Repent! The End is Near!

Delivered at Agnus Dei Lutheran Church. Epiphany 3, Year B.
Text: Jonah 3; 1 Cor 7.29-31; Mk 1.14-20

 

“Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!” What goes through your heads when you hear Jonah’s message? Does the reaction of the Ninevites surprise you? It sure surprises me. When I hear Jonah’s message, this is what I think of:

I think of some guy with unkempt hair and a scraggly beard holding a sign like this on the street corner. I think of Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world back in 2011. I hear Jonah’s message, and I think, “What a nutjob.” The trouble is that Jonah’s message sounds an awful lot like the first words out of Jesus’ mouth in Mark’s gospel.

The message that we hear today—the message of Jonah and Paul and Jesus—is that the “appointed time has grown short;” something is about to happen, and we’d best be ready for it. However, we have seen lots and lots of people bearing this message over the centuries—and we’ve seen them all be wrong. Our BS meter is finely tuned to this. We have no reason to suspect that tomorrow will not—for all intents and purposes—be just like today. So, how should we take Paul’s admonition that time is short? How should we react to Jesus when he says that the kingdom of God has come near?

Our three of our readings today have two things in common: repentance apocalypse. When we think about repentance, we usually think about Jonah’s kind of repentance: “turn or burn”. To us, repentance often means feeling sorry for what we’ve done wrong and trying to do better. Actually, that’s contrition, not repentance. Contrition can be a part of repentance, but not necessarily. True repentance has to do with apocalypse.

Here’s another word we may not correctly understand. Apocalypse is not about the end of the world (again, at least, not necessarily). Apocalypse simply means “revealing” something, shedding light on it. Apocalypse leads to “epiphany”—which is what makes this theme appropriate for today. Jonah’s message is about revealing God’s unhappiness with the evil of Nineveh. Paul and Jesus are concerned with the revealing of God’s kingdom—God’s reign on earth.

This revelation of God’s kingdom is one of the primary focuses of Mark’s gospel. Mark records this story for us because he and his community have had an epiphany: they see revealed in this story the way God is active in the world around them, and he wants us to see it, too; and to see this truth is an invitation to repent. And so, Jesus begins his work on earth with these words: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the good news!”

Take the disciples as an example. Sometimes when we read these stories during the course of the year, we may want to look at them as though we don’t know what’s coming up. We see Jesus walking along the lakeshore and seeing these four men and calling them, and we see them drop everything and follow. Looking at the story in this way, we might think, “What faith they have to follow him without even knowing him!”

The thing is, though, we do know the end of the story. We know that the same disciples Jesus is calling today will desert him tomorrow. They seem so faithful and steadfast now, but soon they will show themselves to be full of doubt and ignorance. When Jesus predicts his Passion, James and John ask for extra authority; and at Jesus’ trial, Simon denies three times that he even knows Jesus just to save his own skin. We know that when they drop everything on the lakeshore to follow Jesus, they are following him to the cross.

With this knowledge of what lies ahead, instead of being amazed by the disciples’ faith, we might instead be amazed that Jesus could get these fishermen to follow him all the way to Calvary. We might wonder why they followed him, given where he was going. We might even try to tell them not to go, kind of like somebody shouting to characters in a movie not to go out into the dark alone.

Think of the last time you were about to read a book or watch a movie, and somebody told you how it ended. With the ending spoiled, you experience that story in a different way. That’s what repentance is: leading a spoiled life. Repentance is knowing the end of the story and letting that knowledge affect how we live our lives. That’s what Jesus’ message means: the kingdom of God has come near: it has arrived, and it’s spreading. Knowing that, act like it!

That’s what Paul is getting at. This section of 1 Corinthians is all about whether or not people should get married or be circumcised or eat food sacrificed to idols… to us, it’s very weird and archaic. Paul’s point, though, is simply this: God’s kingdom is coming, so don’t get distracted by anything: not sex, not food, not even religion. Paul is reminding them that they know what’s coming and encouraging them to live like it—to lead spoiled lives.

When we focus on the big picture instead of just the day-to-day stuff, we make different choices. When we live with the outcome in mind, something changes in us. That’s what repentance is. It literally means to be reoriented, to have one’s internal compass realigned. Jesus and Paul aren’t telling us to feel bad for whatever we’ve done and try to do better, they are telling us to live with an eye to what is ahead.

Which brings us back to Jonah.* We hear today about the repentance of the Ninevites, but the real story about the repentance of Jonah. The central theme is that God’s will is done regardless, and the conflict arises when Jonah tries to avoid, thwart, or disobey that will. In the end, Jonah ends up unhappy and alone because he does not want what God wants. But, in spite of his best efforts, Jonah is still used by God to do God’s will and he suffers in the process, mostly from his own anger and hatred. The story leaves us, the readers, saying to Jonah, “You knew all along how the story would end; if you had only participated in God’s will instead of fighting it, you would have had a happy ending, too.” Jonah refused to repent; and we are left to realize that we don’t have to make the same mistake.

That’s what Mark’s gospel is about: Jesus is revealing to us how the story is going to play out, what God’s kingdom looks like. Just like the story of Jonah, we are being invited to participate in that story, rather than resisting it. We are being invited to repent. Paul would say, we are being invited to live as though we have no distractions or dealings with the world and to prepare ourselves for the fullness of God’s kingdom by practicing it now.

This is the invitation of the gospel: 

 

If we know that God’s kingdom is peaceful, then live peaceably; if we know it is just, then live justly; if we know it is merciful, then live mercifully. If we prepare ourselves now, then when we find ourselves in its midst, we will be able to enjoy it, rather than ending up like Jonah: angry and alone.

So when we hear Jesus call Simon and Andrew and James and John on the shores of the sea, here is what we should understand: The kingdom of God has already come near—there’s no turning back, no reversing course. It’s coming one way or another. The question for us is this: will we live a spoiled life and follow Jesus to the cross, knowing full well what death and resurrection awaits? Will we live lives of justice, mercy, kindness and love in preparation for God’s coming kingdom even when it means doing something we don’t want to do, even if it causes us some suffering? Or will we instead continue to live our own way, waiting for the kingdom to swallow us up as well and spit us out on the same shore where we would have ended up anyway?

 

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*If you are not familiar with the story of Jonah, here it is in a nutshell. Nineveh is a terrible place, and God is going to destroy it. God sends Jonah to tell them this, but Jonah wants God to destroy Nineveh, so he tries to avoid telling them. This doesn’t work out, and after attempting to flee from the job God gave him, he ends up inside a fish, who spits him out on the shore right next to Nineveh. Jonah realizes that resistance is futile, and delivers God’s message, and the Ninevites repent and are saved. Jonah reveals that he knew all along that if he delivered the message, the Ninevites would repent and God would show mercy, because Jonah knows that God is merciful. Jonah, however, is not merciful, and is now very angry with God because Nineveh is not going to be destroyed. The end.