3rd. Sunday of Year (B) (Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; 1st. Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark 1: 14-20)
In the Gospel reading today we have St. Mark’s account of Our Lord’s proclamation to Israel at the beginning of His public ministry; and we can expect that this might well contain something absolutely central to His teaching:
This is the time of fulfilment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.
He declares the imminent proximity of that which had been foretold by the prophets and longed for by the faithful for over a thousand years:
“The time is fulfilled" He said, "The kingdom of God is at hand”.
What joy! God has been mindful of His People and, having seen their distress, is now about to bring them salvation! What then should they do to welcome Him and embrace the salvation He offers?
Repent …… and believe in the Gospel!
Notice the order of the words. “Repent” comes first; then, “believe in the Gospel”: repentance has to come first in order for us to be able to believe in the Gospel, as Jesus says elsewhere, those who seek the Truth will recognize the provenance of His words. Israel had learnt from their inability to keep God’s Law as given them through the prophet Moses, something of the reality and nature of the sinfulness alienating them from their God; and such awareness did indeed entitle them to be known as the People of God because it was unique in the world of that time, and enabled them to have a unique appreciation of the transcendent holiness of the one true God.
If Jesus had presented Himself as a charismatic leader come to drive the Romans out of the Promised Land, then there would not have been a call to repentance, the first thing would have been a call to arms: “Aux armes, citoyens” as the French cry in their national anthem; and Jesus would have been merely a somewhat bigger and better version of the king David.
Jesus, however, was the very Son of God made flesh, and He came with a message concerning Israel’s intimate relationship with her God, not her political status with Rome, for in order to hear God’s offer of salvation it was, and still is, necessary to acknowledge and accept the truth of God’s charge of personal sinfulness and personal responsibility. None can appreciate God’s Truth offering salvation who are not willing to hear His Truth telling them of their need to be saved from sin: their own sin and the resultant sin of the world. A disciple of Jesus must first of all be willing to repent in that personal and public – root and branches -- way in order to wholeheartedly receive and believe the Good News of the Gospel offering purification from the old and transformation into what is new and Godly, child-like and divine.
John the Baptist required of those coming forward to receive his immersing in the waters of the river Jordan something that modern society can appreciate, namely works; works, however, of a deeply religious significance:
You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits in keeping with repentance.
And when the crowds questioned him, saying, ‘what shall we do?’, he would answer them with examples he considered acceptable to God as signs of their turning away from the sin hitherto too prevalent in their lives:
The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise. (Luke 3: 7-8, 10-11)
Jesus, on the other hand makes no such demand; His first words are quite simply:
Repent, and believe in the Gospel.
The fact is that people can do works from all sorts of motives: they can be trying to influence others, to avoid something else more difficult, to prove their human or individual worth, indeed to prove their own personal holiness. Today those are the only works our disbelieving world has to offer: works witnessing, at the best, to the personal goodness of those performing them, not works flowing from the fatherly goodness of the transcendent, almighty, and eternal God.
Now Jesus willed and wanted all to be done with humility: for love of God and to serve His purposes. Therefore, He said:
Repent -- root and branches -- and believe – wholeheartedly -- in the Gospel.
It was to be from the depth and sincerity of their belief in Jesus’ Good News and hope in the promises He made, that His disciples would bring forth fruit of good works most acceptable to God.
Salvation is an offer from God of eternal blessedness as a child of God. The ancient scriptures had long proclaimed that human kind is not -- as Buddhists like to think -- on a level with earthly things, part of, and intimately and essentially bound up with creation around us: for Moses and the prophets told God’s chosen people that humankind had been originally made in the -- subsequently lost -- image and likeness of God. And Jesus, was now come to proclaim and to offer that, in Him -- the Son of God made flesh -- our sin-scarred likeness to God could now be restored and, indeed, brought to its ultimate fulfilment. Through faith in Him and obedience to His Gospel, mankind will receive His Spirit – the Gift of God -- to free us from our sins and to form us, in Him, as true children of the Father, adopted sons and daughters in Him Who is the only-begotten and eternally - beloved Son made flesh for our sakes.
