🦁 Epiphany 3-👑

Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 ; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20. 

From the TRNG Room:

Reflection

Welcome to first forward Advanced, spiritual scriptural insight for grunts and anyone who does ministry with grunts. Those are you listening have know that the sun readings I reflect on and I just kind of get straight to it. I don't go through all the readings. There's sometimes four or even five different passages or Perich Abbeys that you might choose from, and so it would just take too long. I also don't do prayers on Sundays because I assume your church, your congregation, your flock has their own set of prayers. This is more about understanding the marshal undertones that are present in Scripture and the Sunday readings. So for the third Sunday after epiphany, we are in ordinary time and our readings for year, be the year of Mark, come to us from Jonah three verses one through five and ten, Psalm 62, verses five through 12, first Corinthians seven versus 29 to 31. And finally the gospel of Mark chapter one verses 14 through 20. The reading from Jonah is unfortunately split up verses one through five, have Jonah going out to the city and then six through nine, which are omitted from the lectionary texts are admitted. But it's basically what the king and the people do in response and likewise or not likewise. Our other major reading from the Gospel of Mark also has something similar there. And I'm going to be talking about the prophetic kind of invisible string between Jonah and Mark, and you might not have caught it if you aren't into biblical languages like Greek and Hebrew. But Jonah essentially is told by God to go to Nineveh, which is the capital city of the Assyrians, who will or who have depending on when Jonah was written or when you think John was written, who have destroyed the northern tribes and have continued to be a threat even to the southern tribe, the southern kingdom of Judah. And so he's saying, go to your enemy, go to the most dangerous place you can think of the capital city of your more powerful enemy. And tell them or say to them for me, 40 days more Nineveh shall be overthrown. And so Nineveh, which is thought to be the city of Mosul and many of post-9-11 vets have probably been stationed there or have passed through there. I spent some time at Camp Diamondback twice in my rotation 2004 and back in the day it was very was an interesting FOB forward operating base. And so these ancient texts have something to say to us as well, and they touch us even in our own modern context. And so Jonah, as a prophet, is known as someone who is a very reluctant person, he runs away from God, is swallowed up by the fish, and is eventually kind of taken there. And he has to finally do it. And the verse that's that was left in verse ten is a a I'll say a slight repeat of the of verses six through nine, but six through nine they're just a couple of verses. I'll go ahead and read them. The word reads The king of Nineveh. So the the emperor, the ruler of Assyria and he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself in sackcloth and sat in ashes. Then he goes on verse seven, makes a decree and tells all of the aristocrats, Everybody do the same. Don't, don't drink water or eat food. We're going to have a fast and be and cover yourself in sackcloth. And everyone in verse eight turned from his evil way and from the violence that in his that is in his hands and it goes on. The king is still speaking in verse nine. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.

So you can think of the king of Assyria or the king of Nineveh, as, you know, just being really practical, like, Oh shit, there's a foreign god and this guy thinks we're going to perish. I don't want to perish. So let's do what he says. Let's clothe ourself in sackcloth, you know, straight pragmatism, right? It's not about pride. You know, if you have nothing to lose and all you have to do to avert destruction is to walk around a little uncomfortable sackcloth and dry ashes and, you know, you won't be destroyed. Let's do it. The the cost is makes, you know, the benefit of doing it makes the cost worthwhile. It doesn't have to be about humility. It doesn't have to be about strategy or arrogance or domestic interests. And he doesn't address everybody addresses his Royal court and the ESV he addresses by decreeing decree of the king and his nobles. And so the economics are kind of kind of screwy, right? But I read those verses. I kind of focused on them because in verses eight and nine are an important kind of like allusion to verse ten and in verse ten, we do hear in the lectionary when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Now, I heard that, and I thought it interesting their undoing, or they're turning around from something. And that made me think of the definition of melancholia, which is what Mark brings into it in, I believe John's in the mouth of John.

