Lent 1, February 22 2015
Gen 9:8-15; 1 Pet 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15
Brookdale

Mark’s Gospel is always in a hurry.  It races along.  In today’s Gospel passage, it races through the temptation in the desert, the arrest of John the Baptist, and a summary of Jesus’ message—all this in four verses.  In our translation, Mark takes three short sentences to summarize the “gospel of God”:

“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

If I imagine myself standing there in Galilee listening to this itinerant rabbi, I can try to understand what that message sounded like when it was new, when people heard it for the first time.  The first sentence is “This is the time of fulfillment.”  No more mañana.  Something is finally going to happen, something good that we have all been waiting for, maybe a promise fulfilled.  As I listened, I’d probably be thinking, “Wonderful!  Uh, could you just remind me what exactly this fulfillment is about?”

The second sentence answers that question: “The kingdom of God is at hand.”  The Greek word for kingdom is basilea, which means reign or rule; we might say that Russia today enjoys the basilea of Vladimir Putin.  So Jesus says that the reign of God himself has come near; it is within reach. We are that close to having God be in charge.  That sounds good.  God is bound to do a better job than the Romans or King Herod.

Now we come to the third sentence, which says what we need to do about this kingdom.  And now the message becomes mysterious, at least in our translation: “Repent and believe in the gospel.”  Those were the words that accompanied our marking with ashes on Ash Wednesday.  That’s our program.  But what does that have to do with the reign of God and fulfillment?  And for us today, what does it have to do with renewing our lives during Lent?

Today, “Repent and believe in the gospel” sounds as if it is saying:

Feel remorse for your sins, and believe that what it says in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is really true.  Or at least that the story I’m telling you in this Gospel is true.

We all know these days that “gospel” means good news, so presumably Jesus is talking about the good news he has just given us: the reign of God is at hand right now.  But what that sentence actually meant when Jesus said it was rather different from the way it sounds today.  To the first-century listener it meant:

Return to God; change the way you think about things.  Trust in this good news of God’s reign and live accordingly.

What we translate as belief meant more like trust in the first century.  The idea is that we need to trust that God really is in charge.  The late Marcus Borg, a scripture scholar and mystic who unfortunately passed away just last month, explains the biblical meaning of repentance like this:

The biblical meanings of repenting are primarily twofold.  On the one hand, it means to “return” to God, to “reconnect” with God.  On the other hand, it means “to go beyond the mind that we have” – minds shaped by our socialization and enculturation.

Repentance means dying to our “old way of seeing and being and living and identity, and being born, raised, into a new way of seeing and being and living and identity.  Ash Wednesday, as we are marked for death, is the annual ritual enactment of the beginning of that journey.”[1]

The good news is that the reign of God is breaking in right now.  There’s no need to wait for the Romans to go home, or for the temple to be rebuilt, or for the right political party to control both white house and Congress, or for all politicians to be wise and saintly.

That’s the good news.  The other news is that the reign of God requires changes in us, changes that will feel a little bit like dying.  We got a foretaste of that in the first line of today’s Gospel passage: “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert.”  The same Spirit that descended on Jesus like a dove at his baptism drove him out with the wild beasts.  The path to Easter runs through Ash Wednesday and Lent.  We’ll need faith in God’s good news to get us through the desert, with its wild beasts.

But as I listen to this first-century rabbi, I feel a tug.  God can begin to reign right in my heart, right now.  If I turn back to God and trust Him in spite of those wild beasts.

[1] Marcus Borg, March 1, 2014, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marcusborg/2014/03/ash-wednesday-death-and-repentance/.