REFLECTIONS ON THE READINGS

FOR THE THIRD SUNDAY OF THE YEAR, CYCLE B

Jonah 3:1-5, 10;  Psalm 24:4-5,6,7b-9; 

1 Corinthians 7:29-31;  Mark 1:14-20

Within all our scripture readings for today there is a sense of compelling urgency, of living at a ‘make or break’ time:  a real ‘kairos moment’.  “Kairos”  is the Greek word Mark uses in his gospel, translated here as “time”: ”The time has come.”  The deliberate use of such a word denotes a particular, significant point in time:  here, the time of salvation – and of judgement.  For Mark, the Kingdom of God was the central theme of Jesus’ teaching.  Here he says that this kingdom is “close at hand”.  The Aramaic phrase (which Jesus would have used) underlying the Greek phrase used by Mark is better translated as “the kingship of God’”, i.e. the rule of God, which is both present and future.  The evangelists see something of it embodied already in the person of Jesus, who is obedient to God and who confronts us with the challenge to share his obedience.

Jonah’s mission was to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, a military power that cast its shadow of fear across the entire Near East.  For Jonah, this was the equivalent of Berlin of the Third Reich.  Jonah’s God-given task was significant in pointing to salvation for others outside the house of Israel.  Jonah, a persistently reluctant prophet, not only refused God’s call but went to enormous extremes, to the very brink of death itself, so as to run away from it.  But God does not let him go – both the Ninevites and Jonah are given an opportunity by this patient God to turn back to Him, for He is the God who, as Jonah petulantly goes on to say, is “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in graciousness, relenting from evil”’  (Jonah 4:2).  It is another urgent, ‘kairos moment’.

There is the same note of urgency in Psalm 24, which stresses the speaker’s sense of having sinned and of the deep need to know how to return to God’s “ways”.  He goes on to say: “relieve the anguish of my heart and set me free from my distress” – the distress of having “wantonly” deserted God’s “paths”.  This cry from the human heart to the heart of God, reminds God of the covenant, the relationship of love, that He has with His people.  Once again, there is an echo as in Jonah, of  “a God of tenderness and compassion”.  In this psalm, the three themes of forgiveness, guidance and protection are woven together and constantly appear.

Paul, writing to the new Christians in Corinth, has a strong sense of living in ‘the last times’.  “Our time is growing short”, he says.  It is, indeed, another ‘kairos moment’:  “the world as we know it is passing away”.  Paul has a strong sense of the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming.  This helps us understand the strangeness of the recommendations he makes in his message to the Corinthians in today’s reading.

Living in 2012, we may have lost that sense of imminence, but the call to “repent, and believe the Good News” and live our lives according to the  “ways” of God remains real and urgent.  We have to recognise our own ‘kairos moment’.  Jonah’s message of the need to turn, return to God, to make Him the centre of our lives, is to us, too.  Significantly, the Book of Jonah is read in the synagogue as one of the readings for Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement, a day with which Jesus, as a faithful Jew, would have been so familiar.

Sr Margaret Shepherd nds

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