Mark 1:14-15- After John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee preaching the Message of God: “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.”
Jesus, apparently, hit the ground running. And that’s what I think it is imperative for any human to see. Jesus may or may not have known, probably did, the repercussions of the message he had to tell. It was a message that would allow the people who heard it to “go around” the high priests on their way to interaction with God. And that was guaranteed trouble. Thus, I believe Jesus felt a sense of urgency about his mission.
And he acted on that sense of urgency! That what separates some of us from the rest of us: acting on that which we know needs to be done. It is easy to delude ourselves, no matter how important we may sense our mission is, to believe that there is always another day, or that we need to plan more, or that it’s just not the right time yet.
Jesus could have laid low and bought himself at least another couple of years. He could have done a better job of planning, and left behind more than just a few disciples whose names we remember. Or he could have left the Roman Empire to rot a little longer from within, or watched the priests begin to topple under the weight of their own power.
But he did none of those things. “Time’s up! God’s Kingdom is here!”
His life was lived in a way not unlike that of the artist who feels compelled to tell in paint or words or music the truths that he or she perceives. The artist knows that no one else can tell that particular truth and, despite the fact that they will never be able to execute it in exactly the way they would like to, proceeds to begin anyway. “The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make it.” (Simone Weil, French essayist and member of the Resistance)
Perhaps the greatest thing I can sacrificially give up during Lent, is the misbegotten delusion I share with most other humans, that I have all the time in the world. Perhaps one of the great things we miss in studying Jesus is that he lived urgently- in the knowledge that all things do come to an end.
