Advent Week 3: Repentance

"Now, after John [the Baptizer] was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.'"
Mark 1.14-15

In the time when Jesus lived, the Jewish people lived in a state of tension and hope. Tension because they were in a state of political and spiritual exile and they were slaves in their own land. Hope because they believed that Yahweh (their covenant God) would act again in history to vindicate his people, to bring them all the way back from exile.

Many Jews believed that by faithfully obeying God's Law, the Messiah or Anointed One would come and usher in a new age – an age in which Yahweh would restore the fortunes of Israel by defeating her enemies. Israel's hope for restoration was, however, often mistakenly bound to its nationalistic belief that restoration would come in the form of a military overthrow of the Roman Empire, starting with the conquest of Jerusalem. A commonly held belief was that God would establish the Jews in the Promised Land and throw out the unclean Gentiles (ie. the Romans). This is how God's kingdom or rule would be established on earth.

But that was not the message of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. Jesus came announcing a different kind of kingdom - one that included the outcasts, sinners, and those who were deemed to be ritually unclean.

Along with this, Jesus' message of the kingdom of God included within it the call for all in Israel to "repent." Shocking! The (so-called) "people of God" needed to repent - to turn to God with all their hearts.

"But turn from what?" you may ask. After all, the Jews were God’s people, weren't they? Exactly! And we often miss this. Jesus was preaching to the choir, so to speak. But why?

Well, even though many Jews thought they had it all in order, they didn't. Many boasted that Abraham was their father. They believed they were God's children by right, by blood. They believed you could be born into God's family. Thus, they concluded that they'd be the benefactors of God's coming kingdom because of their status as physical descendants of Abraham.

So Jesus (and before him John the Baptizer) came with a message that challenged Israel to realize that being a physical descendant of Abraham was not good enough. In Matthew 3.9, John the Baptizer says, "Let me tell you, God is quite capable of raising up children for Abraham from the very stones at you feet."

Being born a Jew, or a Christian for that matter, is not good enough! No one can claim an absolute right to possess the status of a member in God's family. That is something that happens through faith in Jesus. "Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham...in the Messiah Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith." (Galatians 3.7, 26).

And so, God calls all of us to repent - to continually turn from the way of arrogance and conceit, and from our self-centered desire to do it our way. God wants us to admit that we don't have it all together, that we are all messed up, and that we desperately need his grace to save us. But that's not all...

The message of Advent is that God graciously comes to us through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, offering us forgiveness, reconciliation, and the amazing opportunity to become children of God. God meets us where we are at. And God calls us to trust in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for salvation - to turn to Jesus and follow his way of being human. God calls us to embrace the way of the cross, the way of the crucified and risen Messiah, and then to pick up our own cross and to become his agents of peace, reconciliation, and renewal in the world.