Jesus Is From the Future.

Mark 1:14-20

January 21, 2018

I.

Jesus is from the future.  Not that he is a time-traveler in the sense of science fiction.  He doesn’t have a souped-up Delorean stashed in a cave somewhere.  Jesus is from the future in the sense that he embodies the fulfillment of human nature.  We’re on the way to that fulfillment; he’s already there.  He reveals our destiny.  His story is a big spoiler, ending the suspense about the end of creation and the purpose of human life.  News-flash: it’s love.

When he begins his ministry he makes this proclamation: “the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near.”  He means that our time of waiting is over.  God’s Kingdom is really happening now, all around us.  “The time is fulfilled;” the end of time, the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom, has been brought into the living present.  That’s what “the time is fulfilled” says; it means that he makes eternity, the consummation of God’s ultimate plan and purpose for creation, available to us now.  As Paul says in Second Corinthians, “Now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation.”  Jesus Christ is by nature the realization now of what God intends for all humans to be, by grace.  

Jesus declares God’s Kingdom, this realm — order, commonwealth, or reign — this Way of living together in justice and peace — to be “near.”  That is, available and real now.  It is closer to us than we are to ourselves.  He calls on us to live today in the presence of the One who is to come.  How shows us our future and invites us to step into it.

Having the New Testament is kind of like having access to the last page of history, the page where everything comes together, and the point of the whole story is revealed.  We know how history turns out.  We know that God wins, which is to say that love, compassion, equality, peace, justice, grace, and forgiveness triumph.  Life always wins in the end.  Always.    

This means that what Jesus teaches is not one optional timeline among many.  He is saying that this is what life is really about, this is where life is going, this is how the story ends.  He is showing us the final chapter and offering us an opportunity to dwell together in this ultimate reality.  He is showing us how the game ends and who wins; begging the question of why we would bet our lives on the team that certainly loses.  

He is at the same time warning us that to continue to exist in the ego-centric world, to keep putting all our chips on greed, gluttony, envy, fear, anger, and the other divisive, selfish, violent, adversarial sins, is suicide.  Racism, nationalism, militarism, sexism, inequality, hatred, condemnation and everything else that dominates our world but which we see not a trace of in Jesus?  They’re all going down.  They’re all doomed.  They’re all finished.  Trust in them at your peril.  Invest in them and you will perish with them.

II.

When he says, “Repent and believe,” he means that we have to change our ways of thinking and acting so we start perceiving from the infinitely broader perspective of this fulfilled time, the certain future in which everything comes together.  It means trusting in him and his vision of wholeness, justice, shalom, and light.  The more we trust, the more we see.  The more we live now in this future, the closer this future comes for all.  

And that becomes the content of his ministry as he heals, liberates, welcomes all, teaches, and eventually gives his own life for the life of the world.  He is witnessing to and revealing this world of fulfilled time, where there is no more disease, no more oppression, no more violence, no more division, and no more hostility between people.  In the end, he says, we are all one in him.

Unfortunately, this will not be a simple, straightforward, gradual, linear process in which things just keep getting better.  The process of repentance and belief is a halting, back-and-forth, up-and-down, three-steps-forward-and-two-steps-back strenuous journey over harsh terrain.  So when he calls these fishers as his first disciples, they may imagine this is going to be a triumphal march to Jerusalem where Jesus gets to be the new king and they get installed as his top advisors and inner circle.  But what he is really calling them to is far more problematic and ambiguous.  He is calling them to give up their whole lives the same way they leave their boats and nets on the beach.  

Realizing Jesus’ fulfilled time here and now is not an easy thing.  It’s not like you wake up and you stay there.  You may wake up… but then you fall back into unconsciousness.  You partially wake up, and don’t know where you are.  Most common and most dangerously, you think you’re awake, you convince yourself that you are seeing clearly, you’re sure you have it all together as a faithful, saved Christian… while in reality you’re still only dreaming in the same broken, unfulfilled time, the time of fear and anger, the time of enemies and retribution, the time of winners and beaten.  Too many people are living not in Jesus’ fulfilled time but in “Christian” time, in which we are just another group fighting for market-share and claiming to be better than others.  