Today there are many who do not want to hear about human dignity transcending that of the rest of creation, because they do not want to be called to strive for anything other than what they can immediately see, hear, taste and enjoy. They do not want to aspire for yet higher things, they seek to just enjoy here and now what they have got or can easily acquire. Consequently, the idea that human beings have a greater, higher dignity than that of the world around us seems a preposterous suggestion, because it is, first of all, an unwelcome one.
God sent His Son -- a divine Person -- to taken on human flesh and become perfect God and perfect Man, thus showing mankind both the possibility and the way to become one with God:
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
But such oneness cannot be attained by any merely human works, and that is why Jesus did not, first of all, call for works; rather He demanded faith in His own Personal Self and in the truth of His Gospel, whereby human beings might be lifted up to a heavenly level by the sheer goodness of God, in Jesus, through the Spirit. Heaven cannot be gained by any human excellence or power because heaven is not a place to be found nor a state to be acquired: heaven is a relationship with and presence to the Trinity of Love, into which only Jesus -- the beloved and only-begotten Son -- can lead those who, in faith submit to Him and aspire -- by His gift of the Spirit -- to the promise of heaven as proclaimed by His Gospel.
Repent, and believe in the Gospel.
In the face of such a new and eternal destiny we cannot continue living as though nothing had changed, as even the ancient and pagan Ninevites appreciated that:
So, Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the LORD’S bidding. Now Nineveh was an enormously large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day’s walk announcing, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,” when the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes.
We have to stop living as if we are simply part of this earth in which all our happiness and fulfilment is to be found. The blessings of life on earth are indeed, many, because God has made all things good; nevertheless, they were meant for us to use on the way to our eternal destiny and calling, they were not intended to become a drug that would stultify any higher aspirations. Because we have been fashioned by God in His own likeness, we are supreme over all things of earth, and we are, most certainly, not meant to be ruled by things of earth. Paul was speaking of this in our second reading:
I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.
Paul is saying that marriage may indeed be for you, that is, it may be of help in your salvation, but do not think that there is nothing better to come than marriage. Likewise, those who mourn should not fear that their whole life has been totally blighted, their destiny is – still – a destiny to eternal joy and happiness; while those who are happy must not be so foolish as to think that earthly happiness can be compared to the blessedness awaiting those who will sit at the Lord’s Supper in heaven as God’s children, for, as St. Paul tells us:
Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. (2:9)
Some of you have possessions you treasure, Paul adds, but don’t forget that this world will certainly pass away, and, therefore, your greatest treasure should surely be that which endures and will give you joy for ever. Business and many other aspects of life on earth can be of great interest and can bring about much that is necessary and good for self and for society, but in all your work let your character as a Christian inform that work, do not allow yourself to be deformed by the demands and the practices common in your field of work.
Jesus’ call, ‘Repent, and believe in the Gospel’, is an invitation -- most serious and pressing -- to help you first of all recognize and then realise your true worth, your divine calling, and your eternal dignity. Learn from Jesus, let Him teach you what to hate and avoid, but above all, what to love and whither to aspire: that is the essence of repenting. If you thus commit yourself to the Gospel, that Good News will lead you to joy and peace in this world, and, for the future, give you an inviolable hope transcending all earthly limitations.
We should not be surprised that the message of the Church is unpopular today, because many are living in such a way that they cannot hear that message; money is worshipped as the supreme goal of human endeavour because it promises alluring pleasure, buys obsequious respect, and provokes envious admiration on all sides. Moreover, for many today, popularity is second only to money, and so there can be no excellence accepted where popularity is wanting, and whatever is popular and exciting is considered to be excellent, no matter how tasteless, futile, or degrading it may be.
Considering these aspects of our world today, surely, People of God, the present unpopularity of Mother Church is proof that her teaching and her life are a condemnation of much evil that is done in our midst. Let us take heart, therefore, from Jesus’ words recorded in the Gospel (John 16:33 and Matt 24:35):
These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.
3rd. Sunday
of Year (B) (Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; 1st. Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark
1: 14-20)
In the Gospel reading today we have St. Mark’s account of
Our Lord’s proclamation to Israel at the beginning of His public ministry; and
we can expect that this might well contain something absolutely central to His
teaching:
This is the time of fulfilment.
The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.
