Epiphany III B [Mark 1:14-20] (21-Jan-2017)

This sermon was preached at St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Maryborough, 8.15am, and Grace Lutheran Church, Childers, 10.30am.

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

There’s a place in John’s Gospel where we read that John the Baptist has been baptising, and some of John’s disciples come up to him and tell him that many people have stopped following him and now they are following Jesus instead. It’s almost like they think that John would be annoyed by it—John has been pointing to Jesus and preaching about him, and now people are following Jesus and not listening to John anymore. But John is not upset by this, and he tells them that he is only the friend of the bridegroom, but Jesus is the bridegroom himself. And he says: He must increase, but I must decrease.

It’s as if we were at a wedding reception, and everyone is waiting for the bride and groom to arrive, and in the meantime the MC—the Master of Ceremonies—is talking, and then all of sudden, they arrive. And the MC tells everyone to stand up and welcome the wedding party and the bride and groom. The MC is not the important person anymore, the bride and groom are. When we remember back on our life, and think about all the weddings we might have been to, we eventually forget who the MCs were at the weddings, we might even forget who the best man was and the matron of honour. But we don’t forget who is was that actually got married! And so John the Baptist uses the same picture. He says to them that he is only the bridegroom’s friend, like the MC or the best man. But Jesus himself is the bridegroom.

And so in our reading today we read that Jesus begins his ministry of preaching the Gospel. Jesus has been baptised, and straight after that he went out into the wilderness and was tempted by Satan. But now he comes back, and he begins his ministry. But the reading says: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God. It says that John was arrested. John had had a very fruitful ministry, and he got into trouble for it, and so he was arrested. And it’s at this time, when John was arrested, that Jesus begins his ministry. John has done his job in the whole scheme of things, and now Jesus takes over. In fact, John the Baptist is completely taken out of the picture.

And so Jesus says: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.

Jesus says: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. It’s as if he’s telling people that everything has now happened in the right order, and everything that has taken place has taken place. John has prepared the way of the Lord, he has been a voice crying in the wilderness, but now his ministry is finished. Now the time is right, and your Messiah is here. It’s also as if Jesus also says: There won’t be another Messiah, or another Saviour, sometime later in history. If you miss me, you won’t get another one. Here I am, now is the right time, and the God’s kingdom is right here with you because I am with you. So listen to me, and pay attention to what I have to say.

And so what does Jesus say? He says: Repent and believe the Gospel. These words that Jesus says here give a little summary of everything that Jesus says, and also a kind of summary of everything in the bible. Jesus speaks to us two words, two messages that go together. He tells people to repent. And also he tells them to believe. And he doesn’t simply tell them to believe anything, or simply to believe in him, but to believe a particular word that he is speaking to them. He calls them to believe the Gospel.

What Jesus is doing here is preaching the Law of God, and the Gospel of God. God’s law is God’s holy word and the Gospel is God’s holy word. The law of God is good, and the Gospel is also good. When Jesus says: Repent, this is a great and wonderful thing. When he says: Believe the gospel, this is also a great and wonderful thing.

But the law and the Gospel do completely different things, and they have a completely different effect on us. The Law of God is God’s perfect will, and it teaches us what God expects of us, and what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. We could summarise God’s law with the 10 Commandments. God’s law tells us to love God with all our heart and all our mind and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It’s a wonderful message and a powerful message.

But we human beings fell into sin, and we read that each of us are sinners and we are conceived and born in sin. What this means is that when we hear the preaching of the law, we realise that we have already broken it. Even though God’s law is a wonderful message which shows us how we should lead our lives and how the world and society should work, we realise that it condemns us. When the law is preached, it kills us and leads us to despair.

And so Jesus says: Repent. “Repent” means to turn around or change our mind. It’s as if Jesus comes to us and whatever stage of life we are at, whether we are young or old, and he says to us: Whatever life you have been leading until this point is simply not good enough. You must live your life at a higher standard that what you have been living previously. What you have done before has been bad, and you must now do good. If you think you have done good, you must do better. Whatever a kind of life you live now, you need to know that you must change, and you must become a completely different person to what you are now, and you must act completely differently, you must speak differently, you must think differently. Everything must change. This is what Jesus says when he says: Repent.

