Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand – Mt 4:17
We are at the very beginning of Jesus' public life.This was immediately after his baptism in Jordan and his forty-day fast in the desert. From the very beginning, Jesus is threatened with persecution. Therefore, he goes to the northern tip of Galilee, to the lands that earliest fell away from the unity of God's people, hence most plunged into religious ignorance and unbelief. The people who lived there were practically pagan. So, the Evangelist, in the coming of the Lord Jesus to these people, saw the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy: " The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; Upon those who lived in a land of gloom a light has shone." (Is 9:1)
Notice: the people sitting in darkness saw a great light. So, it was not that they were looking for the Lord God and found Him. It is God Himself who came to them to illuminate their lives with His light and to bring them liberation. This is why Christianity came into existence as a religion. After all, Christianity exists not because over the course of generations we have managed to accumulate all the treasures of the highest spiritual wisdom. Christianity exists because God, in his love for us, has given us his own Son. We were sitting in the darkness of sin and the darkness of death, and we would not have found God by our own strength. We, who are far from God, He was the first to look for us.
Jesus was the first to come to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali to preach the Good News of God's Kingdom to those people whose hope was close to the horizon of death. But once the brightness of His teaching and His presence began to illuminate these lands, many individuals make their own decisions to draw closer to Jesus. They began to gather around Him to hear His teaching and began to bring their sick people to Him so that they could experience His power.
This is the logic of our faith and our path to God. God loved us first and even gave us his own Son as Savior, and He somehow enlightens each of us with His grace. But now the next move is up to us. Now we have to come closer to Jesus and show Him our diseases. We, too, should bring our weak and sick to Him, also the weak in faith and the morally ill, so that His power may heal them.
Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.
The people responded correctly to these signs revealing the messianic nature of the mission of the Master from Nazareth. From here many crowds followed Him, listened to His teachings, expressed their admiration for everything that He did.
But Christ did not want to gather crowds with him to admire him. Revealing himself more and more clearly to the world, he emphasized more and more that he was waiting for a response from the man to whom he revealed himself. Hence, he made clear demands on everyone from the very beginning. Today he exclaims: "Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand." This invocation is repeated many times in the Gospel and it always remains relevant. Christ came into the world so that men could throw off the old man associated with the first Adam and put on the new man, shaped according to the pattern shown to us by Christ, rightly called the second Adam. But this is not a one-time act. In our earthly journey, it is never the case that we only need to turn from evil once and we will be on the right path forever. Most often, we still seem to oscillate between good and bad, we have ups and downs, sometimes we rise very high, we are ready to fulfill all Christ's instructions, other times we experience weakness that causes us to blush.
This state means that we must constantly convert, which requires us to constantly confront our attitude with the requirements of the Gospel and to make constant efforts to adapt our behavior to the requirements of the Gospel. St. John reminds us today that “those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them”.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george