Repentance on the Cliffs of Insanity

I have mulled for a while now that when Jesus preached His first message, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," that He might be saying something different than what we are hearing. Reference the Spaniard in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

We normally associate repentance with an individual felling sorry for his/her sins and then making the choice to turn from them and live in the opposite direction. In this sense "sin" is the thing I have done.

Perhaps, though, Jesus' proclamation is something entirely different. Maybe it is consistent with the Shema, Hebrews 11:6 and the Garden of Eden. Maybe sin is not to be understood primarily as a breaking of the law or an offense that violates God's holy code of conduct.

If God is really who He says He is, then He is the One God of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4. He is to be loved, worshiped, obeyed and emulated in every sphere of life. He is Lord--the absolute, final word on how I should and can approach any and every situation and option in life. One who operates from this position filters everything through the lens of how God might see it, and therefore, what He would want me to do based on what He wants as my first priority.

So when Jesus says, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," He is really issuing a call to orient our lives to His lordship. The declaration of the nearness of God's rule is my cue to submit my life in total to His purposes. It means that I declare my allegiance as a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

In this context, then, repentance becomes the movement away from the rule of foreign "gods" toward the absolute authority of God in Jesus.

When the writer of Hebrews says that "anything not of faith is sin," perhaps it is also written in this context. The human examples bookending this declaration show men who submitted their lives to God's rule--and thankfully it shows less-than-perfect men who, by the way, did become examples--warts and all. Faith, then, is far more than hoping God does something that only He can do. That is the consumer-oriented version where, incidentally, my desires are actually a notch above God's. Reference the need to repent above.

"Faith" might be best seen as the hopeful entrusting of yet another facet of life to the lordship of Christ.

If this is the case, then I can finally lay to rest the insipid and condescending notion of the original sin due to "pride." (Am I the only one who is bugged by that?) It wasn't pride at all; it was the willful act when Adam and Eve pulled God's permission to lead them off of the table. Their act was all about deciding that they were now going to call the shots and control their own destinies. To borrow the idea from Jesus' message above, they declared themselves no longer citizens of God's kingdom and planted their own flag instead. The curse, then, is simply God giving them what they asked for. As we well know, they went from the penthouse to the outhouse and took us along for the ride.

What does this mean for practical living? Two things come to mind.

First, if I am truly to be a follower of Jesus, then He has to be lord of everything (duh). In New Testament terminology, it means that the Great Command is my barometer of the health -- and even the reality -- of my faith.

Second, it means that living as a citizen of God's kingdom -- under His rule -- now defines God's passions and driving forces as mine, too. The mission of God is now the mission of Bob. Everything else must revolve around and flow from that. Anything less than that means that I am really not a citizen of this realm; I seriously doubt if there is a place for conscientious objectors in this kingdom.

The trap intwo which modern Christianity has fallen is the notion that there is a divide between "private spirituality" and "the real world." Incidentally, this is part of the legacy of the so-called Enlightenment that powerfully shaped our founding fathers and US cultural foundations. In church-talk we call these twin dynamics "sacred" and "secular." What this divide really amounts to is a kind of working dualism where Jesus can be lord of one compartment but persona non grata in the other. As Alan Hirsch says, "People involved in dualistic spiritual paradigms experience God as a church-based deity and religion as a largely private affair, and it is the actual way we do church that communicates this non-verbal message of dualism" (see The Forgotten Ways, pages 95-96).

One great call to repentance, sounding like an Old Testament prophet thundering at his own people, is now being issued to God's people -- you and me -- with the same intensity. It is the call to repent by turning wholly to Jesus in every aspect of our lives. If He truly is the "author and finisher of our faith," then what He started/authored with the example of His own life is what we should aspire to. Repentance for the Church in America must include a take-no-prisoners inventory of our attitudes and assumptions. That, in my estimation, will mean wholesale changes both in why we do things and in what we do.

Are we up to it? I, for one, am tired of living as a resident alien in God's kingdom.