Repentance: His way, not ours.
The call to repentance sits at the very heart of the gospel. Jesus began his ministry in Galilee with a bold message:
“The time has come...The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15).
And there are many other calls to repentance in the New Testament. Just two examples:
‘God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.’ (Acts 11:18)
‘God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance’ (Romans 2:4)
But what does that mean? In our culture, telling people to repent and believe is likely to be heard as a summons to give up personal sins and accept a body of dogma or a scheme of religious salvation. We have to unlearn our normal readings (including our faith readings) of first-century texts and allow the first century itself to tell us what to hear instead. The phrase means, broadly, ‘Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.’
Tom Wright:
'If you were to walk down the street of any town or village with any Christian background and were to call out ‘Repent and believe the gospel’, people would think they knew what you meant: ‘Give up your sins and become a Christian.’ Of course, Jesus wanted people to stop sinning, but ‘repentance’ for him meant two rather different things as well. First, it meant turning away from the social and political agendas which were driving Israel into a crazy, ruinous war. We can imagine someone saying that today in a country where ideologies are driving half the population into violent behaviour. Second, it meant calling Israel to turn back to a true loyalty to God. And, as anyone with a smattering of knowledge of the Bible would recognise, this was what had to happen before God would redeem Israel at last. The call to repent is part of the announcement that this is the time for the great moment of freedom, of God’s rescue’.1
An illustration from history may help us.
Jewish aristocrat and historian by the name of Flavius Josephus was born just a few years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In AD 66, just as the infamous Jewish Revolt was about to begin (which would ultimately result in the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple), Josephus was a young army commander. He was sent from Jerusalem to speak with some rebel leaders in Galilee.
His task was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better way of doing things. So when he confronted the rebel leader, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the words he uses are remarkably familiar to readers of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to ‘repent and believe in me’
Josephus used the expression "repent and believe in me" not in a religious sense but in a thoroughly practical sense. He was not asking the brigand leader to give up sinning and to have a religious conversion. Rather, he was pleading with the rebel leader to turn aside from his agenda of rebellion and military confrontation and trust Josephus’ agenda of compromise.
As followers of Jesus, we are called to ‘repent’ and embrace a whole new worldview - His way.
1 (Wright, T. (2004). Mark for Everyone (p. 9). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).