The Time Has Come
Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany, year B
Bible reading: Mark 1:14-20
The words we heard just now are the first words on the lips of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. Brief thought it is, these words are the theme of Jesus’ inaugural address, which he goes around proclaiming in one village and town after another in Galilee.
Very different from the inaugural address we heard last Wednesday. The new President of the US did not have to go from place to place, a handful here and a handful there to hear him. 2 million people right there hanging on every word; countless millions around the world, tuning in via TV or radio. Even if you were not interested enough to watch and listen to the whole speech, you would have heard key parts of the speech in news bulletins or read them in your paper—it was a speech that was scarcely unavoidable.
Very different though they were, there are couple of striking similarities between Jesus’ first words in his public ministry and Obama’s first speech in public office as President. Both speeches talk about time and change. Things are not right and not good, and it is time for change, and that change must happen in people. Obama said:
And yet, at this moment—a moment that will define a generation—it is precisely this spirit [the spirit of selfless service] that must inhabit us all.
… Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions—that time is surely past.
… Starting today we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
Jesus’ inaugural sermon was likewise about time and change: The time has come.
Literally: The time has been fulfilled.
Even more literally: The ‘kairos’, that is, ‘the right time’ has come.
There are various kinds of ‘right time’, as we know from that beloved chapter of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 3:
For everything there is a time, and season for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; … a time to weep, to laugh, mourn, to dance, to love to hate …
The times that we, as human beings, set up for ourselves can be variable and debatable; only the times that God appoints are truly ‘right time’.
When your read the Scriptures, you see over and over again that God’s right time for intervening, for action, for doing something entirely new and wonderful and unexpected is in crisis time. God knew that it was crisis time for Nineveh, so he appointed the prophet Jonah. Go,
said the Lord to Jonah, go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.
But Jonah had other ideas. Why? Because Nineveh is Iraq. The ruins of Nineveh lie in Iraq near modern Bagdad. Can you imagine a Jewish rabbi from Israel wanting to go and preach a message from God in Bagdad today—a message of repentance and salvation? No way. ‘What, me go to Nineveh?’
asks Jonah. ‘No thanks.’
So he hops on a ship heading in the opposite direction—to Tarshish, the furthest know place in the west.
You know the story: God organised a fish to bring Jonah back. Jonah found the fish journey to be like a ride in hell. So when the fish journey was over, Jonah knew he had no choice. When the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, Jonah knew it was God’s right time and that he had to go. Arise,
the Lord said, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.
It was a message of crisis and gloom: In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed!
The reluctant prophet reluctantly speaks the message from God. The surprising thing is that the Ninevites heard the message, they believed God’s word, they repented in sackcloth and ashes, and a great disaster was averted:
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; God did not do it.
That crisis passed. But there is always crisis. In fact, the whole world is in crisis. What Mr Obama said in his speech the other day is true for us all. He said: That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.
He spoke boldly about the greed and irresponsibility of some people being one of the significant causes of the financial crisis and, alongside that, collective failure to make hard choices. On many fronts, we see a world in crisis: whether it be the economy, the environment, war and bloodshed in many places, and not least in Gaza, political instability in many countries, epidemics like the outbreak of cholera.
But what is causing all this turmoil and crisis? So often the root cause for these things is human sinfulness, in one form or another. A year ago, Australia was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and our problems seemed all rather minor—we were lulled into a false sense of security. But now the symptoms of a deeper underlying crisis, such as we are experiencing in these days, have risen up before our face—crisis and the sense of crisis is acute.
And the real cause for so much of this is the human condition. The world is in crisis because we are a fallen humanity. On every side we witness greed, arrogance, irresponsibility, stupidity, murderous hatred, bloodshed, war, violence, exploitation of human beings, rapacious exploitation of the planet’s resources, reckless consumerism, and so on. And it is not just someone else who is being this way and doing these things. This capacity for evil is within each one of us. In Jeremiah (17:9) it says: The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?
