In the novel Barabbas there is a scene where a woman who lives with the outcasts in the valley of Ge-Hinnom, outside the gates of the city of Jerusalem, waits for sleep at night. She hears the groanings of the sick. She thinks about Jesus and the kingdom he is always talking about. She thinks the next day will bring an end to suffering.

Later on in the story, after the death of Jesus, many of his followers are persecuted. This woman is led out to the place where people are put to death. A yelling crowd surrounds her, and begins stoning her.

She stretches out her hands and says, "He has come! He has come! I see him!" Then, she falls to her knees and says, "Lord, how can I witness for thee? Forgive me ..." And, she dies.

There is a phrase in the Gospel of John which, in my mind, sums up the message of the New Testament: "The Master has come." It is a phrase which has intrigued me - captured my imagination - for in that phrase is the answer for which we are all looking. Whatever the problem - the question, the situation, the pain, the sorrow, "the Master has come."

The Master has come, and nothing will ever be the same again. An entirely new element has come into the history of the world. A new song has passed across the lips of men, women, and children. A new note of joy has been sounded. A new source of hope has melted the ice of despair. A new light of victory has streaked across the horizon. A new dawn has broken into a new day. The Master has come.

It happened that Jesus came down from Nazareth to the Jordan River where cousin John, the baptizer, was preaching. And, along with many other people Jesus was baptized there. Then the spirit of God descended upon Jesus, and he heard a voice from heaven saying, "Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well pleased."

Jesus went to the wilderness for forty days - a time of retreat, thought, prayer, strategizing, and testing - being tempted of the devil. Then, Jesus came into Galilee preaching. God had one son, and he made a preacher out of him.

But, why did Jesus preach? Why didn’t he write a book, organize an army, run for public office, issue decrees, write letters to the editor, or send petitions to Rome?

The answer is that he came to be the proclaimer - the bearer, the teller, the talker, the preacher, teacher, actualizer of God’s kingdom. He came to tell people what God was doing, was about to do, would do in the present and future. "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." (Mark 1:9-15)

He came to be a preacher, a teacher, a proclaimer. He did not come to be a leader, an organizer, a general, a doctor - a doer of wonders, a miracle worker, a performer of signs and magic, personality, a celebrity. He came to proclaim God’s kingdom.

The theme of his preaching and teaching was the Kingdom of God. Miss that, and you do not understand anything about Jesus.

In the Gospel of Mark, at the beginning of Jesus’ proclaiming the Kingdom of God, we catch the sense of urgency about this message of his. There needs to be the same urgency about us as we think about what the coming of the Master means today.

I

Three things we must do.

First, we must recognize the urgent moment he produced. Mark records the message of Jesus as beginning with this statement: "The time is fulfilled." The time refers to that urgent moment toward which the prophets had looked - that historic moment when God would break into the history of the world.

Jesus knew that in leaving the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth and going down to the Jordan River he was bringing about some magnificent moment. The hour had struck. It was time to begin. He produced an urgent moment.

So today, because the Master has come, we must recognize the urgent moment he produced. But, for many of us these days there is no sense of urgency about our religion, or God, or the church.

Our urgent moments are produced by other things we see as being more important, - "urgent matters." Some of us have a sense of urgency all right, but our sense of urgency is caused by the way we live and not the things we should be living for; by our priorities and not the things which should be priorities; by things which cause stress, and not the things we should be stressing.

I read about a lady who suddenly decided she just had to have some rat poison that very day. Her husband was in town and she knew he would drop by the drug store. So, she called and said, "Please give my husband rat poison when he comes in for a coke."

There is a sense of urgency about life for many of us these days.

A man went to see the doctor. He said, "My work absorbs me. I can’t sleep at night. I’m living on the ragged edge of my nerves." The doctor told him he needed to learn to relax. He said, "Go to the circus. See the great Grimaldi. Laugh. Have fun. You will be a new man." And the man replied, "But Doc, I am the great Grimaldi."

Many people are wondering what is wrong with their lives. They are living in shallows and miseries. They have forgotten that Jesus said, "The time is fulfilled." He has produced an urgent moment which puts everything else in the right perspective.

II

There is a second thing we must do. We must realize the urgent announcement he proclaimed.

Jesus said something about what this urgent moment meant when he said, "The kingdom of God is at hand."

