paragō

This is a word for a person in motion. It says nothing about where they are headed or why; it simply puts them on the move past a place, and usually past somebody who is standing still. In the Gospels it works almost like a stage direction: Jesus is walking along, and the scene begins because of who he goes by.

That is why the same short setup keeps recurring:

• he is walking along the shore and calls fishermen away from their nets
• he goes past a tax booth and calls the man sitting at it
• he goes by and notices a man who has been blind from birth
• two blind men hear that he is going by and shout after him
• a stranger walking in from the fields is seized to carry a cross

The going and the seeing belong together. Nobody in these scenes has an appointment. The encounter happens because someone on the move crosses paths with someone who is not.

Once, the word lets go of the idea of passing anything in particular and means only moving off and away, which is how it reads when Jesus slips out of the temple courts.

The second use takes the same picture and applies it to time rather than to a road. What is on the move is not a traveler but the world itself, and the point is that it is already going. Paul says the present arrangement of this world is passing, and John says that both the darkness and the world with its cravings are passing.

Two things follow from the image. The first is timing: this is not something scheduled for the end of history but something happening while the reader reads. The second is manner: the picture is of a scene moving off, the way a person walks by and is gone from view, not of something being smashed. Greek has a separate verb for actively putting an end to a thing (καταργέω); this one describes the quiet slipping out.

The practical force is the same in both writers. If the setting is already on its way off the stage, then living wholly for it means investing in something that is leaving.