First Reading
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, saying: “Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you.” So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the Lord’s bidding. Now Nineveh was an enormously large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day’s walk announcing, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed, ” when the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.
Second Reading
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.
Gospel Cycle Cycle B
Mark 1:14-20
After John had been arrested, 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.” As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Then they left their nets and followed him. He walked along a little farther and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They too were in a boat mending their nets. Then he called them. So they left their father Zebedee in the boat along with the hired men and followed him.
Repent! That is the theme of the first reading and of the Gospel today. The second reading gives us the motive for repentance: “the world in its present form is passing away.”
For many of us, the world does not seem to change very much at all and we can wonder if there is much use of repentance in our lives. For others, the world is indeed changing, and for the worse. We are much more capable of total destruction of the world today than other humans were many years ago.
We have to wonder about the role of repentance in our lives. Is there any good that comes out of repentance? For sure we can tell others: the Lord asks repentance of us and so we repent! But that doesn’t seem very strong. Unless we know why we are repenting, our repentance can be just an external compliance with some religious law that we have discovered.
In both the Hebrew Scriptures and in our Christian Scriptures, real repentance can only be worthwhile when we have some kind of personal encounter with God. That does not mean the kind of encounter we might have with another human being; for instance, meeting our mother or our brother or our sister or a good friend in the street. Sure, all of us would like to have an intimately personal and profound encounter with God in that way. But generally our encounters with God come about in other ways.
We have to wonder today also if we really believe that the Kingdom of God is at hand. That was one way of describing an encounter with the living God. Today, very few people sense that God is present at all. More and more of us humans are becoming atheists or at most agnostics. This life is all there is.
But we Christians, who follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus, believe in His words. He tells us that there is another life after death. He tells us that there is a living God with whom we can converse in prayer. He tells us the gateway to this new life after death is the love we have for one another in this life.
Our spirituality often comes down to this fundamental point: do I believe in Jesus Christ? If I do, I look at the world in one way and begin to try to choose to make all of my decisions in accordance with that belief. Jesus tells us that we encounter God whenever we serve others.
Repentance, then, is really important for all the times that I fail to be faithful to the words of Jesus and to His invitation to share His life. Repentance is important when I fail to love. Personally, I fail so very much. Yet repentance gives a chance to start over again. Repentance, if we follow Jesus, is a joy in our life because it allows us to acknowledge our brokenness and to receive healing from the Lord of life. Let us thank God today for this gift of repentance given to us in Christ Jesus.