3rd Week of Ordinary Time

Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

“Time is running out…
The world in its present form is passing away…”
Paul tells us in our second reading today,
so we should set aside worldly concerns.
And in our Gospel Jesus arrives proclaiming, 
“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe in the Gospel.”
Already the old world is crumbling
and the new world is being born.

But two thousand years later,
with the world seemingly still firmly in place,
what can such words mean for us?
Was Paul simply wrong about the timing of things
or was Jesus merely mistaken 
about the nearness of the Kingdom?
Can we safely ignore Paul’s advice 
about how to live in a world that is passing away?
Can we put off responding to Jesus’ call 
to repent and believe in the Gospel?

I don’t think so.

For Paul is surely correct: time is running out.
Indeed, that is all time ever does.
Time’s arrow ultimately moves in only one direction,
and the world as we know it 
is simply one long process of passing away.
Both for us as individuals and for the world as a whole
the end is, if not exactly in sight, 
at least predictable with some certainty.
You and I will one day die,
and the cosmos as we know it will one day end.
Everything that we seek to hold onto
decays and slips through our fingers.
Our loves and our labors,
our tears and our laughter,
all are passing.
We know this on some level,
which is why we expend 
so much energy trying to deny it.
We engage in fruitless attempts
to hold on to what is passing
and to exert control over 
what is in fact beyond our control.
And these attempts are often purchased
at the expense of others.
We are willing to deceive and destroy
in order to maintain the illusion
that we have mastery over our own destinies
and can change the direction of time’s arrow.

But we do not have to think that way.
Indeed, when Jesus says 
“repent and believe in the Gospel”
he issues a call to think differently
about our lives and our world.
To repent means literally “to think again,”
to change one’s mind,
to rethink and reevaluate 
and to see the world in a new way
so as to live in the world in a new way.
Time’s arrow need not point us toward death
and the ultimate dissolution of all that we love;
for those who believe in the good news Jesus brings,
it can point us toward the victory of life over death,
toward a new birth from above.
It can point us to a life that is more
than the endless clawing after control
of a world that is passing away.
This is the life to which Jesus calls
Simon and Andrew and James and John
in today’s Gospel,
when they abandon control of their own destinies
by placing their lives in the hands of Jesus.
This is the life to which Jesus calls us.

But what does all this look like concretely?
Let me offer an example.
Recently the Chinese embassy in the U.S.,
seeking to manage the bad public relations resulting
from the Chinese government’s repression of the Uygurs,
the Muslim minority in northwestern China,
tweeted out this message: 
“Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, 
the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated 
and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, 
making them no longer baby-making machines. 
They are more confident and independent.”
What the embassy clothes in the appealing language
of emancipation, equality, and health
are in fact practices of forced sterilization and abortion
carried out as part of a program of genocide 
against a religious and ethnic minority. 

This is obviously something horrific.
But what is particularly striking
is the claim that Uygur women
are in this process gaining control over their lives,
a seductive claim that is used 
to try and sell this genocidal program,
not simply to us Americans,
who are heavily invested to our own autonomy,
but to the Uygur women themselves,
who are forced into re-education camps
where they are told that the abortion of their children
is in fact making them masters of their own destinies.
If this reeducation works,
the government will no longer have to resort
to the crude methods of forcing Uygur women 
to abort their pregnancies.
If it works, Uygur women will confidently choose 
to do so themselves,
in the name of emancipation, equality, and health.
In other words, they will have become just like us.

But what if this sort of control is an illusion?
What if we cannot kill our way 
to emancipation from fear,
the fear that we will not be able to hold onto
the future that steadily slips through our fingers?
What if the only hope 
in a world that is passing away
is to place our futures in the hands of Jesus?
Can we change our ways of thinking,
repent and think anew,
so that true emancipation is found
not in autonomy but in community,
not in self-assertion but in mutual service,
not in violence against the weak
but in welcoming the stranger?

I think one reason why the issue of abortion
remains so intractable in our own nation—
along with issues of poverty and immigration, 
the death penalty and racism—
is that all of us cling too tightly
to this world that is passing away
and to the illusion of control.
Indeed, we are willing to sustain that illusion
at the expense of others.
If we can just eliminate 
one more unwanted pregnancy,
one more hardened criminal,
one more undocumented alien…
well, then time’s arrow might change direction, 

the world might stop passing away
and be as we would like it to be.

We need to hear together the call of Jesus to repent.
For the words of Jesus remain true:
the kingdom of God is at hand.
It is just on the other side 
of a different way of thinking,
which can lead 

to a different way of living.
May the God of grace
grant us a spirit of repentance
and have mercy on us all.

