JESUS IN THE IMPERATIVE
REPENT AND BELIEVE
Text: Mark 1:14-17

We have in these four short phrases the essence of the message of Jesus:

The time is ripe,
and the kingdom of God is near;
Repent, turn,
and believe in the good news.

It is a perfect balance of the indicative - - what God is doing - - and the imperative - - what we are to do. The indicative is always the foundation of the imperative, but the imperative must always be there. As Richard Hays once wrote:

The Imperative Mood is the very warp
on which the sacred pattern of humanity is woven: tamper with these
strong Imperative threads and the
whole web must ravel.

Half the church fancies the indicative and shies away from the imperative. The other half pounds the imperative - - you must, you must, you must - - and forgets the indicative, the grace of God that sets it all in motion.

Jesus’ message is of sturdy cloth, indicative and imperative its warp and woof. Mark captures it in the four phrases we now investigate.

I

“ The time is fulfilled.” I like to translate it, “The time is ripe.”

It’s kairos-time - - fulness of time time. It is also a time of crisis, which in the greek word krisis means a time of momentous decision. Buechner says one meaning of the phrase is “the time is up.” The time is up on the old way of doing things. Like the time is up for Abramov and his cronies and their way of betraying the public trust. Like the time is up when the web of secrets with which we live is torn apart - - and now, if we wish, we can live in truth and light and new freedom.

Jesus proclaimed that we live at the turn of the ages. History as we know it was coming to an end. Buechner says:

If he meant that the world was
literally coming to an end back
there in the first century A.D.,
then insofar as he was human, he
was humanly wrong. But if he
meant that the world is always
coming to an end, if he
meant that we carry within us the
seeds of our own destruction no less than the
Roman and Jewish worlds of his day...
then of course he was absolutely
right.1

The time is ripe. God is ready to remake your life and remake the world. Can you see it? It is harvest time and there’s no time to waste. Seize the day! Carpe diem!

II

The second indicative follows swiftly from the first: “The kingdom of God is at hand.” The kingdom of God is near.

Basileia tou theou. The reign of God, the rule of God, God’s movement. It defies simple definition because it is the kingdom of God, not something of ours.

Some like to confine it in personal terms: Personal transformation. Others confine it to social or political transformation. But the kingdom of God is uncontainable, unconfinable.

It is personal. “The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus said. It is oneness with God and with your own true self. It is social and communal - - about community and neighborliness. It is political, how we care for the order of things, towns, cities and nations. And it is ecological - - how we care for creation and God’s whole earth.

I tend, we tend, to define the kingdom of God in terms convenient for us - - so that it means change for others, but not for us. Beware, said Samuel Johnson, of those who want to change the world but are uninterested in changing themselves.

In Jesus’ teaching the kingdom of God is meant for earth, not just heaven. This world not just the world to come. That’s why Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”

Matthew’s gospel has inadvertently led us astray. In his Jewish reverence for the name of God Matthew substitutes “kingdom of heaven” for “kingdom of God”, so creating a misreading of Jesus. The kingdom of God Jesus meant for earth has been confined to heaven, something for the next world, not this one. We’ve turned daily bread into pieces into “pie in the sky by and by”, simple justice into streets of gold.

The great Howard Thurman, mentor to Dr. King, wrote in his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited:

Many and varied are the interpretations
dealing with the teachings and the
life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these
interpretations deal with what the
teachings and the life of Jesus
have to say to those who stand,
at a moment in human history, with their
backs against the wall.
To those who need profound
succor and strength to enable
them to live in the present
with dignity and creativity,
Christianity often has been
sterile and of little avail.
The conventional Christian word
is muffled, confused and vague.2

Tell it, Dr. Thurman! Jesus’ message was not muffled, confused and vague.

The time is ripe,
and the kingdom of God is at hand;
Repent, turn
and believe in the good news.

And it was unmuffled, unconfused, and unvague enough to get him killed.

Wendell Berry likes to translate the phrase “kingdom of God” as “The Great Economy. The Great Economy includes everything: “The fall of every sparrow is a significant event.”3 In the Great Economy we all belong to one another. We are held together in the mystery of God. In the Great Economy everything we do is of consequence. Therefore it imposes upon us, to use Berry’s own words, “an extremity of seriousness and an extremity of humility.”4 So Jesus preached the kingdom of God. (Our religion is too often unserious and far from humble.)

