The time is short; do not procrastinate

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Jon 3:1-5, 10
Second Reading: 1 Cor 7:29-31
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:14-20

This Sunday’s readings warn us not to procrastinate.

“The appointed time has grown short,” St. Paul says. God tells the Ninevites that they have only forty days to repent. “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news,” Jesus says.

Why all the hurry? Surely a kind, compassionate, and understanding God will not condemn us to hell without giving us a second chance. Can we not put off repentance until later? St. Paul and the other early Christians thought the end was coming soon, but we know better. Do we have to live as though the time is short?

Yes, the time for deciding is short and is growing shorter. In fact, the time for deciding is now, for every decision we make, from birth to death, affects our ultimate choice.

Some people argue that we need not keep all God’s commandments all the time as long as we maintain our “fundamental option” for God. They are like a wife who argues that she need not be faithful to her husband as long as she does not abandon him, or that she need not be faithful to him in her thoughts as long as she does not actually commit adultery.

In reality, every moral choice we make counts, because in making it, we acquire, bit by bit, by God’s grace, the habits of heavenly creatures, who will be at home in heaven with God, or those of hellish creatures, who will hate God, their fellow-humans, and themselves forever.

“We do not go to hell only by being unfaithful to the free self-commitment which we have made to God,” Pope St. John Paul II said in his Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth): we also lose the grace of salvation “by any other mortal sin.”

We all want to be happy. However, hellish creatures want to be happy in their own way. They will not accept happiness in the only way it can possibly be experienced: as a by-product of a life directed toward God.

Following Adam and Eve’s example, they want the happiness God promises them, but “without God, before God, and not in accord with God,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says. However, apart from God there is no happiness. Apart from God there is simply nothing.

When we commit sin, we turn away from God. We might not consciously reject him; we might not be fully aware or fully responsible. However, through steady repetition, our choice of the hell-ward roads hardens into a habit and then into a principle we are prepared to defend.

Thus, gradually, we develop a “hard, tight, settled core of resolution” to go on being what we are, says C.S. Lewis’ imaginary devil Screwtape. If we do not repent, this is the decision we will articulate fully at our death, even if we hide it from ourselves during our lives.

In Lewis’ The Last Battle, at the end of Narnia, all the creatures in the world rush up to the doorway where Aslan (Christ) is standing. As they approach him, they all look him straight in the face. As they do so, the expression on their faces changes: either to fear and hatred, or to love.

That change marks each creature’s final decision. It is not the work of an instant, but the culmination of the decisions of a lifetime.

Hell is “not a punishment imposed externally by God, but a development of premises already set by people in this life,” Pope John Paul said. It is “the state of those who definitively reject the Father’s mercy, even at the last moment” of life.

God gives us a lifetime—from birth to death—to make up our minds. However, once we have decided, he accepts our decision.

Yes, “the time is short.” The time for decision is now.