though Mark only references Isaiah, he’s actually quoting from both Malachi and Isaiah. I don’t know of any good explanation for this, especially since Mark’s original audience would have known both of the passages he was quoting from and the larger context of each passage.
The sending of a messenger to prepare the way sure sounds like the good news Mark mentioned in verse 1. But a closer look at Malachi’s message reveals that what the messenger brings is a message of judgment.
Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD (Mal. 3:1-3).
Eugene Peterson once said, “The judgments of God are ultimately creative.” And that’s what we see in Malachi. A refiner’s fire melts the metal down. It’s harsh. But it’s necessary for the metal to be purified. A fuller’s soap is also harsh and scrubbed into fabric with rough bristles.
As we shall see fairly quickly later on in Mark 1 and following, Jesus is far from meek and mild. He is intentionally confrontational. He creates tension. He sets himself on a collision course that ends up in his arrest and execution.
As Malachi asks, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Jesus is difficult. He intends to be. There simply is no way of getting around this. But he is good. And his difficulties are for our benefit.
As Jesus brought his message to the people of God, they were refined by it. Not all made it through. But those who were left, gleamed gold. Jesus continues to do the same, even today.
ENGAGE
What aspects of the coming of Jesus are like Handel’s Messiah, beautiful and majestic, making your life full and complete?
What aspects of the coming of Jesus are like the brutal fire of a refiner, melting you down to your core elements?
In what way(s) are you being melted and scrubbed by God right now? Where in your life are you being stripped down and laid bare? And what do you think God’s end goal for this refining process might be?
In what ways are the people of God around the world and in your church community going through a refining process right now? What might be God’s purpose in the pain being currently experienced?
PRAY
“Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me. Mold me. Fill me. Use me. Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.”
I know I need to be refined, Lord. I need to be scrubbed clean in your laundry. I just don’t like the pain. I wish you could purify me, clean me, in some other way. But if this is what it takes to become the person you long for me to be, then let it be so. And don’t just clean me up, purify all your people that we might be your people of righteousness and justice in this world. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
LIVE
Malachi and Mark and Jesus see this purification as a community thing. It’s something God’s people as a whole need to go through, something entire churches need to go through. But it’s also intensely personal. We live it out both as a community and as persons.
In his short novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of the transformation of a mean-spirited boy named Eustace. The key moment takes place after Eustace’s dragonish heart has become manifest in him being turned into a dragon. In the following scene, the lion Aslan turns him back into a boy, but only through a painful experience.
Then the lion said — but I don’t know if it spoke — “You will have to let me undress you.” I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know — if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.
…
Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off … And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me — I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on — and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.
In your community and in your own life, ask God to help you not turn away from the pain being experienced, but to submit to it so that it does its purifying, cleaning, renewing work in you, preparing you for good things to come.