The kingdom of God is the realm when God’s spirit and our spirit merge.
The kingdom of God is what God is making of our lives, relationships, communities and nations.
The kingdom of God is what life on earth would be like if God were on the throne, not us guys.
“The time is ripe, and the kingdom of God is at hand”: With these two bracing indicatives Jesus turns now to the imperatives. The kingdom of God is near. But it is here, only inasmuch as we receive it.

Anne Lamott tells the rabbinic story. A rabbi always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put scripture on their hearts. Someone asked, “Why on our hearts and not in them?” The rabbi replied, “Only God can put the Scriptures inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”5
Life has a way of breaking our hearts. Maybe that is when the time is ripe for us and the kingdom of God draws near. Maybe that is a prerequisite for “repent” - -the breaking of the heart.
So Jesus offers two imperatives - - what we must do from the human side, if we are to enter into what God is doing, and let it enter us.

III

First, “Repent, turn.” The greek word is metanoia, a changed mind, a remaking of the way we know, see, think, live. But the great Hebrew word for repentance is the verb shuv, meaning to turn, or re-turn to God our maker, savior, redeemer.

We have messed up the word “Repent,”scumming it up with sweaty guilt and toxic shame. “Repent”, as we’ve been taught it, means we’ve gotten caught in our sin and now come crawling forth. No wonder we cringe at the word. Sometimes sin is part of the equation - - ways we harm others and ourselves. And we turn from what harms and diminishes us and damages the world. But “repent, turn” means much more than that. It is a turning to God, the source of life! It is plugging into life at its fullest.

Can we then decontaminate the word “repent”? Detach it from people who use it to try to get you to change into what they want you to be? The real issue is to change as God wants you to change and as you most need to change in order for you to be the person God made you to be. And only you, you alone with your God can know what that is. Other people can help, but finally the turning is yours, baby, and yours alone.

When Rilke the poet looked at a piece of sculpture, the archaic torso of Apollo, the stunning beauty of the piece conveyed this message to him, “You must change your life.”

Sometimes that life-altering message comes when we meet beauty, truth, goodness or love as never before. Sometimes it comes when we meet a person who lets us see what it means to be what God made us to be.

That is what happened when people met Jesus and heard, “Follow me.”

Repent, turn! I think it should sound like trumpets over the canyon at dawn, not like the church organ at full tremelo playing the 51st verse of “Just As I Am.”
It should feel like a new beginning. And it should feel like rest. As Hebrew scriptures say:

In returning (shuv) and rest you shall be saved
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
(Isaiah 30:15)

The turning, if it is of God, should come from a quiet place, not a noisy place.

The noisy place is where all the voices of the world shout their advice to you: Do this! Do that! The quiet place is the inner sanctum where God’s spirit speaks, and the words “Change your life” become the most welcome words you ever heard. And it is there, in that inner sanctum, where you begin to get vision of what this change might look like, a holy visualization of what might be.

 IV

The last phrase is “Believe in the good news.” It is not enough to believe in anything. This is believing in what feels like the best news in the world, believing in what God’s goodness and mercy are doing.

I said last week that believing is what joins your life with another’s life. Believing is as Deuteronomy says, Loving the Land, obeying his voice and cleaving to God (Deuteronomy 30:20). It is a joining of your life with God’s life in the world.

It is what Jesus called us to when he said, “Follow me.”

“Believe in the good news” finally circles back to “The kingdom of God is near.” I love how Buechner puts what Jesus was saying in today’s text:

What he seems to be saying is that
the kingdom of God is the time, or
a time beyond time, when it
will no longer be humans in their
lunacy who are in charge of the
world but God in his mercy
who will be in charge of the world.
It’s the time above all else for
wild rejoicing - - like getting out
of jail, like being cured of cancer,
like finally, at long last, coming
home. And it is at hand, Jesus
says.6

I used to think that the kingdom of God was going down the aisle of a Billy Graham Crusade. Then I thought it was doing my best to be a good person. Then I thought it was freedom marches and the Civil Rights Act, the end of the war in Vietnam, women’s rights, a living wage. Then I thought it was individuation and psychological integration. Then I thought it was mystical union with God. Then I thought you had to choose; it was one or the other. Then I realized Jesus wouldn’t let me choose. It is all that, he says, and more! What more? I ask. Just wait and see, he says.

The time is ripe,
and the kingdom of God is near;
Repent, turn
and believe in the good news.

1 Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (N.Y.: Harper San Francisco, 1992), p. 164.
2 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), p.11.
3 Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2002), p. 220.
4 Ibid., pp. 220-221.
5 Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (N.Y.: Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 73.
6 Buechner, op.cit., p. 165.