Jonah 3:1-5 (NRSV Updated Edition)
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
Mark 1:14-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Now after John was arrested, 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.”
~
"So [Jesus] comes to this place and he proclaims the good news of God. Now this does not mean the good news 'according to God', it means the good news that *is* God. God as good news. This is, if you like, that which is going to take us, all of us, the rest of our lives to unpack: the good news that is God, that God is good news. What does this 'good news-ness' of God ... sound like, what does this look like? How is this lived by any of us? Well, one of the things about it is that the terminology 'the good news' comes from Isaiah. ... There are a number of references [in Isaiah] to ... 'the bearer of good news' and this is something that is absolutely central, because what Jesus is saying is [that it is] this Isaian vision of God as good news that is now being instantiated in your midst, and that I'm telling you about. This is now happening - the good news of God.
"Now, here our Jonah passage, our first reading is actually very helpful because it gives us, if you like, how not to do this. Jonah is a wonderful story because it's someone who is told to go and say something that he doesn't want to say. Why? In the book of Jonah God tells Jonah to go and preach conversion to the people of Nineveh and Jonah really doesn't want to go. Why? Because he knows that if God is sending him to preach the good news to enemy it really means that God likes the people of Nineveh and wants to be able to set them free from all the hardness of heart and difficulty and awfulness of their lives. And he, Jonah, doesn't like them, he really doesn't want the people [to repent], he longs for them to be punished. ... And as he arrives in Nineveh, preaching the word of God, he finds that they were already starting to repent, ... and it says “and they believed God.”
"And here's the thing: what the Hebrews understood and what's difficult for us to understand is that believing in God and being penitent amount to the same thing. Why? Because God likes us. This is the central thing which is difficult. If you like somebody, you long for them to be able to be penitent, you long for them to be able to have their hearts stretched open so they can become more. If you dislike somebody, what you want them to do is to close down evermore, to double down into their hardness of heart and become if you like more and more stuck in ruts that will lead to their self-destruction. If you like someone, they become penitent. If you like someone they're able to relax in your liking them and their hearts are able to be broken and become open and so be able to be stretched into ways of peace, things that are good for them and for each other. This was what Jonah knew: he knew that if God likes someone he helps make you penitent. ...
"So here Jesus is saying, “the good news of God.” The good news of God is: God likes you. He likes us. Therefore he's making it possible for us to become penitent. These two phrases he's saying: “the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near.” So he's saying all of that Isaiah stuff about the good news coming in, all of that is being fulfilled. The text of Isaiah is absolutely fundamental ... in terms of the shape of God's good news coming into the world. Jesus is going to be constantly re-enacting and fulfilling Isaiah. ... “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near.” So, the time when God is going to be able to reign, thus making it possible for us to live together. This is what is possible for somebody who likes us: humans being able to live peaceable together, collaborating, learning how to help each other. The one who makes that possible is the one who's bearing God's liking of us. That's good news.
"And then he says, “Repent and believe in the good news.” ... The one who's going to make it possible for you to be able to do this is coming in. That in fact is what he, the Son, is going to be doing, [he] is going to make penitence possible for us. That's the whole point of him coming in and going up to his death - not to judge us, but to make it possible for us to see the kind of things we're doing and be forgiven from it, so that we can learn to collaborate without destroying each other. This is the program of someone who likes us: repent and believe the good news. What's the good news? The good news is God, the utterly Living One, the One who is not out to get us, not trying to punish us, not come to judge us, has come to make it possible for us to learn how to live together, for God's kingship to be brought alive amongst us."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMHWh3-VO1Q)
~
"Let me in conclusion revert to the simple narrative mode of the Gospel. Jesus is the human face of God and he calls us to live with him and allow that cohabitation to reform our social selves into our true selves. Repentance is the leaving behind of the old self; belief is the entrustment to Jesus. Repent, believe and follow me – the old, traditional and true moment of our Christian Gospel.
"This all stands to reason. Many of us know with vivid certainty how the people we loved and lived with made us who we are; more precisely perhaps, not so much that we loved them but that they loved us, loved and continue to love us. I am convinced that the heart of the divine creative grace is the marvellous experience that somebody loves me. I am loved into being. Who can’t see that the saddest most destructive people are those who have never been loved?
"Where can I be sure to find such love to make me me? Use your imagination, meditate on the Gospel, and be with Jesus. Imaginatively being in relationship with him will activate your receptors of his life-giving love. “Jesus loves me, this I know, Because the Bible tells me so.” This is the truth about leadership, and discipleship; all unspoiled human existence, and good citizenship too, must be and is a friendship of love."
- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from sermon delivered on January 25, 2009 (source no longer available online)
[Source of Robert Hamerton-Kelly quote, and for discussion and reflections on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/epiphany3b/]
No comments:
Post a Comment