God says in Jeremiah: Is not my word like a fire and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? When Jesus goes out and preaches repentance, he is pouring fire out on the people’s hearts, he is smashing their stony hearts. Because what God’s law expects of us is not the same thing as what we might expect of ourselves, or our parents expected of us. God’s law is completely above and beyond our tiniest ability or capacity to fulfil, because it is so perfect, and we are not even the slightest bit close to perfect. Even our individual thoughts are all completely corrupted by sin, and before we have even tried to fulfil God’s word, we have already failed, and we have already done less what than what God’s expects of us.

And so we might say the same thing that Isaiah said when he saw his wonderful vision of the Son of God sitting on the throne and the angels singing all around. He said: Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the LORD of hosts! And so we say to God: I was wrong, and you are right.

But now, Jesus has a completely different message to speak. It is so different to the law, that if we never heard the Gospel, we would never have imagined that such a thing were possible. Every religion has laws and rules and commandments, and basically tells people what they should do or not do. Jesus all tells people what they should do or not do, but he sharpens the standard in such a way that we can’t escape, and we can’t excuse ourselves, we can’t rely on scholars or good lawyers to get ourselves out of trouble. We must completely despair of ourselves of any hope to save ourselves. And so this is where the second thing comes in: and this is called the Gospel. Jesus says: Repent, and believe the Gospel.

The Gospel does not show us what we should do or not do, but it shows us our Saviour who has done everything for us. Jesus, the Son of God, has entered into the world, he has taken on human flesh, he has lived a human life like us. And now, Jesus will suffer and die for the sin of the world, he will make an atonement and a payment with his own blood for every single sin that has ever been imagined, so that when we simply look at him and believe in him, all our failures in keeping the law are completely washed over, our bill has been paid in full, the victory has been won over Satan so that he can’t accuse us anymore, we are completely free from the chains of failure and despair and disappointment, because we have a Saviour who has entered the world, a Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, who has died for us, risen for us, and loves us.

This is the Gospel, and this is the message that is completely different from the first message that Jesus preaches. When Jesus preaches repentance, or when he preaches God’s law, it is like a laser beam which searches us out and finds us. The Law doesn’t make us sinners, but it finds sinners, and when it does, it kills us. But then he says: Believe the Gospel. This is a completely different message, because it creates something completely new. The Gospel doesn’t find any saints, but it makes and creates people into holy people, not because they have earned it, or deserved it, but because Jesus has done everything for them, and now they slate has been completely wiped clean. They are completely pure and holy, not because they are pure and holy because of what they have done, but because of what Jesus has done for them. When God looks at us, all of sudden there is Jesus standing with us, with his hand around our shoulder and he says: It’s OK. This person is with me. Jesus’ blood and his righteousness and his holiness completely cover us over, and it covers over all our sin and shame and failure. This is good news! And that’s what the word “gospel” means: it means good news.

Now, these words of Jesus, Repent and believe in the Gospel, are so incredibly helpful, because the whole bible could be divided up into these two things. When Jesus went out preaching, there’s a sense in which Mark is saying that Jesus was preaching all kinds of things, and speaking about all kinds of things from Moses and the prophets before him. But he was dividing up everything in a very sharp way, and focussing everything, so that things very intensely clear. And so when we read the bible, we should ask ourselves the question: Is this passage law or Gospel? If it is law, then where is this passage calling me to repent? Where is it calling me to acknowledge what I have done wrong? How is this passage calling me to change my life? But then there is another message in the bible: the gospel. So we should then ask: Does this passage show me my Saviour? What is this passage calling me as a lost sinner to believe?

You see, when Jesus calls us to faith, just as he does in our reading today, that faith is always a faith in God’s word. Some people might say: but it’s not faith in God’s word that saves us, but faith in Jesus that saves us. But that’s only half true. Sure, Jesus is our Saviour, and he is the one who has done everything for us in history to save us from sin, from hell and from the devil, and to bring us to eternal life with him. But how do we know this? And how would we know it if Jesus hadn’t said anything? Jesus is not a Saviour who keeps his mouth shut. He is a Saviour who speaks, who calls, who invites, who preaches, who blesses. And so in our reading, our Saviour speaks. And as our Saviour he gives us a wonderful gift: he gives us the gift of the Gospel, the completely free forgiveness of every single on our sins. But the way in which he gives it to us is by speaking it to us, and when we believe this word, we receive this gift from him completely and totally freely, without anything that we have done or anything that can contribute. He calls us to trust in his word, and particularly to believe in the Gospel.

