What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “repent and believe”? Is it a young Jewish army commander in AD 66 trying to persuade some Galilean rebels to stop their revolt against Rome and to trust him and other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better solution? No? Well it should. Because that is what a young Josephus, who would later become the famous Jewish historian, did according to his autobiography. When he confronted the rebel leader, he told him to “repent and believe in me”. 

Does this make you tilt your head in confusion. Is Josephus telling the rebel leader to stop sinning and believe in him for some religious experience? Nope. The phrase “repent and believe” carried a non-religious political meaning.

So when Jesus of Nazareth, the one with whom we usually associate this phrase, goes around Galilee declaring, “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:13), it’s important to keep this in mind. Jesus, as Israel’s king, was telling his fellow Israelites to give up their agendas of how to be Israel, God’s chosen people. He was urging them, similar to Josephus, to give up their dreams of violently revolting against Rome in the attempt of ushering in God’s kingdom. Instead, he was encouraging them to trust his way of bringing God’s kingdom, which was available here and now through him. By doing so, Jesus injects the political meaning with an essential spiritual meaning.

Centuries later, many of us carry a different understanding of repentance. We often think of repentance as some sort of religious or spiritual transaction. We feel remorse for something bad we did. We confess it to God and maybe to a pastor, priest, or a trustworthy friend. We decide to stop doing that behavior. Then we receive God’s forgiveness and mercy. But repentance is more about one’s entire life than specific behavior.

Alexander Schmemann taps into this when he writes:

“It is easy indeed to confess that I have not fasted on prescribed days, or missed my prayers, or become angry. It is quite a different thing, however, to realize suddenly that I have defiled and lost my spiritual beauty, that I am far away from my real home, my real life, and that something precious and pure and beautiful has been hopelessly broken in the very texture of my existence.”

Last night, a friend shared our priest’s definition of repentance. “It’s the ongoing process of reorienting myself to God.” This is a more holistic understanding of repentance and seems more in sync to Jesus’ message. In this definition, repentance doesn’t necessarily involve specific sin. Rather, it describes the larger process of being formed into Christ’s likeness. 

And in that larger process, repentance is not selective. It’s not only for “bad” behavior. Jesus was not calling “bad” people to repent of “bad” behavior. He was calling all people — both “good” and “bad” — to rethink their entire lives — again everything they would consider both “good” and “bad” — and reorient every aspect of themselves to God by apprenticing themselves to him.

My thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions, words, relationships, values, beliefs, politics, aspirations, attitudes — simply put, everything “good” and “bad” in my life — needs to be retrained, reshaped, reformed, and reoriented into God’s design for human life within his kingdom. Even my “good” may not be God’s good.

Bottom-line, I need to become like Jesus to become the person God designed me to be. And that means rethinking and reorienting everything around God.