“Repent.” John the Baptist bursts on the scene of first century Palestine as a prophet — the first prophet in Israel in more than 400 years. His message of repentance would be familiar to those who knew the prophets of old. Jesus himself took up the message when he began his public ministry. What does it mean to repent? The word in Greek literally means a change of minds — not in the sense of “Oh, I’ll have chocolate instead of vanilla” but literally to swap the mind you have for a new, improved model. (St. Paul calls it “a spiritual way of thinking.”) We repent not so much when we are sorry for something we have done (which is certainly a good thing to do.) Rather, repentance demands looking at things in a whole new light. Perhaps the closest analogy to repentance is the experience of falling in love. When we fall in love the whole world looks different. Whereas before things seemed drab and worn, in the experience of love all is fresh and new. Repentance has a similar effect on us. We start to see things not from our own personal point of view but see things as God sees them. We know we have a repentant heart when we see every person as precious, when we stop thinking about what I can get and start to think about what I can give, when we shift from concentrating of “me” and instead act on behalf of “we.”