He declares the imminent proximity of that which had been
foretold by the prophets and longed for by the faithful for over a thousand
years:
“The time is
fulfilled" He said, "The kingdom of God is at hand”.
What joy! God has
been mindful of His People and, having seen their distress, is now about to
bring them salvation! What then should
they do to welcome Him and embrace the salvation He offers?
Repent
…… and believe in the Gospel!
Notice the order of the words. “Repent” comes first; then, “believe in the Gospel”:
repentance has to come first in order for
us to be able to believe in the Gospel, as Jesus says elsewhere, that those who
seek the Truth will recognize the provenance of His words. Israel had learnt from their inability to keep
God’s Law as given them through the prophet Moses, something of the reality and
nature of the sinfulness alienating them from their God; and such awareness did
indeed entitle them to be known as the People of God because it was unique in
the world of that time, and enabled them to have a unique appreciation of the transcendent
holiness of the one true God.
If Jesus had presented Himself as a charismatic leader come
to drive the Romans out of the Promised Land, then there would not have been a
call to repentance, the first thing would have been a call to arms: “Aux armes,
citoyens” as the French cry in their national anthem; and Jesus would have been
merely a somewhat bigger and better version of the king David.
Jesus, however, was the very Son of God made flesh, and He
came with a message concerning Israel’s intimate relationship with her God, not
her political status with Rome, and for in order to hear God’s offer of salvation
it was, and still is, necessary to acknowledge and accept the truth of God’s
charge of personal sinfulness and personal responsibility. None can appreciate God’s Truth offering salvation
who are not willing to hear His Truth telling them of their need to be saved
from sin: their own sin and the resultant sin of the world. A disciple of Jesus must first of all be
willing to repent in that personal and public – root and branches -- way in
order to wholeheartedly receive and believe the Good News of the Gospel
offering purification from the old and transformation into what is new and
Godly, child-like and divine.
John the Baptist required of those coming forward to
receive his immersing in the waters of the river Jordan something that modern
society can appreciate, namely works; works, however, of a deeply religious
significance:
You brood of vipers, who
warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruits in keeping with repentance.
And when the crowds questioned him, saying, ‘what shall we
do?’, he would answer them with examples he considered acceptable to God as
signs of their turning away from the sin hitherto too prevalent in their lives:
The man who has two tunics is
to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.
(Luke 3: 7-8, 10-11)
Jesus, on the other hand makes no such demand; His first
words are quite simply:
Repent,
and believe in the Gospel.
The fact is that people can do works from all sorts of motives:
they can be trying to influence others, to avoid something else more difficult,
to prove their human or individual worth, indeed to prove their own personal
holiness. Today those are the only works
our disbelieving world has to offer: works witnessing, at the best, to the personal
goodness of those performing them, not works flowing from the fatherly goodness
of the transcendent, almighty, and eternal God.
Now Jesus willed and wanted all to be done with
humility: for love of God and to serve His purposes. Therefore, He said:
Repent
-- root and branches -- and believe – wholeheartedly -- in the Gospel.
It was to be from the depth and sincerity of their belief
in Jesus’ Good News and hope in the promises He made, that His disciples
would bring forth fruit of good works most acceptable to God.
Salvation is an offer from God of eternal blessedness as a child
of God. The ancient scriptures
had long proclaimed that human kind is not -- as Buddhists like to think -- on
a level with earthly things, part of, and intimately and essentially bound up
with creation around us: for Moses and the prophets told God’s chosen people that
humankind had been originally made in the -- subsequently lost -- image and
likeness of God. And Jesus, was now come to proclaim and to offer that, in Him
-- the Son of God made flesh -- our sin-scarred likeness to God could now be
restored and, indeed, brought to its ultimate fulfilment. Through faith in Him and obedience to His
Gospel, mankind will receive His Spirit – the Gift of God -- to free us
from our sins and to form us, in Him, as true children of the Father, adopted
sons and daughters in Him Who is the only-begotten and eternally - beloved Son
made flesh for our sakes.
Today there are many who do not want to hear about human
dignity transcending that of the rest of creation, because they do not want to
be called to strive for anything other than what they can immediately see,
hear, taste and enjoy. They do not want
to aspire for yet higher things, they seek to just enjoy here and now what they
have got or can easily acquire.
