Repent! Does It Really Mean What We Think?

“Repent,” Jesus says in Matt. 4:17, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” But does it really mean what we think?

Jesus says to repent a lot in the Bible.

“Repent.”

“Repent, you sinful generation.”

“Repent, you brood of vipers, repent.”

When kids on the playground get into a tussle, they shake hands, say they’re sorry and go back to being best friends again. They repent.

Bible study groups will scan dictionaries looking for the definition.

Repent comes from Middle French repentir and the Medieval Latin verb repoenitēre, meaning to regret or be sorry.

The oldest use of the word repent was in the 1100s. It came into wider use in the 1500s, around the time the King James Bible was created.

In Christian history the Church controlled the penitent by controlling repentance.

Faithful were required to repent, confess to a priest and pay or perform a penance to demonstrate sorrow for sinful ways.

With the Reformation and the translation of the Bible out of Latin, Christians learned that, wait a minute, the Bible doesn’t say what we’ve been told it says.

Our need for priests disappeared. We can read the Bible for ourselves. We can repent of our sins and petition the Lord ourselves.

Too many American Protestants completely ignorant of the history of Christianity have created the same sort of constricting church structures as the Catholic Church their ancestors fled.

American Christians expect the penitent to ‘accept’ Jesus and repent with the sinner’s prayer. All while still under the control of the (often male) minister.

Too many Christians think this is what Jesus means when he tells us to repent. They are mistaken.

When Jesus says to repent, he’s not telling us to feel sorry for what we’ve done or offer an apology.

A better translation of repent is to “turn away from what you’ve been doing, and do something different.”

So flip through your Bible, and you should flip through your Bible often if you’re a follower of Jesus, and every time Jesus says repent, translate that word correctly into “turn from your way of doing things.” Turn from what you’re doing and do this other thing.

Follow my way, Jesus tells us.

The problem with this translation is people can’t be controlled.

You don’t need a priest or a pastor.

You don’t need the Bible.

And you certainly don’t need a church or a congregation or a hierarchy of a denomination to have people turn from their way of living.

My denomination is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I chose this denomination because we believe that we each have a relationship with the Lord. We can read scripture ourselves, reflect and respond. We don’t have ministers or denominations telling us what to think or believe.

The DOC, and others like it, are not about control and how you as a Christian should live.

It’s about how you as a follower of Jesus should live, how you turn away from what you were doing before and follow Jesus.

So repent, Jesus says, turn from your ways and follow me.

Each new day is a new opportunity to turn from the way we were going, and to follow Jesus anew. No matter how badly we screwed up today, Jesus says tomorrow is another day to try to turn and follow him.

That certainly sounds like good news to me.