NOTES for Luk 7:27
Jesus persistently draws the disciples' attention to the essence of John's ministry, to his calling: to prepare the ways of the Lord. What, then, is the meaning of this preparation? It would seem that we can never be finally ready for His coming. And elsewhere Christ says (Matt. 24:36-39) that we cannot know the day and hour of the coming of the Son of Man. Indeed, however much we work on ourselves, our sinful nature is overcome by us only with difficulty. And Christ, through John, points us to the one and only way to be ready to meet Him: repentance, the awareness of our sins. And repentance does not at all mean putting on black clothes forever and endlessly weeping over our unworthiness. Repentance is a meeting with the reality of our sin, our disfigurement, for which we ourselves are most often to blame. And awareness of this is the beginning of our path to God, the "making straight" of this path.
But the next meeting that must happen to us is the awareness of God's mercy, His forgiveness, which surpasses any depth of our fall. In each of our lives there are situations when it seems that we have hopelessly fallen away from God, when we think that our sin has finally separated us from salvation. But however much we turn away from God, however much we sin, He waits for us and for our repentance. For "the mountains may move and the hills may shake, but My mercy shall not depart from you, and My covenant of peace shall not be shaken, says the Lord, who has mercy on you" (Isa. 54:10). And the first step toward Him is the baptism of John, that is, repentance.