“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
With Jesus’s opening words in Mark he tells us to repent and to believe. In our first podcast we asked the question what does repent mean?
I’ve been thinking about this and reading and so here is where I see this today and how I can apply this to my life.
Repent in English is generally accepted as meaning “to recognize that you have done something wrong and feel ashamed by it.” The word is translated from the Greek word metanoeite. Meta and noeo make up this word. Meta means change. Noeo means understanding. So metanoite means to change your understanding.
When Jesus is saying “Repent and believe the good news!” it is not necessarily to be ashamed of your life, it is to open up your mind to changing your understanding of life. To change your understanding of happiness, of love, of how to treat others, in reality of everything.
In essence what Jesus is saying is forget everything you know. Forget what society has taught you, because I am going to teach you the truth. Oh and by the way that truth is good news.
This then brings us to the other critical word here believe. So let’s ask ourselves is it possible to change the way you think about something if you don’t believe? Is it possible to truly believe something new if you are still following an old belief system.
I would say the answer to that is no. In order to truly believe you have to fully let go of your previous understanding or belief system. When Jesus says the meek will inherit the Earth, you can’t believe that if you still believe that the meek are pushed over by everyone and so they are losers.
It’s funny but I kind of liked it better when I thought of repent as simply feeling really bad for all the bad things you’ve done. That is easy to do it seems at times, but to completely change the way you look at how to live your life, your understanding of what is important, Well that is tough.
So how does this tidbit help us. Well as we start to read Mark the first bit of instruction we are getting from Jesus is, forget everything you know and open up your mind to learn something completely new. On a day to day basis this may not seem like much but it is really a big deal. Jesus is telling us we have got to let go of the way we look at our lives and we have to look at things differently.
There is a great movie I saw a few years back called Something, Anything. That movie addresses the impact that this way of thinking can have on your life. The main character starts to look at the things she values. The things her friends value. Even the things her partner values, and question whether or not those things deserve the value she and others have been giving them.
If we truly change the way we understand everything, and we truly believe in what Jesus is teaching, then our lives are going to really change.
It is good news we are told, but it is not a promise that everything in our lives will be great. It is not a promise that anxiety, and sadness, and pain will go away. But it is a promise of good news. As we read further into Mark I’m very anxious to see just what this good news is.