“The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” (Mark 1:15) With these words, the Lord Jesus began his messianic mission to redeem the human race from sin and death, and so from the beginning, constant conversion from sin by fidelity to the revealed Word of God has been a requirement for all Christian discipleship.
This Thursday the Church keeps the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, an event which serves as a model of all authentic Christian faith and life. Recall that Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious man who had devoted his entire life to the study of the Torah under the finest teachers in Jerusalem, and his zeal for keeping the precepts of the Lord was second to none.
It was these very qualities which ironically made Saul the most ruthless and efficient persecutor of the first Christians, and in one of the most chilling scenes in the New Testament, Saul watched with approval as Deacon Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death because of his faith that Jesus Christ is Lord.
With a commission from the Temple authorities, Saul set out for Damascus to arrest Christians because many disciples had fled there to escape persecution in Jerusalem. But on the Damascus Road the Lord Jesus revealed himself to Saul and changed the direction of his life, and in that moment, Saul of Tarsus began his transformation into the Apostle Paul, teacher of the nations. In Saul’s encounter with the Risen Lord, the new disciple experienced with great urgency the truth announced by Christ at the beginning of his public ministry: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
From the time of Abraham, the call to conversion and fidelity to the Word of God has been at the heart of divine revelation and the experience of all true religion, and in the first lesson today we hear the Prophet Jonah announcing to the pagan Assyrians of Nineveh that divine judgment awaits those who will not repent.
Because of the urgency of Jonah’s warning, the people of Nineveh did turn away from their corruption, and that same urgency is heard in Saint Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians in today’s second lesson: “I tell you, brethren, the time is running out … for the world in its present form is passing away.” (1 Corinthians 7:29, 31)
But not everyone is willing to hear or heed that urgent appeal, and too many baptized Christians do not live according to the grace of their Baptism because they will not repent of their sins and believe in the Gospel. They may be sincere in their convictions, as was Saul, and they may consider themselves upright people, as did Saul, but until and unless they have received the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith through constant conversion of heart and mind, they are in truth closer to being baptized pagans rather than authentic disciples of the Lord Jesus. Without repentance and saving faith in Christ, the new life of grace would not have begun in Saul, who would then never have become the Apostle Paul.
We all know that there is chaos, fragmentation, and incoherence in the Church today, and many people offer that as an excuse not to repent. And we are right to lament the lukewarmness or outright infidelity of so many who claim to follow Christ but do so only on their own terms, including not a few of the Church’s pastors. But this condition is nothing new in the Church, and we can learn that fact from Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians from which we read today.
Paul founded the Church in Corinth and spent a year and a half there teaching the Gospel and organizing that community to live as faithful disciples of the Lord Jesus. But a few years after he left Corinth, Paul received word while he was in Ephesus that the Corinthian Christians were divided among themselves and fighting over questions that are to us both old and new.
Who has authority to teach, how should we worship together, what does the Gospel require of husbands and wives, what is the nature of our obligations to the poor, how should men and women relate to one another and avoid sexual immorality, and what does the eternal destiny of our resurrected bodies teach us about the dignity of bodily life now. Sound familiar?
Starting last week and continuing until the Sunday before Lent, the second lesson at each Sunday Mass is from First Corinthians, and so this is a good time to read and study all of that letter in the search to understand more deeply what it means for us to repent and believe in the Gospel. And please note that the first dimension of Christ’s call to conversion is found in the order of the verbs: repent and believe.
Many people who hear the Word of God think that if only they could come to believe it is true, then they might be willing to change their minds and their lives. But that is to get the call to conversion backwards. Only when we are willing to change our minds and lives, or better to allow the Lord to change them for us by his grace, only then do we find that we can believe the Gospel is the supernatural gift of divine revelation which tells the full story of our origin, purpose, and fall and of God’s eternal plan and promise for our redemption and salvation.
Repent and believe. Not believe and repent. But one consequence of our Fall from God’s grace is our reluctance to repent or even to admit that our sins are sins. In truth, we like our sins. We cherish and nurture them. We insist that they are part of our true selves and that anyone who calls us to repentance is assaulting our autonomy and denying our absolute right to self-determination.
But the Lord Jesus teaches that anyone who sins is a slave to sin, and Christ died to liberate us from sin and death. For freedom Christ set us free, and so the path to authentic faith begins with a willingness to be changed from the inside out. Christ says to us: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)
So, if repentance must come before belief and if urgent warnings are not enough to move most of us even to a desire to be changed, what can? Well, several things. Longing for love. World weariness. Sin sadness. Emotional exhaustion. Existential boredom. Despair in suffering. Fear of eternal solitude. Yearning for transcendence. Desire for beauty that never fades or ends. And hope for everlasting life and perfect happiness.
Friends, until we know the living God by faith, hope, and love, something is always missing in our lives, an insight expressed succinctly by Saint Augustine who confessed to the Lord: “you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Saul left Jerusalem for Damascus with a commission to arrest and torture the disciples of the Lord Jesus, but along the way he received a new commission from the living God, the Great Commission to preach the Gospel to all nations. As we read today from Saint Mark, that is the very mission given by Christ to Simon, Andrew, James, and John whom the Lord made fishers of men, and we also share in that same commission by the grace of our Baptism.
Sadly, we know that millions of our baptized brothers and sisters in the Church have not accepted or understood that call to be missionary disciples and have settled instead for the false religion of cultural catholicism as a set of rituals and a disputed moral code based on family custom or institutional habit rather than on personal conviction and conversion.
But that sort of spiritual mediocrity always leaves human hearts restless, and so in their restlessness we have an opportunity to help those who are lost to hear and believe the Gospel and be changed by grace through faith to know, love, and serve the living God. But we can do that only if we have already been changed ourselves by the Risen Lord through personal conviction and conversion.
Without any trace of arrogance or self-righteousness and ever mindful of our own constant need for God’s mercy through continuing conversion from our sins, we must bear witness to the saving truth of divine revelation, above all by the way we live and treat other people, so that all the world will know that Jesus Christ is Lord. And that is why we must always shape our lives by the urgent proclamation of the Divine Redeemer of the world: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
This is the text of my homily for the Third Sunday of the Year at Saint Mary’s Greenville, South Carolina.
Fr Jay Scott Newman