Epiphany III

Epiphany III (Mark 1: 14-20)

Repent and believe the Good News

Good news seldom sells.

Bad news not only sells it can be used to instill fear and manipulate people.

There was an abundance of bad news in the religion of the first century. Most if not all of the sects of Judaism taught that the purpose of religion was to help people avoid God’s wrath and earn God’s favor.

The means to accomplish this was the Law. It was based on the Ten Commandments as well as the 606 additional laws Moses recorded during his lifetime. It was expanded by religious scholars to a large complicated system of thousands and thousands of rules and regulations.

That kind of a system required religious lawyers to interpret the law, religious courts to make judgments, religions police to enforce and an all-encompassing council, the Sanhedrin, to administer the system. The religion of the day said: follow these laws and we guarantee God will give you good things. Break these laws and we will punish you to administer God’s wrath. The great fear in law based religion is that if the righteous fail to punish the unrighteous then God’s wrath will fall on them as well.

Jesus never disputed the holiness of the law. He also never said: follow these laws in order to gain God’s favor and avoid God’s wrath. Jesus had a very different message: follow me.

This message is the Good News that God is real, God is personal, God is love, God is Jesus Christ. It is a unique message. No other prophet or religious teacher has said this. They speak of following a law, a set of spiritual disciplines or a pattern of rituals. Only Jesus says: follow me. Only Jesus says: repent and believe the Good News.

The Good News is the real presence of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.

The bad news, from which we need to repent, is the human tendency to create God in our own image. The Bible describes two basic results from this choice. One is a religion of rigid, inflexible uncompromising beliefs and laws. The other is the lack of all standards, boundaries and structures. What these approaches share in common is the erosion of civility, kindness and compassion in society as a result of the assertion of self-will through pride.

Jesus offers a different way. It is the middle way of grace through faith in love.

It is the way that invites us to give up our demands and fears and judgments by entering into a personal relationship with the living God.

In the context of that personal relationship the law becomes a tutor and a guide. Our focus is on using the law in union with the Holy Spirit to discern where we need to seek divine help to transform our particular sins back into their original virtues. The Good News liberates. The bad news enslaves.

The Good News helps us to grow, transform and build. The bad news gives us permission to judge, condemn and destroy.  The Kingdom of God is a set of relationships we create and nurture in union with God.

The Kingdom of God is not something we impose by law and by force. As we grow into the Kingdom by grace through faith we become the change people long for and thirst for.

People came to Jesus because he told them the Good News that God is universal unconditional love. People followed Jesus because he showed them a new way of living in relationship with God and other people. People received the gift of Jesus as they came to understand that Jesus is the real presence of God reaching out to all people everywhere with the Good News that God is with us and God is for us.

Jesus asks us today to surrender judgment and condemnation of others as well as ourselves. Jesus asks us to receive the reality of God as Good News for us and for all people everywhere.