Repent and believe the good news! That phrase has played an important role in my faith development over the years. It was Ash Wednesday, 1984. I had been out of high school for a couple years, and was playing music and working menial jobs, whatever it took to pay the little bills I had. I wasn’t living a life that anyone would describe as walking the straight and narrow, not by a long shot. I had, however, begun playing music at mass on Sunday mornings, for a few of reasons
- My father had a rule that, if you lived in his home, you went to mass.
- Since I had to be there anyway, I may as well be doing something I enjoyed doing.
- The guitarist that had been leading music at the family mass for years had a falling out with the priest, or a nun, or something, and they needed someone to step in.
This was all made that much more strange by the fact that, though I had attended mass my whole life, and had completed the required sacraments along the way – baptism as a baby, first penance and first communion as a young child, confirmation as 13 year old – and was now serving in this position of leadership, I really didn’t have any true sense of faith, at least not in any way that impacted the way I lived my life day to day.
Still, there was a sense that God was reaching out and drawing me in, as I had played in a band with a couple of born again Christians, and had been witnessed to by a couple of other folks along the way, and I had stumbled onto a Contemporary Christian music station. And in and through these various experiences and relationships, I had begun to be introduced to a whole different way of thinking about, and talking about, and experiencing the Christian faith.
So, I went to mass on that Ash Wednesday, not expecting anything particularly different, until the priest smeared the ashen cross on my forehead and spoke the words: Repent, and believe the good news. And the only way I can describe it is that something snapped. My whole life changed that night.
If you were with us on Ash Wednesday, you heard me preach about times, and places, and experiences that God uses to do God’s saving work in our lives. And that Ash Wednesday in 1984 was exactly that kind of moment in my life. On that night, I was set on the path that has led me to this moment, to this call to serve the Church of God in Christ as one called to ordained ministry in the office of word and sacrament…
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.
These are the first words that Jesus speaks in Mark’s Gospel. They introduce his mission and ministry. So I thought we’d take a little time this morning to unpack it a bit.
The time is fulfilled.
From the dawn of creation God had one primary desire, to be in relationship with humanity. God walked with Adam in the garden in the cool of the evening, and lived in relationship with him until the fall. After the fall, God still desired to be in relationship with humanity, and one of the manifestations of this desire is found in the story of Noah. Though humanity had wandered far from the ways of God, and though God saw fit to hit the reset button in a big way, destroying the whole earth by a flood, saving only Noah and his family and the animals God instructed Noah to bring with him in the ark, in the end, God reestablishes covenant with humanity, giving the sign of the rainbow as a sort of seal or reminder for us, and for God’s own self, that God will never again destroy the whole earth by a flood.
Along the paths of time God established covenant with a chosen people, through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and, even when these chosen ones were unfaithful, God sent prophets and teachers and leaders, faithful women and men who would call them back to the ways of God, and remind them of who they were, and who God is, until, finally, in the fullness of God’s time, God became truly human in the person Jesus of Nazareth, born of the virgin, Mary. This was a particular moment in the story of God’s relationship with humanity, a moment that would, of course, change everything, a moment that had been promised through the prophets down through the ages, and was now, finally, fulfilled in the sight of God’s people…
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.
And notice, the kingdom has come near, not is coming near, not may be coming near, not could come near if you play your cards right. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom, the very presence of God and God’s reign in Christ Jesus, has come near.
Since the time of King David, about 1000 years before the time of Christ, God’s people had been waiting for God to re-establish the kingdom in a new and everlasting way, by sending a descendant of David to establish God’s reign on earth. And here, in Mark 1, Jesus is identifying himself as this long-awaited king.
Now this might seem strange to someone who has never heard the story before. Jesus bursts onto the scene –
no birth narrative, nothing to identify him as this long-awaited king, and he comes to be baptized, which might seem like a weird thing for a God/man to do, since John’s baptism is so connected to repentance, and a God/man would have nothing of which to repent, and coming out of the water, he’s named and claimed by the voice of God as a beloved Son with whom God is well pleased. (we just covered all that a couple weeks ago, right?)
But then the story takes a strange turn. As Jesus comes out of the water, and hears these words of affirmation, immediately he is cast out into the wilderness, (that’s a better translation than driven out – it’s more faithful to the Greek word, ek-ballo, to throw or cast out) and, having been cast out into the wilderness, he’s there for 40 days,
- being tempted by Satan, though Mark gives us no details about the nature of the temptation
- being with the wild beasts, though whether they were a threat or not isn’t made clear
- and being waited on by angels, though how that happens also isn’t made clear.
In fact, there’s a lot we don’t know about Jesus’ time in the wilderness from Mark’s perspective. And that just might be on purpose. Perhaps Mark is short on details so that we won’t be too tempted to see ourselves, or to insert ourselves, into the story here. This is a story about the temptation of Jesus, and, as highly as we humans tend to regard ourselves, the fact of the matter is that we’re not Jesus. Jesus can be in the wilderness, and can withstand these particular temptations of Satan, because of who he is. So while there might be a sense of solidarity here – in other words, we might be able to receive encouragement by considering how Jesus withstands temptation and comes through on the other side ready to fulfill God’s call and plan – we have to remember that we’re not Jesus. The point of this temptation story is not necessarily for us to be encouraged to think about how we’re going to withstand these particular attacks of Satan in our own lives. Rather, the point is that, when any temptation comes, when we find ourselves in a wilderness moment in our lives, and we all will at some point or another, we are to realize that we are not alone in it, which is really our only hope.
Left to our own devices, made to rely on our own strength, we would be hopeless to withstand the temptations of Satan. But we’re not alone. God in Christ, who has been there ahead of us, goes with us through it all. It’s significant, I think, that Mark doesn’t give us the details of the temptation, like Matthew and Luke do, because we might be fooled into thinking that temptations come only in those forms. The 3 temptations that the other Gospels name are temptations specific to Jesus and to his identity. We may be tempted in very different ways based on our own identities, because, and I’ll say it one more time, we’re not Jesus. Still, the kingdom of God has come near in the person of Jesus, and the presence of God with us in all the stuff of life…
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.
And it’s important that we hold those last two things together. Repentance means to turn, but more specifically, it means to turn away from one thing, and to turn toward another. Turn away from those things that aren’t good news, and then turn toward belief, toward faith, toward trust in the God who brings good news, and forgiveness, and deliverance, and freedom, and healing, and wholeness. This is what Jesus has come to call us to –
To turn from those things that keep us from experiencing the loving relationship that God wants to have with us, as God has longed to have with all humanity throughout all time, and to turn toward the good news of God’s saving love in Christ Jesus our Savior, who has come in the fullness of time, ushering in God’s kingdom here and now, and changing our lives by his saving grace.
Amen.
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