We’re about halfway through Lent and still a week away from Mothering Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday, when the Church used to encourage people working away from home to go back to their families, or to their ‘mother’ church and to take a break from their Lenten abstinences.

Taken together, the readings for today urge believers to do the things they know they should do but may have put off, and to stop doing things that don’t matter or that are downright sinful.

The prophet Isaiah gives a clarion call to the people not to waste their time, money and attention on things that do not satisfy and ‘feed’ them in their inner beings. ‘Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me and eat what is good.’ Through Isaiah, God is beseeching his people to wake up and seek the Lord ‘while he may be found.’ There is an urgency, an impatience with how people are behaving.

‘Repent’ warns Jesus in the Gospel to the Jewish people listening to him, otherwise, he says, bad things like those that have been happening to others will happen to you! A parable about a barren fig tree seems to imply that, while God is patient, he is getting fed up with his chosen people who are rejecting Jesus’ message and hardening their hearts against him. The Gospel goes on to tell of Jesus healing a woman who had been seriously incapacitated, bent over double for 18 years, only to be criticised by the Pharisees because he healed her on the Sabbath. The people are not understanding what is important in the kingdom of God: loving and obeying God and caring for others is what matters.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul is distraught at what some of the new believers have been getting up to. They have been behaving as if they had never heard Paul’s teachings on how to live a life pleasing to God. Though exasperated with the people’s wayward behaviour, Paul also tells them that God is with them and will help them to resist temptation, if they trust in God.

There is in all three readings a strong sense of urgency: don’t put it off, don’t wait to change and repent and seek after God to another time, because that time may never come. You can’t know what’s around the corner, what’s going to happen in the future, but you can decide to change and you can decide to change right now! 

Whatever it is that you know you need to do – do it now!

Rev’d Christina Rees