Monday, 1/13/13
Today’s Gospel from the Gospel according to Mark repeats what we
read not long ago when we had the story from the Gospel according to Matthew.
If you don’t mind, I’d like here to repeat what I said about this similar
passage then.
Our Gospel passage from St. Mark
says Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent.”
Let me point out that Mark wrote
his Gospel in Greek, and where our English translation quotes Jesus as saying,
“Repent,” Mark actually wrote that Jesus said, ”Meta- noiete.” or,
“Turn your thinking around.”
That’s different. “Repent” has you
looking to the past, punishing yourselves for what you did wrong. While, “turn
your thinking around” has you looking to the future, resolving to do
better.
Ancient Greece gave us two great
philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. They both believed in the one God. One main
difference between them was that Plato thought that our souls existed with God
before we were conceived, while Aristotle taught that they both were created in
the same instant.
Plato’s way of thinking considered
the soul to be imprisoned in the body, and that had him telling us to punish
the body to keep it from getting the upper hand. That led to saintly people
punishing their body to strengthen the soul. For the first thousand years of
Christian history good people, following Plato, did a lot of repenting.
Aristotle, in thinking that our
body and soul were created together, advised us to take a holistic approach to
life, cultivating a healthy mind in a healthy body. His recipe for a happy
future would have us turning our thinking around, rather than our going around
glum, repenting for our sins. That’s not what Jesus actually told us to do.
In translating the Gospels into
English, the early Christian fixation on repenting had them switching the way
Mark summed up Our Lord’s message.
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