Now, we might also say: When Jesus tells us to believe, isn’t he also expecting something of us again? Isn’t he telling us to do something? Isn’t he telling us to use our own efforts to believe in him and to trust in him? Not at all. That would be like as if someone gave someone else a Christmas present, and they were about to open it and they said: Hang on—you can only have this present on one condition… that you take it and open it! Of course, the person would take it and open it! What’s the point of having a present, if you can’t take it? But then it would be like the person going to their friend and says: Thanks for the present, and also I’d like to thank myself for making the effort of taking it from you and opening it. The person giving the present would think their friend was mad!

But also, remember Jesus went to a deaf person and said: Be opened! And they were opened! The deaf person made no effort, but as soon as Jesus spoke this word to them, they could hear! Jesus went to Lazarus when he was dead in the tomb for four days. And Jesus said to him: Lazarus, come out! The word of Jesus was powerful to raise him from the dead. Lazarus didn’t make any contribution! He was dead.

So you can see, when Jesus says: Repent, he knows us flat, his word lays us in the dust of death. But then Jesus has another word, just for dead people, and only for dead people. He says: Believe the gospel. And this word has all the power in it to make us alive. Nothing depends on us, everything depends on him.

Now in the second part of our reading. We read that Jesus goes and calls some fishermen. He calls Simon and Andrew who were brothers. And then he also calls James and John, who were also brothers. And we read that they immediately left their nets in the boats, and followed Jesus. And Jesus says to them: Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.

It’s an amazing thing that Jesus calls a group of fishermen. He doesn’t go first of all to a university and choose his first disciples from the greatest and brightest minds of the day. By the way, that doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t value intelligent and learned people: after all, he also called Paul to be an apostle, who was a highly educated man. He calls different people for different purposes. But when Paul was called to be an apostle, who were his fellow workers? A bunch of fishermen. And Jesus calls a group of simple hard-working fishermen to show us that the power of God belongs to him, and to the Holy Spirit. The Gospel is for all people, and it is a simple message. And Jesus is happy to have a simple group of fishermen as his preachers, because he wants to show the world that the power of the Gospel is not in human beings, and in grand and lofty talk, but the power of the Gospel comes from the Holy Spirit. So that when one of these fishermen talks, like Peter or John or James or Andrew, by the power of the Holy Spirit, they can lay flat all the wisdom of the world. In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says: Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

And so how were these fishermen going to become fishers of men? What did they do that would enable them to catch people? They would do it in exactly the same way that Jesus caught them, by preaching law and Gospel, by preaching repentance and faith, exactly as we were talking about before. And this is exactly what we read about at the end of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus had risen from the dead, and he meets with his disciples, and we read: Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. So what was the thing they had to preach? Jesus said: Repentance, and the forgiveness of sins. This is exactly what Jesus was saying earlier in our reading when he said: Repent and believe in the Gospel. And so here is the net, here’s the means by which people are caught, and drawn out of the wide-open sea, and brought into the kingdom of Jesus. These words are the fishing tools which catch people.

And so it’s a wonderful gift for us that we have been caught. And Jesus continually calls us to repent, and believe the Gospel. And it is also a wonderful thing to be equipped with Jesus’ own tools, so that we as a congregation, and I as a pastor, and all of us as individual Christians living wherever God has placed us in the world, know how it is that Jesus catches people, so that we can also join those fishermen in drawing others to Jesus not by own power, but with Jesus’ words, and with his power and the power of the Holy Spirit. So let’s thank our Saviour, Jesus, for the wonderful gift of the gospel which he has given to us, and which he still speaks to us today, the message of his death and resurrection, and the words which give to us the free forgiveness of every single one of our sins, and promise us the wonderful gift of eternal life with him. Amen.

Dear Jesus, we thank you for calling us to repent and to believe the Gospel. Continue to work a wonderful change in our lives, but also keep our eyes fixed on what you have done for us, and in your word of promise. Amen.