Jesus was bringing in a new age, something entirely different, the new age of God’s Kingdom breaking into history from the outside. It made everything new and different from that moment on.

This was the urgent announcement he proclaimed - that the Kingdom of God was at hand, on the way, about to happen, already beginning, not yet here, completely here, and still coming out there in the future.

The Kingdom of God is the rule of God in the lives of people, in the life of the world, to the far corners of the universe.

Jesus used many parables to teach what the Kingdom of God is like. He said the Kingdom of God is like a man who will sell all he has in order to purchase a pearl of great price. He said it is like a seed growing secretly. No one knows it is there, but it grows up and becomes something which bears much fruit. He said it is like a grain of mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seed, but becomes the greatest of all shrubs.

The Kingdom of God is a kingdom within us - all around us, in the world and beyond the world - which knows no boundaries, which offers freedom, which has moral and ethical implications, which is a force for right living, and which calls us not only to be citizens, but also to be ambassadors of the Kingdom.

But it is easy for us to let our citizenship in this kingdom get pushed down toward the bottom of a long list of priorities. We lose sight of it. We turn away from it.

One writer, who grew up in England, tells how as a boy he was walking around his parents’ estate one day. One of the tenants’ little girls saw him coming. As he walked past her, she held out some flowers. He turned snobbishly away from her, and left her in tears. He said, "That was the first time I ever rejected the Kingdom of God."

How easy for us to do that. When we do, life gets out of kilter. It is not right. Something is wrong, and we know it.

A man was looking through his checkbook. He saw these entries his wife had made: "Beauty shop - $12.50; grocery store - $55.85; gas station - $10.00; E.S.P. - $24.65." He asked, "What is E.S.P.?" She replied, "Error some place."

Something is wrong and we know it. There is an error some place. Yet, the Christian life is a call to make the Kingdom of God a reality in our lives.

Gerald Mann, a Baptist minister in Texas, wrote a book called Why Does Jesus Make Me Nervous? He told of going to see his friend Carlyle Marney, and telling him he was thinking of leaving the ministry. When asked why, Mann replied that he was unhappy. Marney said, "Well, you ought to quit! Whoever told you that you had a right to be happy? The ministry is no place for the pursuit of happiness ... it’s a place for the pursuit of the Kingdom of God!"

Too many Christians are worshiping the gods of happiness. The Christian life is a call to pursue the Kingdom of God, and to realize it in our living.

III

A third thing we must do is respond to the urgent Gospel Jesus preached.

Jesus also said, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel."

To "repent" means to turn around, to turn toward God, to travel in another direction, to get a new mind.

"Gospel" means good news. It is not "repent and flee the judgment," as John the Baptizer had said, but, "Turn around, get a new mind, and believe the Good News about the Kingdom of God." It is a message which calls for a response. We either reject it or accept it. There is no neutral ground. We cannot say, "I’ll wait and see ... maybe sometime ... let’s weigh our options." There is no option. We must respond now. It is urgent!

Would we let God’s Kingdom be Good News for us? Some times it is bad news for us, because we do not really want it. We say we believe in it, but we vote against it. We say we are for it, but only as long as it does not interfere with some special interest close to our hearts, or our pocketbooks. We say we want it, but we mostly reject it.

Though we try to ignore him, and dress him up in our clothing, and put our words in his mouth, and interpret his message according to what we want to hear, Jesus Christ still stands among us and says, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel."

Gospel? Good news about what? Good news about God’s Kingdom, which calls us away from special-interest and economic considerations, and what is popular, and what the Joneses are doing, and what the neighbors will think, and how I can get ahead, and what diversion I can throw my money into. We are called away from all that superficial fluff, and into the Kingdom of God.

How will you respond to this? You are the only one who knows.

In one of his books, E. Stanley Jones told of being in Russia in 1934. He saw the communists building a new civilization without God, and he said he was shaken by it. But, one day he read those words in Hebrews: "Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken." He lived off those words the rest of that day, the promise of an unshakable kingdom.

The next day he read on a little further, and he came across these words: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever." He wrote, "In a world of flux and change is there one unchanging person, and is that one unchanging person Jesus Christ? And the answer came back, yes - an unhesitating fullthroated, yes. Jesus Christ is not changing." So, he discovered two absolutes - an unshakable kindom, and an unchanging person.

You can make that urgent discovery, for the Master has come - to proclaim God’s Kingdom.