Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
21^st of January, 2024

1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

The time is fulfilled. The present form of this world is passing away. In the year 2024 it is hard not to hear the words of Jesus and Paul and respond, ‘Really?’ It was even hard for the author of the Gospel according to Matthew, which most biblical scholars agree was written slightly later than the Gospel according to Mark. In today’s Markan reading Jesus begins his ministry by saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;’ but by the time Matthew came to write the same scene Jesus simply says, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ (Matthew 4:17) Already in Matthew’s version questions of time have become difficult.

It is unsurprising that the Apostle Paul thought the end of the world was fast approaching. The situation within the Roman Empire was tumultuous, and pressures on Christians were increasing. He was writing this letter to the church in Corinth at around the same time that Nero became Emperor, and about a decade before the First Jewish–Roman War which would lead to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And while Paul was writing his letters before the gospels themselves were written down, undoubtedly Jesus’ followers were passing on to each other sayings like: ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’ (Mark 9:1) This is certainly what Paul believes: ‘the appointed time has grown short’.

In last week’s reading Paul was admonishing those of his beloved children who believed that the good news that ‘all things are lawful for me’ justified them doing whatever they wanted. This week’s reading comes from a section in which Paul is dealing with members of the church at Corinth who believe the opposite. They have written to Paul, ‘It is well for a man not to touch a woman.’ (1 Corinthians 7:1) The church members about whom we heard last week thought that nothing the body did mattered. Now Paul must deal with people who have gone to the other extreme and are trying to impose celibacy on everyone in the church. After all, if the world is soon to end, what is the point of marrying or giving in marriage?

Paul does not agree. He might wish that everyone could be celibate, as he is, but he recognises that celibacy is a gift that not everyone has, and it is certainly better to marry than to burn with passion. (If only today’s Roman Catholic Church was as sensible as the Apostle Paul.) But because the time is so short, he advises people to remain in the situation, married or unmarried, slave or free, circumcised or uncircumcised, that they were in before they became Christian. And so we come to today’s reading in which he advises those with wives to behave as though they had none; those who mourn to behave as though as though they were not mourning; those who rejoice to behave as though they were not rejoicing; those who buy to behave as though as though they had no possessions; and those who deal with the world to behave as though they had no dealings with it.

What does this mean? Paul is not suggesting that those with wives should live celibate lives; he has just explained why that is inadvisable. Nor is he prohibiting mourning, rejoicing, buying, and dealing with the world. He assumes all these things will continue until the end of time. In every case he is encouraging the Corinthians to sit lightly to the things of the world. He explains what it would mean for men to live as though they had no wives by arguing that: ‘The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.’ (1 Corinthians 7:32-34) A man who lives as though he has no wife will be one seeking to please the Lord. The person who lives as though they have no possessions will not base their identity or their status on their consumption of material goods. Those who live as though they have no dealings with the world will, again, not base their identity on their employment or wealth, on whether they are Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but simply on being the beloved child of God and baptised member of the one body.

We can understand all that, but what does it mean for those who mourn to live as if they were not mourning and those who rejoice to live as though they were not rejoicing? Does Paul want the Corinthians to follow the advice of the Stoics and maintain an attitude of indifference to external events so that they could be, in the words of Epictetus (50-135), ‘sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy’? Probably not, and even Epictetus is asking to be shown such a person, not claiming to be one. John Calvin argues that by ‘mourning’ Paul means adversity and by ‘rejoicing’ he means prosperity, and that would make sense of Paul’s advice. But I suspect that Paul is referring to his sense of time being short. Soon those who mourn will be reunited with their loved ones who have died; soon those who rejoice over earthly things will have something much greater about which to rejoice – the return of Christ at the end of time. Earthly mourning and rejoicing will soon end, for the time is coming when ‘the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Revelation 7:17)

The world did not end within the lifetime of any of Jesus’ first followers, within the lifetime of Paul, within the lifetime of any of the recipients of his letters. What relevance does Paul’s advice have for us, some nineteen hundred and seventy-five years after he wrote it? Apparently in the United States thirty-nine percent of adults, including forty-nine percent of Christians, believe that we are living in the End Times, and ten percent of Americans think Jesus will return in their lifetime. I suspect that none of us here is expecting the imminent eschaton and parousia. Is Paul’s advice for us?

The advice to sit lightly to the things of this world, not to base our identity on our relationships or our possessions or worldly institutions, has always been part of Christianity. All such things are relativised by our identity as children of God. Nor are we to make our relationships or our possessions or our worldly status, or even our grief or joy, into little gods to be worshipped. They are important, but they are not of ultimate importance. Nor need we be afraid because of our current relationships or possessions or worldly status or grief or joy, clinging too closely to some and rejecting completely others. The time will come when all such things will pass away, and God will create a new heaven and a new earth, so in the meantime we can live with the freedom that comes from not being anxious about the things of the world.

Christianity has held Paul’s advice to be good, even if the appointed time has not grown short for the world. But for each of us, as individuals, the time has grown short. One of the things I do as a minister is take funerals. Luckily, because I am living in Australia where life expectancy is in the eighties, most of the funerals I take are of people who have lived to a ripe old age. But this job makes it clear that life does not come with a guarantee, and death can arrive suddenly, prematurely, tragically. I will never forget the deaths of the three college students whose car went under a bus during an Easter holiday, nor the death of my beloved stepfather of mesothelioma at the age of sixty. I will never forget taking the funeral of a stillborn baby and the tiny, tiny coffin that the father carried in his arms, nor the funeral of a seventeen-year-old who died of asthma and the church full of weeping secondary school students. The old funeral service used to say that ‘in the midst of life we are in death,’ and being a minister certainly reminds me of that. Death can come peacefully, at the right time, at the end of a long life, but it can also come unfairly, by accident or illness or through violence. We do not know, until after the fact, how it will come for us, and all too often we must mourn loved ones for whom death has come too soon.

How are we to live, then, knowing that for each of us the appointed time may be growing short? There are two ways not to live. The first Paul himself describes later in this letter: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ (1 Corinthians 15:32) This is the attitude that seems to have prevailed throughout the Roman Empire, as I have said before. No, says Paul, we should not live like this, because there is life after death. On the other hand, I personally do not advise the strictly Calvinist attitude that I discovered in the wonderful Scottish novels of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan 1877-1948) of regarding everything from the point of view of our deathbeds. That attitude led to many very dour Scots, who took no pleasure in anything. Instead, knowing that our lives may be short, and yet that all our days are held in the loving hands of God, I believe we can live with love, hope, freedom, and joy. We can, in fact, love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds, and with all our strength, and love our neighbours as ourselves. We should not wait to express our love, do good, leave behind happy memories, appreciate the life we have, because our appointed time is growing short.

Now, as on the previous two Sundays I want to end this reflection with a poem, because I am finding that poems so often say what I want to say, and say it much better. Today’s is ‘The Summer Day,’ by Mary Oliver (1935-2019).

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?