Jesus said: Out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
The world is in a mess, and as long as human beings have been around, always has been. So at the right time, in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those under the law, and condemned by the law, as we all are. At the right time, God sent his Son. Jesus was born. Jesus grew up quietly and obediently in Nazareth. At age 30 Jesus went to the Jordan. Jesus was baptised by John and anointed with the Holy Spirit. At the right time Jesus began his ministry by speaking the word of God in public. And this is what he said:
The time has come; the kingdom of God is near.
Repent; and believe the good news.
That was the message of Jesus back then. That is the message from Jesus for us today. Do you notice the contrast in that: the shade and the light? There is a negative word and a positive word; a word of warning and a word of promise; a word of gloom and a word of hope.
The time has come … repent.
I hear warning and gloom in those words. Not a popular message. Here we are in the lazy hazy days of summer. Can’t we just relax and enjoy them? Here we are, about to celebrate Australia Day in this good land. We have so much to be thankful for. We live in a wonderful country. Great people. We live here in peace and harmony like few people in the world do. Despite the economic downturn we still enjoy a standard of living that is beyond the wildest dreams of most people in the world. And yet the word of Jesus is for this land, for this city, and for each person: The time has come. The time is near. Repent.
What does it look like, this repentance that Jesus call us to? Well, the one thing it is not is that it is not superficial. It is not just picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and attending to a few little faults in your life. This repentance is not just admitting that some things are wrong, and shouting defiantly, ‘Yes, we can! Yes, we can!’
Rather this repentance is the deep realisation that ‘No, we can’t.’
The world is in deep crisis. Our way of life as a people in this good land is in deep trouble. And this deep trouble is deeply rooted in our lives and in our hearts and what proceeds from them. As we say sometimes in the confession:
We confess that we are born in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you [O God] in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have failed to do. We have not loved you with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves.
Repentance is the deep realisation that we cannot change ourselves, that we can’t fix our lives, let alone our country and our world. That by itself could lead to despair. But repentance is more than that. Repentance is the profound recognition, the deep belief, and the steady hope that God has come to help us in our helplessness, to rescue us from the power of evil, to save us from our sins.
In Jesus inaugural address the ringing world of hope is not that we can do it, but that God is already doing it: The time has come. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God has drawn near.
God is not silently watching from afar, from a distance corner of the universe. God has come near. God’s kingly rule is breaking into a broken world, a world breaking down because of human sinfulness. And because God is doing this the invitation and the command for us is metanoieite: ‘repent’, ‘change your mind’, is literally what the Greek says. Turn your whole life around, change your mind, change your heart, and await what God is doing as God’s kingly rule breaks into the world.
And you already know what has happened and what is happening: God draws near to our broken world and our broken lives in this One: in and through his Beloved Son. This Jesus, who gave up the power and glory of heaven to be born a helpless baby. This Jesus, who, to use Luke’s words, went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him
(Acts 10:38). This Jesus, who did what we could not do, and bore our sins and failures and went to the cross and died for them, and died our death. But more: God raised this Jesus from the dead, and he lives and rules with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God [Amen].
And what this means is that when we the world is in crisis, as is the case in these days, we do not despair. When it is Australia Day and we see that the lucky country is running out of luck and its people becoming so godless that one writer has called Australia ‘the most godless place under heaven’, we do not hang down our head and capitulate. Why? Because crisis time is precisely when God’s salvation draws near. The world is not reeling out of control. The world is in God’s hands, and God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him may not perish, but may have eternal life.
God has not promised to insulate us from economic crisis, unemployment, hard times, climate change, war and bloodshed, sickness, ageing, or anything else. What God has promised is that God will not abandon us, because he loves us. In Christ, God has entered into the very depths of our human misery to bring us forgiveness and healing and peace and life eternal that nothing can destroy, not even death.
And because we have heard and responded to this good news, this Gospel of God, we are called to follow Jesus, just like those first disciples on the lake-shore. Follow me,
says Jesus, and I will make you fish for people.
So there you go, spread your net, tell the good news that the kingdom’s come, and the kingdom’s coming. People will see it, and people will believe it, when they see the transformation that has happened in our lives.
The time has come,
says Jesus, repent and believe in the gospel.
The time has come,
says Jesus, Come follow me.