Change of Heart and Mind (3rd Sunday Ordinary B)

One Sunday afternoon, a wife was startled with what she was seeing at home. Her husband was all geared up repainting their house!

“Honey, what are you doing?”  She asked rather tentatively.

“Well, you see, I’m painting our house.”  

“I can see that.  But why? I mean, why this sudden decision to repaint?”

“Well, I figured the preacher at the Church this morning made sense. Don’t you agree with what he said?”

“What part?”

“How could you miss that! He kept on repeating his point: ‘Repaint! The Kingdom of God is at hand!’”

We do have a sense of the imperative to prepare when we are expecting important and great events to come to pass.  Often we tend to bring our full attention to things external to us, keeping them spick and span as much as possible.  Maybe because that’s easier.  But we are missing the point.  We don’t see that what need real change are ourselves and not the color of our walls.  This is all the more true in our social life; we can easily point an accusing finger to others as if to say that there is nothing wrong with us and everything has got to be their fault.  Often we uncritically take it for granted that we are fine; it’s them who need a lot of changing to do.

Today’s readings zero in on the urgent call to repentance.  We may do well to look within us this time and open our hearts to the invitation to a real change in our lives.   

The call to repentance is an invitation to a change of heart and mind. There’s a lot in this line. In the first reading (Jon 3: 1-5, 10), we hear the story of Jonah who was sent by God to the enormous city of Nineveh in order to warn them of an impending destruction.  The Ninevites, who were considered enemies by the Israelites, believed in God and responded to Jonah’s call with penance, fasting, and mortification (v. 5).   Thus, the Lord extended forgiveness to these people as they had manifested what the Lord wished to see, a change of heart.

No matter what our past is, we can find favour with God when He sees our resolve to change our ways. 

The gospel reading (Mk. 1:14-20), allows us to understand what this repentance really means and show us how we can truly change.  The word for repentance in Greek is metanoia which means change of heart and mind. This is not cosmetic change which deals only with the superficial. This is neither selective change which allows only one or more aspects of ourselves, a bad habit for instance, to change and all the rest remain to constitute the same old unhappy self.  

Jesus said, “Repent, and believe in the gospel” (v. 15).  This means two movements: One is to turn away from sin.  “Sin,” in the singular, represents not just one sinful act, but everything that it stands for, in a word, the rejection of God’s love and the mindset and structures that support such a rejection.  This radical turning away is only possible when we embrace the second movement which is the turning toward God.  This means embracing the gospel of love. 

Existentially, we can even say that the turning toward God and his love is the first impulse of change.  Only when we experience and realize first the great value of God’s love and the incomparable joy that the Good News brings that we are empowered to leave behind whatever we have gotten used to as our way of life in this imperfect world. That means, in simple terms, that we abhor our sinful ways only when we discover first the beauty of God’s love.

The first disciples of the Lord were fishermen (v. 16-20).  Fishing was their means of living. They surely lived in such a world—the mindset and value system of fishermen.  But they decided to leave this world behind, the world they were very familiar with, only because the Lord manifested to them a far greater value, a better world where they would no longer be catching fish... but men and women for the Kingdom of God.

In the best-selling Seven Habits of Effective People, Steven Covey’s presentation of his concept of “paradigm shifts” resonates well with the gospel’s radical change of heart and mind. Paradigms are models of our worldviews.  We think and act, or even feel, according to this encompassing mould or map.  Real change happens when we finally change our paradigms.  Covey explains that “if you want to make small improvements, work on your behaviour and attitudes; if you want to make major improvements, shift your paradigm.”

Hence, we can see the call to repentance as an invitation to a paradigm shift in our lives.  Real change happens when we decide with God’s grace to put on the worldview of the gospel and leave behind the seemingly attractive way of life espoused by this sinful world.  Once we do that, our lives, like those of the first disciple of Christ, will never be the same again.

Again, today’s readings invite us to a real change in our lives.  But nothing really changes in us when what we can dare are only the cosmetic and selective changes.  We need to have the courage to surrender ourselves to God’s grace so that we can have a change of heart and mind. The call to repentance can well be our invitation to take a leap from one paradigm to another—from the paradigm of sin to the paradigm of God’s grace.