Consequently, the idea that human beings have a greater, higher dignity
than that of the world around us seems a preposterous suggestion, because it
is, first of all, an unwelcome one.
God sent His Son -- a divine Person -- to taken on human
flesh and become perfect God and perfect Man, thus showing mankind both the
possibility and the way to become one with God:
I am
the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
But such oneness cannot be attained by any merely human
works, and that is why Jesus did not, first of all, call for works; rather He
demanded faith in His own Personal Self and in the truth of His Gospel, whereby
human beings might be lifted up to a heavenly level by the sheer goodness of
God, in Jesus, through the Spirit.
Heaven cannot be gained by any human excellence or power because heaven
is not a place to be found nor a state to be acquired: heaven is a
relationship with and presence to the Trinity of Love, into which only
Jesus -- the beloved and only-begotten Son -- can lead those who, in faith
submit to Him and aspire -- by His gift of the Spirit -- to the promise of
heaven as proclaimed by His Gospel.
Repent,
and believe in the Gospel.
In the face of such a new and eternal destiny we cannot
continue living as though nothing had changed, as even the ancient and pagan
Ninevites appreciated that:
So, Jonah made ready and went
to Nineveh, according to the LORD’S bidding. Now Nineveh was an enormously
large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began his journey
through the city, and had gone but a single day’s walk announcing, “Forty days
more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,” when the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When
the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his
robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes.
We have to stop living as if we are simply part of this
earth in which all our happiness and fulfilment is to be found. The blessings of life on earth are indeed,
many, because God has made all things good; nevertheless, they were meant for
us to use on the way to our eternal destiny and calling, they were not intended
to become a drug that would stultify any higher aspirations. Because we have been fashioned by God in His
own likeness, we are supreme over all things of earth, and we are, most
certainly, not meant to be ruled by things of earth. Paul was speaking of this in our second
reading:
I tell you, brothers, the
time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having
them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those
buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the
world in its present form is passing away.
Paul is saying that marriage may indeed be for you, that
is, it may be of help in your salvation, but do not think that there is nothing
better to come than marriage. Likewise,
those who mourn should not fear that their whole life has been totally blighted,
their destiny is – still – a destiny to eternal joy and happiness; while those
who are happy must not be so foolish as to think that earthly happiness can be
compared to the blessedness awaiting those who will sit at the Lord’s Supper in
heaven as God’s children, for, as St. Paul tells us:
Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared
for those who love Him. (2:9)
Some of you have possessions you treasure, Paul adds, but
don’t forget that this world will certainly pass away, and, therefore, your
greatest treasure should surely be that which endures and will give you joy for
ever. Business and many other aspects of
life on earth can be of great interest and can bring about much that is
necessary and good for self and for society, but in all your work let your
character as a Christian inform that work, do not allow yourself to be deformed
by the demands and the practices common in your field of work.
Jesus’ call, ‘Repent, and believe in the Gospel’, is an
invitation -- most serious and pressing -- to help you first of all recognize
and then realise your true worth, your divine calling, and your eternal
dignity. Learn from Jesus, let Him teach
you what to hate and avoid, but above all, what to love and whither to aspire:
that is the essence of repenting. If you
thus commit yourself to the Gospel, that Good News will lead you to joy and
peace in this world, and, for the future, give you an inviolable hope
transcending all earthly limitations.
We should not be surprised that the message of the Church
is unpopular today, because many are living in such a way that they cannot hear
that message; money is worshipped as the supreme goal of human endeavour because
it promises alluring pleasure, buys obsequious respect, and provokes envious admiration
on all sides. Moreover, for many today,
popularity is second only to money, and
so there can be no excellence accepted where popularity is wanting, and
whatever is popular and exciting is considered to be excellent, no matter how
tasteless, futile, or degrading it may be.
Considering these aspects of our world today, surely,
People of God, the present unpopularity of Mother Church is proof that her
teaching and her life are a condemnation of much evil that is done in our
midst. Let us take heart, therefore,
from Jesus’ words recorded in the Gospel (John 16:33 and Matt 24:35):
These things I have spoken to
you, that in Me you may have peace. In
the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the
world. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass
away.
