THIS is a short Sunday Gospel: only six verses. But three of the six are a quotation from Isaiah. A scant three verses carry the message for which Isaiah provides the confirmation.

At first glance, they are not promising. One-and-a-half verses are about historical dating. That leaves a verse and a half to provide spiritual sustenance for the week ahead: “[2] The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. [3] He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

This is the fourth time that Luke has given John’s name. It came first through the angel to Zechariah; then to his wife, Elizabeth; then Zechariah wrote it down. The scene in which people gather and ask Elizabeth what the child’s name is to be (1.60-63) reminds me of the cartoon by Riana Duncan showing a board meeting at which the only woman present has just spoken. The caption reads: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”

Elizabeth’s word is not good enough: Zechariah has to write his agreement for her direction to be taken seriously. But, in the end, the right result is reached. God’s will is done. The baby boy is named “John”.

For the majority of Christians in the UK, the land of Jesus’s birth and ministry is more myth than reality — a place of imagination, not experience. Only a small proportion of the faithful make a pilgrimage to visit it, perhaps because pilgrimage does not now bestow automatic spiritual credit in the way that it once did.

In that holy land of truth and meaning, the wilderness looms large. It is more than geography: it is a place of encounter and testing, across both Testaments. Luke does his best to orientate us within this strange setting, to help us to make sense of John’s ministry, because John is the first human to make a paradigm response to the Christ-child: joy, retreat, spiritual wrestling, and action in the world.

John is in the wilderness when the “word of the Lord” comes to him. We can imagine why he went there, because we know the story of God’s ancient people, in which the wilderness is a desert, hostile and bleak, where testing reveals true character.

Wildernesses are found all through the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and all are places of this kind. The four Gospels likewise mention the wilderness, but, of course, use the equivalent Greek word. It is still a desert, but — unlike the Hebrew midbar, a tough refuge for fleeing Israelites — the Greek eremos (which in English becomes “hermit”) highlights its loneliness and isolation.

The wilderness is a place of spiritual mystery, experienced by Jacob, Elijah, and David; and this is confirmed by John, and Jesus, and even the “woman clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12.14). That place of desolation can also be a place of self-discovery. This is where God’s chosen ones prepare for their calling to the Lord’s service.

John proclaims himself to be a voice “crying in the wilderness”. Yet what could be more futile, a greater striving after wind, than to cry aloud God’s message, as a prophet, to the vast emptiness of that wilderness? No one can hear. No one will respond. Scorching sunbeams and chilly dewdrops test the prophet to the utmost, but his proclamation is not so much to inform as to embody, in the style of the prophets of old.

Encountering the Advent wilderness with John, we, too, are supposed to prepare for our task of embodying the Kingdom. Here, Luke formulates one of the main themes of his writing, in both this Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles: the breaking down of human barriers. Jew and Greek must speak to one another. The commemorative writing of ancient Greece (with its emphasis on historical time) stands side by side with the timeless record of a prophet speaking the Lord’s words to the Lord’s people.

During this church year, Luke will go on revealing how the good news breaks down barriers between Jew and Greek (ruler-chronology, prophetic inspiration) and male and female (men and women alike are named, they matter, they are participants, not mere observers, in the drama of salvation). Finally, through angels, a virginal conception, and an infant Messiah, heaven and earth will be as one.