By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Jan. 21, 2024)
Welcome back everyone to the spring term. I've been at Harvard for 18 years. I came as a student, a master's degree student in 2005. And I have to tell you that I think last term was the most difficult of my time here. I know many of you have been here longer than me, I guess many of you would say the same. And if I'm being honest, events over the break have not made me feel much better. And if I'm honest, as we approach this new term, I'm feeling sadness and uncertainty and apprehension.
As we begin the term, so also begins Jesus's ministry in the gospel of Mark today. This calling of these disciples into uncertainty. That line at the beginning of the passage is so important. John, whose message is the same as Jesus's has just been arrested. John, who says the same thing that Jesus means to say has just been taken. And this is the uncertainty and the apprehension and the sadness in which Jesus begins his ministry, in which he begins to offer his message, John's message. And what is that message? "Repent." Jesus says, "For the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near."
What that sounds like is, repent because we are just at the cusp of some moment, a moment you'll want to be ready for. Repent, because if you're not prepared for what comes next, you're going to get it. Repent, because some apocalyptic moment of wrath is just around the corner, and unless you repent, you'll be sorry. That is the traditional interpretation of this passage, of this message of repentance. And maybe it's the most obvious one, but I think it's wrong. I'll get to why I think it's wrong, but first, let me turn to Jonah, the passage from the prophet Jonah that Elizabeth read. Jonah's a famous prophet, a story many of us know, Jonah swallowed into the belly of the whale. Jonah who did not want to prophesy and God made Jonah do it. And it makes sense that we would have this reading on a Sunday when we're talking about repentance because we see the Ninevites repent. Even the animals we're told in sackcloth and ash, everyone fasting.
But really the book of Jonah is not about the Ninevites' repentance. So Nineveh was the capital of the Neo Assyrian empire. And at the time of the prophet, Jonah Assyria was in the process of conquering and overtaking the kingdoms of Northern Israel. Jonah was from one of the northern tribes. By the time this book had been written, the Neo Assyrians had overtaken all of Northern Israel. Those tribes had been scattered, the people taken to Nineveh. Jonah hates the Ninevites. We know the story about the whale, but the reason Jonah says he was reluctant to go prophesy to the Ninevites, what he tells us is that "I knew that if they listened to me, God would relent and not punish them." Jonah says, "I did not want to go prophesy to them because I was afraid that they might be shown mercy and I wanted them to suffer."
But God grabs him with a whale and sends him back to Nineveh. And after he does this, he walks through the streets and tells everyone to repent. And to his surprise and disappointment, the King does repent and the city repents. And Jonah goes up on a hill and he sits overlooking in the hill in the chapters after these verses, and he waits, hopeful to see the destruction of the city and he gets very upset because God doesn't do it. At the end of the book of Jonah, God comes to Jonah and says to the prophet, "I created every person in that city and every animal. Shouldn't I care for them? How can you ask me to do otherwise?"
So let me turn back to Jesus and his message of repentance this morning. Because I don't think it is about sack cloth and ash. I don't think it is about self mortification or self-abasement in order that we might avoid some imminent or impending moment of wrath and destruction. Because look closely at the language that Jesus uses when he calls his hearers to repent. He says, "The time is fulfilled." Not, it is almost fulfilled. It is already complete, the time is now.
And when he says "The Kingdom of God has come near." This is kind of a quirk of the Greek language, but this verb, this version, this tense, the present perfect tense of the verb come near, in the Greek actually means has already arrived, is present. It's not almost here, it's not just around the corner. It's right here and right now, the time has already arrived. The time is already complete. The Kingdom of God is already with you. It's not about the world to come, it's about this world. And it's not about getting right with God before the moment of crisis. Jesus is saying, this is the moment of crisis. God is here now. Repent. God is here now right next to you in this moment. Repent.
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So what does that mean, if not sackcloth and ashes? What does repentance mean? So in the Hebrew, the language that Jonah would've been using, the Hebrew word for repentance is teshuva, and that just means turn. And in the ancient Hebrew sense, it meant turn to God, turn away from other things and turn back to God. The Greek word which is used in the New Testament here is metanoia, which means, it's a little less dramatic than turn, but it means change your mind. Literally, it means think differently about things.
And this is the repentance, this idea of turning and changing your mind. This is the repentance that Jesus calls good news, not sack cloth and ash, but something else. Because the good news is that God is right here, right now. God is not around the corner. God lives in this world, in this broken world, rather than in some other world to come. Like Jonah, it's not about repentance. It's not about avoiding some punishment in the future. It's about responding to others in this sacred present. It's about realizing that God is with the broken person right next to you. Even if that person is an enemy, even if that person is a Ninevite, and realizing that God is with that person next to you, even if they're an enemy, even if they are a Ninevite, that changes everything. It changes your mind. It makes you think differently. Because if it is true that God is with the one next to you, then you need to change your mind about who they are and about how they deserve to be treated.
Repentance, turning to God, doesn't mean turning away from this world because of the threat of some world to come. It doesn't mean turning away from your neighbor or turning away from your enemy like Jonah wanted to do through so much of the book of Jonah. It means turning toward them. Another way to say what Jesus is saying when Jesus says repent because it's right next to you, is to say, love your neighbor
Or more dramatically love your enemy. These teachings that form so much of Jesus's ethical teachings, love your neighbor, love your enemy. They're not just moral niceties, they follow from his fundamental teachings about who God is and where God is. Because God is next to you here and now. God is next to you in these pews. God is sleeping on the sidewalk in the square, this frigid morning. God is wasting away in our prisons in this country. And we can raise the moral and political stakes and I can be more pointed. God is with the hostage you hold, God is with the family you bomb, and bomb again, and again, and again.
Jesus is asking us to turn toward God, which means to turn to toward your neighbor, turn toward your enemy. Because when you do, if you see a child of God there you will be changed and your actions will be changed as well. I'm not a professor of politics, or policy, or of international relations. I'm just a lowly professor of Christian morals. And I'll acknowledge that these teachings love your neighbor, love your enemy, may seem pie eyed and fanciful at best. Impractical and insane at worst.
Love your enemy? Have you seen what they've done? How could we love our enemy? Or love your neighbor? How could we love our neighbor when they sympathize with that enemy, that awful, awful enemy? How can this teaching, love your neighbor, love your enemy, how can this be good news? It can't be good news. How could it be good news? But have you read the actual news, the news, the accounts of the horrors unfolding around us in this world? There is not much that seems less sane than what is unfolding in our world today. Not much. That seems less fanciful than the idea that what is unfolding will end in anything other than tragic calamity. Maybe it's time we turned to one another and to God. Maybe it's time we changed and repented.