Repent!
Repentance has become an ugly ritual in American politics. The politician drags his wife to the podium (I can’t think of one woman politician who has dragged her husband) and says that he wants to briefly address a private matter. He takes full responsibility for his actions, but is somewhat vague about what his actions were. He then promises to devote himself to rebuilding his closest relationships.
Is that what Jesus was calling people to do as he began his ministry?
How about the calls for America to turn back to God, Guts and Guns – our core values according to some. Is that what Jesus was talking about when he said, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand?” The Aramaic word that he probably used did mean “turn around”, but did it mean to return to the [nostalgic] past without any close examination of what we have done or why we have done it?
Jesus was a Jew and so we look, first, to a Jewish understanding of repentance. In an interfaith dialogue with the Vatican, Rabbi David Blumenthal, a professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University gives five stages or characteristics of repentance:
- Recognizing one’s sin as sin. That is, I realize that what I did was truly wrong. It wasn’t a “mistake” or an “oversight” nor was it “inadvertent”. I sinned. I violated God’s law and my own standards.
- Feeling remorse. This goes beyond saying, “I’m sorry”. It means really feeling sorry for what I have done. It may even involve feeling that I have abandoned my own moral principles and feeling some despair about myself.
- Deciding to stop committing this sin. This isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. Whether we are talking about robbing banks or ridiculing children, I just don’t do it anymore.
- Making restitution. I pay for the broken window. I go back to the people I’ve told lies to and say, “What I told you about Joe isn’t true.” I let my wife know where I am and what I am doing 24/7.
- Confession. This is both ritualistic and personal. I avail myself of my religious tradition’s means of making confession to a priest or a minister or in the prayer of confession in worship. And in my most private moments of prayer, I come to God admitting that I have committed this particular sin. This deeply personal and spiritual process, when done sincerely, creates real humility similar to that of the tax collector in Jesus’ parable.
But there is an even deeper meaning of “repent” in the New Testament. The New Testament writers choose, more often than not, to use the Greek word “metanoioeo” when they translate Jesus’ call to repentance.
You know that a caterpillar undergoes a metamorphosis in order to become a butterfly. You probably also know that “Morpho” means body or “shape”. “Nous” means “mind” or “soul”. So “metanoioeo” is as radical a change of mind as a metamorphosis is a radical change of shape.
A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Whether we are talking about the mess we make of our relationships or nuclear war, real change will only come when our thinking changes as radically as a caterpillar’s body turns into a butterfly’s. One example of such a change is the fact that human slavery no longer makes any sense to us. Our ancestors couldn’t imagine a world without slavery. We, on the other hand, recognize that slavery not only is immoral, but it doesn’t even make good economic sense.
The documentary Promises follows seven children on both sides of the Israeli/ Palestinian divide in Jerusalem. These children hate and distrust each other until they are brought together by the filmmakers. Then they begin to recognize that the kids on the other side are human, too.
Maybe you rememeber times in your own life when some experience completely changed your mind about something - or someone.
As they wrote their gospels, the early Christians were trying to convey the difference that Jesus made in their lives.
He didn’t come just to point out how sinful they were and make them feel sorry for their sins; to stop their sinning and make restitution for their sins. He came to transform the way they think.
He doesn’t call us to simply grit our teeth as we reach out to shake hands with our enemies, he offers us new minds and hearts that can really love our enemies.
He doesn’t come to give us cold showers. He comes to give us new minds and hearts that really don’t lust after other people to whom we might be attracted.
Leo Tolstoy, once a playboy celebrity writer in Imperial Russia, underwent this kind of radical change of mind and became a humble, simple person dedicated to bettering the lives of the peasantry with whom he lived out his life. He said of his conversion: “It was like going on a journey and deciding before reaching my destination that I no longer had any reason to go there. So I turned around and came home. The things that were on my right on the outward bound journey were now on my left and the things that were on my left were now on my right. In other words, the things I used to love, I now hate; and the things I used to hate, I now love.”
People often call a change of mind like this an “epiphany”.