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:16-20

There is nothing like
an impending ballistic missile strike
to focus the mind
and make us assess our priorities.
When the message went out
over the cell networks in Hawaii—
“Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii.
Seek immediate shelter.
This is not a drill.”—
I imagine people’s priorities
got somewhat reshuffled.
I suspect people didn’t stop
to update the apps on their phones
or check in for flights the next day.
I am pretty sure no one bothered
to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer
or to clean the bath tub.
And I would be very surprised if anyone
checked to see how the market was doing
or what was up with the Kardashians.
But I do suspect that people
did things that might have otherwise
seemed to be trivial matters
that could be put off:
embracing loved ones,
letting go of long-standing grudges,
offering a prayer to God
for mercy and protection.
There is something about the prospect
of a nuclear weapon hurtling toward you
that makes things you believe important
seem suddenly trivial,
and things you treat as trivial
seem suddenly urgent.

“Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:
‘This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent, and believe in the gospel.’”
Jesus is issuing the spiritual equivalent
of a warning about an incoming ballistic missile.
The drawing near of God’s kingdom
causes us to reshuffle our priorities,
making important things trivial
and trivial things urgent.

In today’s Gospel, our translation says
that when Jesus called Peter and Andrew
“then they abandoned their nets and followed him,”
and that when he came across James and John,
“then he called them,
so they left their father Zebedee in the boat…
and followed him.”
But a more literal translation
of the original Greek would be,
“immediately they abandoned their nets and followed him,”
and “immediately he called them,
so they left their father Zebedee in the boat…
and followed him.”

Now when a preacher begins talking to you
about the original Greek of the New Testament,
I generally think you are permitted
to let your eyes glaze over,
since you are likely in for
an irrelevant yet ostentatious
display of the thin veneer of learning
that people acquire in formation.
But, in this case, I ask you to indulge me.
For the Greek word that Mark uses here—euthus—
is one that he uses throughout his Gospel;
indeed, he uses it some forty times
in his sixteen short chapters,
to propel his story forward with a sense of urgency.
Once the story begins, everything happens “immediately”
as Jesus hurtles toward his destiny in Jerusalem,
launched on a trajectory that ends in cross and resurrection.
To be his follower is to be caught up
in that immediacy,
in that urgency,
which reshuffles our priorities,
so that possessions and work and even family
take second place to God’s kingdom.
Peter and Andrew leave their boat and nets,
their very livelihood,
in order to follow Jesus.
James and John leave their father Zebedee behind
in order to be Jesus’ disciples.

In our second reading, from St. Paul,
we find a similar sense of urgency:
“The time is running out.”
The preoccupations of this world—
family and possessions, joys and sorrows—
all look different in the light of the kingdom of God,
for, as Paul says,
“the world in its present form is passing away.”
Paul’s point is not, as some have suggested,
that Jesus is returning soon
and, therefore, we should focus our attention
on getting ready rather than on life in this world.
The point is rather than in Jesus
the kingdom has already drawn near
and the priorities and values of the world
are already in the process of passing away,
of being transformed
into the priorities and values of God’s kingdom.
For Paul, no less than for Peter and Andrew,
or for James and John,
it is the call of Jesus to follow him
that makes important things trivial
and trivial things urgent.
Paul writes to the Philippians,
“I… consider everything as a loss
because of the supreme good
of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things
and I consider them so much rubbish,
that I may gain Christ.”

If you don’t feel a certain urgency in your life as a Christian,
you may have to ask yourself
whether you have truly understood who Jesus Christ is.
If your response to Jesus’ call to follow after him
does not involve a reshuffling of life’s priorities,
you may want to ponder the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
the German theologian who was executed by the Nazis:
“When Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die.”
If you do not see why you need to respond immediately,
then you might want to listen again to the words of Jesus:
“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.”
Indeed, it is hurtling toward us,
making important things trivial
and trivial things urgent.

But, in addition to its sense of immediacy and urgency,
the Gospel of Mark also has a clear-eyed awareness
that those who sincerely desire to be disciples of Jesus
often falter and fail,
that they let the priorities and values of the world
deter them from following him all the way to the cross,
that they do not yet know in the deepest sense
who Jesus Christ is.
Yet the promise with which Mark’s Gospel ends,
that the risen Jesus has gone before us
and will meet us on the way,
is the promise that, despite our faltering failures,
despite our misplaced priorities and values,
despite our blindness
to the presence of God’s kingdom in Jesus,
God is merciful and forgiving and relentless:
the call to follow is renewed again and again,
and the kingdom is still at hand,
hurtling toward us on love’s trajectory.
The risen Jesus still calls us:
This day is the time of fulfillment;
repent and believe in the Gospel.