God's Gospel Claim on Us - The Third Sunday after The Epiphany

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on January 21, 2024, the Third Sunday after The Epiphany.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” This Gospel proclamation is the very first speech act Jesus makes in Mark, first thing we hear him say. These first words that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom has come near are an interruption, the announcement of a regime change, an official pronouncement of God’s favor. Claiming, saving, redeeming love is breaking into the world in the person of this Jesus, who walks along the shore, and calls ordinary people to leave their nets and follow him.

We’re still in the first chapter of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, According to Mark here, and it’s a world-changing announcement. Rowan Williams writes that ‘Evangelion’ or ‘Gospel’ as a genre is an official proclamation, “a message about something that alters the climate in which people live, changing the politics and the possibilities; it transforms the landscape of social life.” (Williams, Meeting God in Mark, p.6). He renders the first verse of our passage today this way:

“After John had been handed over for imprisonment, Jesus went into Galilee announcing the official proclamation about God. The time has arrived, he said, the rule of God has come close, change your minds. Trust this proclamation.” 

He continues, “It sounds odd when we strip away some of the familiar vocabulary of our translations, but something like this would have been what people heard when they didn’t have two thousand years of Christian reading behind them. It’s an announcement that God is taking over. And so the reader is warned from the very first verse of Mark’s Gospel that she or he must look and listen in the Gospel for all the things that change the state of affairs in the world. This is going to be a book about change, a book about how the world came to look different, under different management. … This is about how a particular person’s life altered the shape of what was possible for you and me, the readers.” (p. 7-8).

Walking by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus’s proclamation comes to Simon, Andrew, James and John and interrupts their business as usual, changing the shape of their lives as they knew them. They are not their own anymore: they have been claimed by this strange man who both announces and enacts the coming-nearness of the kingdom of God, drawing people along in his wake. The disciples do seem to be drawn, the call that breaks in is magnetic, it has its own pull; rather, the person who calls them also draws them. “I will draw all the world to myself” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, and the disciples then and now are scooped up after him, drawn by God’s desire to love us and free us from all that has held us captive. “Repent, change your minds. The kingdom of God has come near.”

Jesus passes along the shore and calls these two sets of fishermen brothers. We only hear his words, not any back and forth here, just the proclamation of God’s kingdom and enactment of the reign of God. Jesus himself is the compelling catalyst of action. The disciples are drawn not by any miracles or proofs or wonders but simply by Jesus’s person. Simply through the fact that Jesus claims them and calls them. Jesus goes fishing and draws them out of the water—they’ve been reeled in! Pulled in despite themselves to what is most real and beautiful. He calls Simon, Andrew, James and John, these ordinary, rough and tumble people, with no particular qualifications. We’ll see they misunderstand Jesus at every turn. They are sinners in need of forgiveness, just like the rest of us. We can follow him, too. He calls us, too. Claims us, pursues us, desires us, and delights in us like prize fish.

So the Gospel proclamation is a claiming call. God is pursuing us, calling us out of our boats where we find ourselves tangled up in the fishing nets. Simon and Andrew immediately leave their nets to follow Jesus. And James and John immediately leave their father’s boat where they’ve been mending the fishing nets. The nets are left behind as they answer the magnetic, irresistible call. Grace passing along the shore in human form. What nets are threaded through our hands? What bad stories are we living by? What are each of our habitual ways of trying to capture ourselves, our neighbors and the world, tangled and thrashing, in a confining story of how we think we are supposed to be and how we think everyone and everything else is supposed to be? What net am I casting over experience today? These nets can’t stand up to reality, and when the real rips free, do we rejoice at this release from captivity? Mmm, usually we try to mend our nets, craft a better and more compelling story to contain and strain out what we want from the unwieldy vastness of the sea of experience. The interrupting good news call to follow Jesus is also a call to drop your nets. When they break open, can we let them fall rather than put them back together again? Again and again, we will find the nets back in our hands—the disciples are rather bumbling the whole way through, after all—and we turn again to Jesus who is still calling, “Follow me.”

God’s call is staking a claim, on us and on all the world. Jesus’s summons is not a summons to try harder or do more or simply to imitate him but a pronouncement, a proclamation that the kingdom has come near, has come near to us, you and me, in the very real pain and tumult of our lives as they are. That we are named and loved, sealed as Christ’s own forever, that there is a stronghold, a rock and a refuge in the midst of all of the present forms that are passing away. “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand,” as the hymn says. The one sure thing is the divine love that pursues us, calls us, that goes into the dark with us and ahead of us, making a way through where we see no way.

From Williams again: “Mark is writing into the life of communities experiencing fear and disorientation. There are no shortage of parallel situations today in our world” very real individual sufferings and our communal struggles, including the terror and cruelty of war. Mark is “writing to reinforce a faith in the God who does not step down from heaven to solve problems but who is already in the heart of the world, holding the suffering and the pain in himself and transforming it by the sheer indestructible energy of his mercy.” (p. 46-47). The sheer indestructible energy of his mercy. That’s the magnetic force drawing the disciples along after him, I think. And the call comes to me and to you, still. The sheer indestructible world-changing energy of God’s mercy. Calling us to repent, to let our tangled nets fall and let Jesus draw us along in his wake, trailing mercy in his wings.

Gospel freedom is pronounced upon us. Proclaimed, as the Word like the dayspring from on high breaks upon us. God enacts the kingdom come near, and we are a listening people, the work of repentance done by the Holy Spirit in us as we hear the call and let grace tend to all the wounded places in need of the oil of healing and gladness. Our hearts are mended and tended to, and then we’re sent out to search for lost with Jesus, made “fishers of people”, sharing the world-changing proclamation in our own voice, our own register and dialect, pointing our neighbors and our enemies alike to the one who has come to draw the whole world to himself. “Repent, and believe the Good News.”

Amen.