The prophet Jonah is truly not thrilled with the idea of going to Nineveh – a pagan city – to do the Lord’s bidding. He is sure his message, Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed, will fall on deaf ears and actually he’s fine with that. Jonah can’t conceive that God would give this enemy people the opportunity to repent, yet repent they do, and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth and turn away from their evil ways and toward the Lord. It is a striking moment of metanoia in a completely unexpected place and time, resulting in the great gift of God’s mercy. The Ninevites have opened to the ways of the Lord described in Psalm 25: from a state of distance from God, they seek to bridge that gap and accept the call to repentance, so that they might receive forgiveness. Guide me in your truth, the psalmist sings, that I might turn to you, O Lord – another reference to the metanoia to which we are all called.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus comes to Galilee to proclaim: The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Jesus, the manifestation of the kingdom of God’s rule, comes to call people to metanoia, so that God can rule their hearts. This is the time of fulfillment, Jesus says: his presence is the fulfillment of God’s promises, and something about him causes the fishermen Simon and Andrew, James and John, to abandon their nets and follow him. They too abandon their way of life in a radical moment of metanoia, a complete shift of how they see themselves and the world, a new sense of what is important. Paul asks the Corinthians to focus on what is important as well: not this world and its activity, but God’s activity, what God is doing in them. Like them, we too are to participate differently, focused on where the Lord is leading us. For those who have wives to act as not having them is to love past this world and its expectations, to have a new vision, to see life as a new life of possibilities.
We are all called to metanoia, to a radical change that comes of repentance of our past ways and embrace of God’s ways. That change is for this moment, now, not for the future, not for the past: metanoia takes place in the here and now. Like all of the figures in today’s readings, we too can know radical change, radical transformation, so long as we let go of what has been and what will be and embrace the will of God in this moment, always.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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