Repentance—Good News!

Bourguet, Wilkinson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498281713
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Repentance. From Jesus's own adoption of repentance at his baptism and the opening word of his preaching, the theme winds its way through his ministry and into our lives. We see Peter, the exemplar of repentance, and the unfortunate Judas, caught up in remorse. We look at sins both personal and collective, and at God forgiving and healing. Above all we see Jesus taking on the sin of the whole world and bringing the kingdom of God so very close, this kingdom of love which brings us to our knees in adoration. This book tellingly brings home the wonderful, humble love of God to be found in Jesus.

chapter 1

Repentance—Good News

Today repentance is not an everyday topic any more than it is fashionable to talk about sin. In our day, an awareness of sinfulness is far from being shared by all. Sin and repentance; the words are a little antiquated, and it might be thought puzzling to make them the subject of a book. It may even be, reader friend, that as you open these pages you feel a certain apprehension, wondering where it will all lead!

However, I am forcibly impressed by the number of people who are preoccupied with issues of sin, repentance, and forgiveness, yet without necessarily being able to put these great realities of life into words. Many of those who come to see me are oppressed, whether they realize it or not, whether they say so or not, by this issue, the issue of sin and repentance. Most of the time they are troubled by the shadows in their lives, weighed down by faults under which they labor; they thirst to talk about such things, and want to know how to bring it all before God. It is in great measure because of people like this that I am endeavoring to reflect on our topic of repentance; and it’s in thinking of them that I pore over the Bible looking to find the words that will state things clearly.

Sin, guilt, remorse, repentance, forgiveness-these are all well and truly realities of life; how are they to be experienced before God? There is always heightened apprehension at the idea of God looking into the dark place of our hearts, particularly at those things in us which are despicable . . . How true this is! However, I would like to say at the outset, with great joy, that repentance, as a gift from God, is a pathway of light, a pathway of healing and of liberation. I speak of repentance like this simply because that is how I have always seen it, primarily because this is how I understand it in the mouth of Jesus—not as a supplementary issue but as a fundamental point in our relationship with God.

I don’t know if you have noticed that in Matthew’s Gospel the very first publicly spoken word of Jesus is an invitation to repentance: “Repent!” he says in Matthew 4:17. The first word of his first act of preaching! This is a remarkable fact. Up to this point, when he begins to preach in Galilee, no one, in Matthew’s Gospel, had previously heard him speak other than John the Baptist in a short private interview (3:14–15); no one, that is, apart from the tempter, in another astonishing encounter, to which there was no witness (4:1–11). After his baptism, after his combat with the tempter, Jesus was finally able to begin his preaching ministry, and it is then that we hear as his first word, this—“Repent!”

To show the importance of this inaugural preaching, Matthew sees fit to introduce it with a prophecy, one which is a striking setting for the issue of repentance: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light; and for those who sat in the land of the shadow of death, a light has arisen” (4:16).

To be sure, the light is Christ, but it is also his preaching, his invitation to repentance in the midst of the darkness of our sin. “Repent!” says Jesus. Matthew makes this appeal a burst of light breaking forth into our night. Repentance, a pathway of light! This really isn’t what we are accustomed to think!

“A light has arisen”: Matthew seizes on the prophetic word to illuminate this, the threshold of the gospel, the threshold of the good news to be proclaimed by Jesus. “Repent!” This is the word with which the good news begins!

“Repent!” If we wish to enter into the heart of Jesus’ message and then act in concordance, it is absolutely necessary that we properly understand this first invitation he speaks to us, and to respond by doing what he says. How, in fact, can we go any further if we ignore this initial instruction? To take the gospel seriously means beginning at the beginning and, so, putting repentance into practice. This is the threshold we have to cross to gain entrance into the good news that is presented to us: “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 4:17).

Repentance at the threshold of the good news of the kingdom; this is what we are to receive from the Lord!

Before Jesus ever began to preach, John the Baptist was instructed to prepare the way for him; he too had done this by setting out to preach. What was the Baptist’s message? It’s amazing. According to Matthew, the very first public word of John the Baptist was exactly the same as that of Jesus: “Repent” (3:2). John the Baptist and Jesus said absolutely the same thing, and they even added to it the same expansion on their invitation: “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (3:2 and 4:17). The entirety of their first proclamation is exactly the same! It is possible that there are nuances to distinguish if we are to correctly understand what might have been intended by these words in the mouths of the Baptist and of Christ, and we will make efforts to examine those distinctions; but it is certainly the case that the two men were agreed about the tight link between repentance and the coming of the kingdom.

It may be that John the Baptist, as the forerunner to the gospel of Christ, made repentance a preface to it, whereas, with Christ, repentance is an integral part of the gospel message. Mark specifies: “Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom of God,1 saying “. . . Repent . . .” (1:14–15) Repentance here is “the Gospel of God.”

When Luke summarizes the teaching of John the Baptist he doesn’t, however, present the teaching as a preamble to the gospel, but as an element of it. For Luke, in fact, all the Baptist’s exhortations, including that of repentance, form part of the gospel. “In this way, and with many other exhortations, he proclaimed to the people the Good News” (3:18).2 John the Baptist and Jesus, then, are very close in the way they make repentance the first word of the good news.

To grasp the nuances and differences there might be between the preaching of John and Jesus is doubly important for us Christians, firstly if we are to practice repentance according to Jesus’ conception of it rather than John’s, but also if we in our turn are to preach it. Jesus, indeed, instructed his disciples to preach that the kingdom of heaven has come nigh (Matt 10:7), and that this closeness is inseparable from repentance. Mark clearly notes this with regard to the disciples’ first mission; “they went out and proclaimed the need to repent” (6:12).

Whose disciples are we when we preach repentance? Whose disciple, indeed, am I in speaking here of repentance—of John or of Jesus? If the Baptist and Christ expressed different content in the same words, it is absolutely essential to know precisely what that content would be; we don’t wish to be led astray ourselves or to mislead those to whom we speak.

Perhaps too, and this is what we will discover, if there are differences between the Baptist and Christ in their conception of repentance, it is not that we should accept one and reject the other, but rather that we practice both as a necessary continuum. In fact Jesus himself underwent baptism as preached by John, which is to say, a baptism of repentance (Mark 1:4). Jesus never disavowed either the baptism he received or John’s preaching. Some of Jesus’ disciples, indeed the very first, had originally been disciples of John before following Christ (John 1:35–37). These disciples heard both teachings and must have grasped and passed on the difference. Was it a case of continuity or rupture? Repetition or innovation? Or was it rather a deepening? It seems to me we should gather from the New Testament that it is more correct to think of a deepening and strengthening from John to Jesus, as if there are levels of repentance and John and Jesus invite us to enter at different levels.

The Baptist’s preaching is therefore not invalid. It is retained by the Evangelists, not in some kind of opposition to that of Christ, but to show the continuity between the two, their complemen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Translator’s Note
• Preface
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Repentance—Good News
• Chapter 2: On the Threshold of the Gospel
• Chapter 3: The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
• Chapter 4: The Depth of Repentance
• Chapter 5: The Repentance Preached by the Disciples
• Chapter 6: God’s Repentance