At a glance, the message found in these readings is simple enough: repent. Yet, how often do we give serious thought to this advice? I suspect that most parishioners here have not in the past eight years celebrated the sacrament of reconciliation. If you are one of them, do you see the need to repent or not?
Whatever your thoughts on the matter of sin and repentance may be, I suggest that we step out of our usual mindset and rethink what the message truly is. As Jesus said, “repent, and believe in the gospel.” They go hand in hand.
This prompts me to look up the word in the dictionary. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, repent means, “to feel remorse, contrition for what one has done or failed to do.” That fits the first reading well. The residents of Nineveh truly repented once Jonah proclaimed, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” They turned from their evil ways and their city was spared.
Another definition offered is this, “to make a change for the better as a result of remorse or contrition for one’s sins.” To better understand Jesus’ call to repent, consider first the meaning of sin, also found in this same dictionary, “a deliberate disobedience to the known will of God.”
What I hear Jesus saying is this: change your life. How? By believing in the gospel. Thomas Merton invites us to look at the message of these readings in a new light, “We must in all things seek God. But we do not seek him in the way we seek a lost object, ‘a thing.’ He is present to us in our heart, in our personal subjectivity, and to seek Him is to recognize this fact.”
The residents of Nineveh were challenged by Jonah to change their ways for the better and they did. The image of donning sack cloth and fasting resonates with our own practice on Ash Wednesday. Like the Ninevites, we are prompted to change some of our ways but for how long? As creatures of habit, we can easily slip back into our old ways in due time, thinking that we can always repent “tomorrow.”
Paul urges us to think otherwise. “I tell you brothers and sisters, the time is running out…the world in its present form is passing away.” There is truth to that; governments come and go, species disappear, friends and relatives move on or pass away. We no longer inhabit the world we were born into and when we die, it will be different still. We cannot afford to wait until tomorrow to repent for someday tomorrow will not arrive.
Jesus enters the scene, telling anyone who would listen, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” When you think of the Kingdom of God, what comes to mind? Heaven? Paradise? Or something closer to home, namely this time and space that we are living in? The Kingdom of God is all of the above and more. If we were to take Fr. Merton’s advice to heart and actively seek God in this lifetime, than we can experience the Kingdom of God here and now because seeking God comes about when we believe in the gospel and live out its message. Seeking God motivates us to turn away from sin, thus making it possible for the Kingdom of God to take shape in our lives.
In his book, Living a Life That Matters, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian, wrote that God is often found not in people but between people. When you and I are truly attuned to each other, God comes down and fills the space between us so that we are connected, not separated. Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.”
Mark shares with us in his gospel that God can be found in a simple moment of acknowledging another person’s basic dignity and presence. Jesus’ call to the fishermen to be “fishers of men” is a call for us as his disciples to help one another discover the love of God between us, despite the silk ties and rags that differentiate us.
What Jesus is saying is so often overlooked. “Something great is happening! Change direction or lose out!” He said this at the start of him public ministry and then proceeded to live out the good news, showing us what he meant. He showed that it was possible for a person to live with a changed heart, with outgoing love, interested in the welfare of all life around him.
He showed that his love will work out healing and restoration, fulfillment and invigoration. He showed how God’s gifts to us, including science and technology, should be used for the benefit of all. He showed how we can break through sin and greed, ignorance and stupidity, egotism and shortsightedness. He showed how the direction of the human will can be changed through the power of God.
We need to repent and change our ways no less than the people of Nineveh. They remind us of our own closed minds, hardened attitudes and bigotry, shattering whatever illusions we have about being a tolerant people. The possibility of repentance and change of heart is the good news Jesus offers us. As I noted earlier, repentance means making a change for the better. Repentance, then, can be seen as the start of a total overhaul of our attitudes and priorities, the beginning of God’s kingdom on earth, a changed human life for anyone who is truly repentant.