I'm sorry. No, John has already preached his baptism of repentance. Now Jesus is taking up John's mantle in Galilee after John is arrested and Jesus begins to proclaim the good news of God. According to John, which is the Thames fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news. Repent is melancholia. And there's that turning of like circling around or doubling back or undoing that caught my little, you know, cut my ear. And sure enough, I looked up Jonah in the Greek, in the Septuagint and verses nine and verse ten turned from his evil way in verse eight, Jonah three eight doesn't have Malinois. It's Apple apostrophe, I think, which is like apostrophe, and that's the turning. But when the ESV uses the word relent, that is matano wayo, which is the root verb or the root, you know, it's cognate with melancholia. It is. It's just passed differently. Anyway. So this relent appears again in verse ten God saw within then innovates did how they turned from their evil way. Apostrophe God relented met in oyo of the disaster that he had said he would do to them. And so this melancholia, this repenting or relenting is the through line between Jonah and Mark and John and Jesus are both prophets in any kind of way you can define it. And Jonah obviously is. And it's important to see where these things happen in the Old Testament and what they do in Jonah God relented. The king of Assyria, of Nineveh, expected or hoped that God would relent or repent. So the idea when we put like, you know, when we use words like repent, I hear that often as a veteran, as a Christian veteran, because I'm supposed to repent of the bad stuff I did in Iraq and I can count on one hand how many of those things I think were actually bad and needed. I did repent of, but the vast majority of my service is boring or exemplary. Like I think we did some good things. So as a veteran, I'm very familiar with this idea of repenting and it's tied almost 1 to 1 to sin as though some sin has been committed that then has to be forgiven or absolved, or you need to like stop sinning. But that isn't that isn't exactly the way the Septuagint and therefore John and Jesus understood this term, met in Oyo, were met in Oyo and John, and Jesus was been speaking Aramaic, but they would have had the Greek Septuagint that we don't know of any Aramaic copies, and we don't even have any Hebrew copies of the Hebrew scriptures as old as we do the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures. So when I say that they had the Greeks up to again, are they this is the idea they had in mind by, you know, they certainly spoke Aramaic. They would have been familiar with Greek to be having any kind of real conversation about the Bible. They didn't have to be fluent in it, but it would have been one of the the most central kind of copies, for lack of a better word. And so I say that to name that repenting is not necessarily something that's done wrong. Right. It's not that the invites were supposed to meet in a way, so it's that God was expected to met in Oyo if something else was done first. And so the I think the word relent is a little bit more helpful because of the kind of baggage that evangelical Christianity has put on repentance, and especially, again, in the military kind of mind frame, like, you know, we don't have to be Catholic to be of to be expected to, like, feel guilt about everything we've done. Sometimes it's evangelical Christianity that does that.

But I like the word relent better because it it doesn't have to be some moral event that is being turned from. Right. You know, the nine invites don't there's no suggestion in the text and then invites that God was doing something wrong. It's just, oh, I hope who knows? I think is what the text says. I'm not looking at it right now. Maybe God will do this thing or maybe this. There God will relent from this thing that is planned or anticipated. And so it's more something to do with changing your plans or changing your habits than it is like stopping from doing something evil. When John and Jesus become part of the prophetic nature of their task is they're saying, look, everything you know is changed. You need to change with it. You need to relent in your old ways. You need to understand the world as God made it is changing. And maybe the world isn't like relenting, but like if you persist in your ways, that is the opposite of relenting. Don't persist in your ways. The the Kingdom of God is near the you know, the 40 days proverbially are here. If we're thinking of Jonah, things are going to change. You need to stop doing what you're doing. You need to not persist any longer in what you've been doing because something around you has changed. And if you don't change with it, or if you don't see the change that's coming as Nineveh, the king of Nineveh did, you're going to be overthrown, you're going to be torn down or you're going to miss heaven or whatever. You know, metaphor is most helpful. And so not only is that the through line, as I said, I think it's important to critically examine what we do when we expect people to repent with a p e And I think relenting is a better word here as the Old Testament used. But, you know, A don't think that every soldier has killed, as I said, in God as a grunt because we haven't, and also layoff the assumption that we need to repent in the military because it's so much more than just the worst parts of what service entails. So tone down the repentance and maybe even think of this word Netanya in a slightly different way. It doesn't mean a turning and doesn't mean a turning around, but we need to be careful what we moralize. Whether what we moralize is our words or what we moralize is our soldiers and veterans. We need to just quit it.