A few years ago, there was a very popular grammar book (sort of seems like an oxymoron doesn’t it) entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. The title itself emphasized the importance of punctuation. Does the panda on the cover eat shoots and leaves or does he bring a gun to the party, does he eat, shoot and leave?
We see some interesting punctuation placement in the Bible as well. In Isaiah 40:3: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare a way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”
But in Mark 1:3 the same phrase is rewritten slightly and changes the meaning completely. “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
See the difference? In Isaiah, the voice itself is not in the wilderness. In Mark, the voice is most definitely residing in the wilderness, which as Biblical scholars will tell you, was an effort to link the passage to John the Baptist who, of course, lived in the wilderness.
Regardless of the changes made in Mark’s gospel, and the reasons for the change, I find the idea of a voice in the wilderness, crying out, to be much more moving.
It’s moving because we all live in the wilderness. We do not live as John the Baptist did. We are not dressed in animal skins (well most of us aren’t). We aren’t hunters and gatherers, living off the land. But we do live in a metaphorical wilderness, a cold, sometimes desolate, barren and lonely place. It’s a place of struggle and suffering.
Imagine a desert as far as the eye can see with the heat rippling in waves off the ground. This place is our wilderness, a place of hunger and thirst. And the scary part is that it is a place of mirages, a place to be fooled, a place to wind up like the cartoon characters, drinking sand we think is water.
But then out of this wilderness is a voice crying out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
What does this voice tell us? Oh, many, many things.
It tells us we are not alone. That has always struck me first about that line “a voice crying out in the wilderness,” that we are not alone. There is someone else out there, someone who knows something about the world that we do not, a voice that even if the only thing it said was “hello” would still offer us more hope than we could dare to imagine.
But this voice offers something more. Not only does it tell us we’re not alone. It tells us that someone is coming. Please note that the voice doesn’t tell us to go to the Lord, to try and find Him, the voice tells us that He is coming to us in the midst of our suffering and abandonment. He is coming.
How beautiful.
A voice crying out …
You are not alone.
The Lord is coming.
