(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. What joy! God has been mindful of
His People, has seen their distress, and 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 divine provenance of His, Jesus’, words. Israel had learnt -- from their inability to
keep God’s Law as given them through the prophet Moses -- the reality 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 Judah’s legendary King David,
who had, in a measure, foreshadowed Jesus in his beautiful – but, at times,
overpoweringly fragile – humanity, and in the disarming sincerity of his love
of God in a life scarred, nevertheless, by political and personal scheming.
Jesus, however, was the very Word and only-begotten 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 embrace God’s
offer of salvation it was, and still is, necessary to recognise, acknowledge, and
humbly accept, the truth of God’s charge of individual sinfulness and corporate
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 sinfulness
of their world. A disciple of Jesus
must first of all be willing to repent in that personal way in order to wholeheartedly
receive and believe the Good News of the Gospel, offering purification from his
or her old sinful ways and transformation into what is new and Godly, child-like
and Divine.
John the Baptist required of those coming forward to
receive ritual purification by his immersing them 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, however, goes much deeper, indeed, to the very root
of Israel’s sinfulness; His first words are straight to the point::
Repent,
and believe in the Gospel (Show true
repentance by believing My Truth).
For people rarely do even good works from pure motives: those
practically-minded can be genuinely trying to help others, but also wanting to prove
their own human (‘good fellow, good woman’) individual worth. Others, more intellectual, can pronounce
themselves to be ‘very proud of what they do’, because it shows that
they have no need of redemption, or any
other sort of ‘saving’ by a so-called
God.
Today, dear People of God, the very best works our
disbelieving world has to offer are works of personal generosity or human endeavour,
on the part of those performing them; but they are not works of goodness,
flowing from the transcendent goodness
of the almighty and eternal God Who is the Father of us all.
Now Jesus willed and wanted all His disciples’
works to be done with humility, and for love of God, because He Himself came among us to live and
die for love of His Father and to suffer for love of us. therefore, He said:
Repent
-- root and branches -- and believe – wholeheartedly -- in the Gospel.
Salvation is an offer from God, of eternal blessedness as a
child of God, to one who has believed in His only-begotten Son
sent among men to save them. 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 essentially bound up with
creation around us. For Moses and the
prophets told God’s chosen people that only humankind had been originally made
in the 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 be restored and brought to the ultimate joy of its heavenly fulfilment
and perfection.
Today there are very many who do not want to hear about
human dignity transcending 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, get as much as they can -- here and now -- out
of what they have got, or lies at hand.
Consequently, the idea that human beings have a greater dignity and a higher
destiny than that of the world around us seems to them a preposterous
suggestion, because it is, first of all, an unwelcome one.
God sent His Son to take on human flesh as perfect God and perfect
Man, showing us both the possibility and the way to become truly one with God:
I am
the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
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,
first of all, faith in His own Personal Being 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 three Persons of the most holy Trinity of
Love, into which only Jesus -- the beloved and only-begotten Son, Word of
the Father -- can lead those who, in faith submit to Him and aspire, by His
gift of the Holy Spirit, to the promise of heaven proclaimed by His
Gospel.
We need 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, 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 for 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,
for they are, in Jesus, destined 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)
Dear People of God, Jesus’ call, ‘Repent, and believe in
the Gospel’, is an invitation -- most serious and pressing -- to help you
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 peace and give you strength in this world; and, for the future, an
inviolable hope transcending all earthly limitations.
We should not be surprised that the message of the Church
is unpopular today, if they hate Me, they will also hate you, because
many are living in such a way that they cannot hear let alone understand God’s call:
money is worshipped as the supreme goal of human endeavour because it promises tangible
and 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, let us take heart 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.
