Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Mark 1, 14-15.
Like a good report writer, Mark starts his gospel with a summary, an abstract, if you like, of what Jesus taught: four points, almost bullet points. ‘The time is fulfilled, the kingdom has come near, repent, believe in the gospel.’ Those who asked Mark to write his gospel, sometime around 70AD, might have said to him, ‘what did Jesus really say? What was the essence of it all?’ This is his answer.
Notice what kind of an answer it is. For Mark, the essence of Jesus’s teaching is not a creed or a theology. Instead Jesus makes four points, about history and our response to history. Something is happening, Jesus says, and you need to think what you are going to do about it. This is what Mark remembers Jesus saying. There is no proof of God’s existence, no theory of the universe. It seems there is no time for any of that; the urgency of the moment is too great.
The first point: ‘the time is fulfilled.’ Something has been going on, and that something has reached its completion. Not in the minds of theologians, but in history itself: God’s purpose has been at work, and that process has, like a pregnancy, come to term, is about to release new life into the world.
Point two: ‘the kingdom of God has come near.’ This newness, this fulfilment which is emerging from the womb of history, has a name. It is the kingdom of God. It is God’s life that is coming into the world; it is pressing down on the staleness, the stuckness of the world, bearing down on the weary assumption that nothing changes, that what we have is all we get. But the world does not renew itself; the initiative comes from elsewhere. We do not organise God or his Kingdom; Jesus is telling us to be attentive to an action that is not our own. Notice what you haven’t noticed, says Jesus, and decide what you are going to do about it.
What to do comes in the next word: ‘repent’. This makes sense only in the context of what Jesus has just been saying. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom is close. ‘Repent’ (in Greek, turn your mind around, renew your thinking) means ‘recognise these things and let that recognition change your life.’ Jesus is asking us to live fully aware of what is happening, the coming-close of God, the newness of the kingdom. If we live in that awareness, our lives will be changed.
Fourth point: ‘believe in the good news.’ The good news is what we have just been told: the time is at hand, the kingdom is near. If we hear that and trust it, we already believe. There is no more believing to be done. We have felt the kingdom pressing close; we trust God to bring the new to birth. That is all the believing that Jesus asks of us.
It all sounds very simple; perhaps suspiciously simple. But in one sense it really is. Jesus is not preaching an abstruse creed. He does not ask us to pass an examination in theology before we begin. He starts from a truth in the world: the truth of his own being, of his presence among us. What he asks is that we should look.
If we took this message seriously, what difference would it make now, for us? First point: ‘the time is fulfilled’ shifts faith from intellectual speculation—can we beat Richard Dawkins?—to the world of happenings. It changes our sense of history, from ‘one damn thing after another’ to the possibility that newness and fulfilment, God’s kingdom, can be born from it. It changes the sense of our own lives, so that they too can come to fulfilment, as the life of God frames and resolves all the mess and gives meaning to what we are.
Second point: ‘the kingdom has come near’. This tells us two things: first, that it is God who takes the initiative; and, second, that he has already acted. Jesus is talking about himself. This kingdom that has come near is not an abstraction or a system, but a person, and that person is before us in the world. We know that person, we already live with the closeness of the kingdom. Our task is not to inch toward some unknown future, but to open ourselves to what is already before us. Here is a discipline for Lent: not the struggle to force ourselves into a new mould, but the quietness, the openness, that will allow us to know how close the kingdom already is.
Third point: ‘repent.’ Allow your mind to be changed. This is difficult; our minds are well set on what they are already sure of. But if time can be fulfilled, if the kingdom can come close, your mind will be changed, you will think and act from a new centre. You will still make mistakes, but they will be the mistakes of someone who is thinking in the right direction.
Fourth point: ‘believe in the gospel.’ The Greek word, pistevete, really means ‘trust.’ Trust what you have seen, in God’s engagement with history, in his approach to his world in Jesus Christ, in whatever freshness and transformation you have know in your own life. Trust that; live from what you have, and that is all the believing that Jesus asks of you.
So: hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark: ‘the time is fulfilled, the kingdom has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.’ This is the gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
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