This is where people who imagine themselves to be fully-formed Christians still commit horrible acts of injustice and depravity.  Christianity can still be just another exclusive religion, just another self-serving, self-righteous label, just another group in competition with other groups, just another social club with hierarchies and insiders, gatekeepers and enforcers of the rules.

But the proof that we are living in fulfilled time is repentance and faith.  That is, if we truly see and act in the Way of Jesus Christ, which is to say with love and forgiveness for all, with humility and generosity, and without cynicism, violence, inequality, or fear, then we are in the fulfilled time of his Kingdom.  Fulfilled time is for losers, because only they can be filled with God’s eternity.

This is what Jesus is calling these four men to.  This is what following him means: in every area of their lives they are to lose themselves and all that keeps them tied down in the slavery to their old ego-centric selves.

III.    

Many of us may remember the song we sang as kids in Sunday School, of which the refrain was, “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men, I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.”  And there were accompanying actions mimicking casting and reeling with a fishing pole.  This passage was often interpreted as a kind of anticipation of the Great Commission, with Jesus calling these disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations.  And that works, on one level.  

But in the Hebrew Scriptures the idea of “fishing for people” is not so benign.  Jeremiah (16:16), Amos (4:2), and Ezekiel (29:4) all use the image in terms of judgment on powerful evildoers like Pharaoh or others “who oppress the poor and crush the needy.”  God hooks them and it is not so pretty.  We can at least wonder if Jesus isn’t calling these men to something much more disruptive than happily winning souls for Christ. 

Most likely, as with much of Scripture, the answer is both/and.  The Word of God is a two-edged sword.  It cuts both ways.  It lifts up the lowly and empowers the powerless; and at the same time it brings down those in high places and sends the rich away empty.  It goes into all nations to baptize and make disciples; and at the same time it separates the wheat from the chaff, burning the latter with unquenchable fire.  Both movements are important; we don’t have one without the other.

Just as we have to break free as individuals of the tyranny of our own ego, so also on a larger scale we have also to see the downfall of tyrants in our social and political world.  But these fall not by our self-righteous vindictive violence, but by the careful, patient formation of new alternative communities based on the values of Jesus’ fulfilled time.  God plants little islands of honesty, forgiveness, acceptance, and courage, and eventually self-important leaders are rendered irrelevant.  We live in the future Christ brings, in which these rulers are already irrelevant.

If people reject greed, violence, and lies, the institutions that maintain the present darkness will collapse.  Jesus calls for and institutes new communities, new families, new economies, and new relationships, all based on the fulfilled time of God’s Kingdom.  Hence these fishers opt out of the economy dominated by Rome, in which they basically had to pay the emperor for the fish they worked to pull out of a lake the emperor claimed as his own.  Instead, they choose the poverty, simplicity, contentment, and the obedience of discipleship.  

Imagine if everyone at least started living each day in selfless, open-hearted, non-acquisitive ways.  Imagine if competition and ambition evaporated as defining values in our lives.  Empires would fall.  That’s why Rome and their clients in Judea conspired against Jesus.  If people become free, it’s all over for these rulers.  Pharaoh falls when people decide to stop making bricks for him.

IV.

“I will make you fish for people,” says Jesus.  Just as they gather fish together and draw them from the murky depths of the lake up into the light of day, so now they will, as disciples of Jesus, gather people together and draw them up from the darkness of a violent and fearful world into the present light of God’s coming Kingdom.  Of course, the fish die in the process.  And so do the people, in the sense that we also have to die to our old selves.  And here is where the analogy breaks down: instead of being sold for food like fish, humans who are drawn out of the darkness awaken to a life they never knew enough to dare to hope for.

That life is the life of the future, when God is all in all.  That is the life we are called to live in the church.  We are the people of God’s fulfilled time, living today the life of the world to come.

+++++++