Mark 1:1-3 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger. . . who will prepare Your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight.’”
This quotation from Isaiah brings to mind a vivid memory. The summer before my senior year of college, I visited my soon-to-be fiancé during his summer term at Dartmouth. During those months I roomed with a female student from his church, enjoyed the beauty of his prestigious Ivy League campus, and grew in my faith.
I also worked at the Dartmouth Co-Op, purveyor of all things “Green,” where we sold everything from bumper stickers, banners, and bibs, to ties, trinkets, and, of course, T-shirts.
Some of our popular T-shirts bore the obscure Latin phrase, Vox Clamantis in Deserto. If that doesn’t sound familiar to you, don’t worry. It meant little to our customers.
Whenever a college-aged client asked me the meaning of that phrase, I (having asked my manager the same question) answered, “It means, ‘A voice crying in the wilderness.’ It refers to John the Baptist in the New Testament.”
The conversation usually ended right there. (Their expression mirrored Angelica’s in Joe Vs. the Volcano when she replied, “I have no response to that.”)
At first I hoped my T-shirt customers would ask me more about John the Baptist’s message, but no one ever did.
- No one seemed curious about what John the Baptist had to do with Dartmouth College.
- No one cared that Eleazar Wheelock, a New England minister and the founder and first president of Dartmouth, originally planned to train Native Americans at Dartmouth as missionaries.
- And no one, not even the most brilliant of Ivy League students, asked me how to make ready the way of the Lord or how to make their paths straight.
They just wanted a new T-shirt, not a new heart.
Fortunately, many who heard John the Baptist’s message in person came eager for change. After centuries without a prophet, corruption of the Levitical priesthood, and now pagan Roman occupation, the Jews yearned for their Messiah.
At this point John cried out,
“Get ready for the One who is coming! He’s going to turn all of your ideas about God upside down!”
Mosaic, Baptism of Christ
John the Baptist prepared their hearts for Jesus the Messiah and His shocking message. And what was that mind-boggling good news?
In a nutshell, Jesus (God in the flesh) proclaimed that He had come to fulfill the Law, and that salvation would soon be available to anyone who believed by faith in His atonement. It’s that simple!
So unlike those students buying Dartmouth T-shirts, you don’t need a tremendously high IQ to understand the gospel.
Jesus died for you; just believe it!
Now THAT should be on a T-shirt!
