The Good News Translation, which is my favorite of the more colloquial or paraphrase-ish translations, failed me. For in tonight’s passage, instead of repent, it says turn away from your sins. Admittedly that’s a very common understanding of the word repent. It short changes Repent, which means so much more than that.

More accurately translated repent means a change of mind or heart, a foundational change of all your ways, not just the sinful ones. Or, to connect it to our theme for the year, it means dying to your old ways to be reborn into Christ.

And in fact it’s rather clearly illustrated by the calling stories that follow. Peter, Andrew, James and John drop what they’re doing, leave their whole life behind and follow Jesus. James and John even leave their father behind in the boat, possibly without saying a word.

These are rather dramatic and shocking stories, somewhat mitigated by Mark’s tendency for brevity and immediacy in his storytelling. But that literary technique is, I believe illustrative of the full impact of repentance.

I used to think of repentance as this horrible overwhelming sorrowful guilt. If being a Christin means wallowing in that state of mind, it’s neither good news nor the Kingdom of Heaven. Christian death is the way to freedom, to leaving fear and ties to a normal life behind. Christian death is the way to life, the life that God wants for us. Follow Christ and let the dead bury the dead as Jesus said.  

And this is what the first called apostles did. I got hung up on the “I will make you fishers of men” bit, though. If that were said to me, I’d probably pass. It’s interesting to note however, that we don’t know what Jesus said to James and John. I’d like to imagine it was something different. Sort of like how Paul describes the many different gifts of the spirit.

Then again perhaps being fishers of men does not appeal because of the excesses of Evangelicals who want to collect as many converts as they can to the point of ignoring almost anything else Jesus said. Do I want to talk about Jesus and spread some good news? Yes, but not on such a way that I’m trying to coerce anyone.

One of the things I do want to tell people about is the kingdom of God. I want people to know it’s not a place you go after your physical death, it’s where you go here on earth after your Christian death. It’s living as God desires for us to live.

Mark’s Gospel emphasizes that wealth, power, and status do not belong in this Kingdom, in this new life. These are the empty promises of the American Dream. We are called to leave that dream behind as James and John left their father behind in the boat.

Quite frankly these days America has become my Nineveh. I’m so angry about how we got to the place we are now. I blame pretty much everyone including the apathetic, the left that refuse to see the difference between the candidates, the people who argued with me over the technicality of definition of hate speech, the people pushing back against the Me Too hashtag. And like Jonah, I don’t want God to show this country any mercy.

 And all those things are fuel for righteous anger, but anger is no longer righteous when there isn’t any room for God’s mercy. That difference between righteous and unrighteous anger is what I need to be working on this Lent. I’ll need to find the part of it that I need to leave behind in the boat that I need to die to.

And I invite us all to similar work this Lent. Let’s not wallow in our guilt, but rather think long and hard about the things we need to leave behind in the boat. About our ways that don’t belong in the Kingdom of Heaven whether they are sins or not.