Metanoia Is More Than Repentance

This Sunday marks the beginning of what our lectionary calls the season of Metanoia.

Or, as often happens in our church, we have some disagreement about how to pronounce the word.

Regardless, the word matters.

This season, and especially the Gospel from Mark, calls us back to something Christians must return to again and again. We are called to follow Christ. That sounds simple, but it is never something we master once and move beyond. We are followers of Christ, yes. We are also human beings. We miss the mark. We lose focus. We grow tired. We fall into old habits. We need continued conversion.

That is what Metanoia is really about.

The word often gets reduced in ways that make it hard to hear. Some think of repentance as doing penance, as if the heart of the matter is saying a certain number of prayers after confession. Some think of it as praying the sinner’s prayer or making one clear adult decision to follow Jesus. Others hear it as a ritual act, a bow, a gesture, or a religious obligation.

But in the Greek, metanoia means a change of mind. Not in the shallow sense of changing an opinion. It means a change of mindset. A change of vision. A reordering of the whole way we see God, ourselves, our neighbors, and the world.

In Christian language, we often call this theosis or sanctification. It is the process of becoming more like God. It is the slow work of holiness. It is the Spirit reshaping us until the mind of Christ begins to become our own.

For many of us, though, the word “repent” carries pain. Some of us have heard it used as a threat. Some have heard it used as an empty religious demand. Some have heard it used as a weapon against who we are. So we need to recover this word. We need to receive it again as Christ gives it, not as people have misused it.

When Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” he is not offering shame. He is announcing freedom. He is calling people into a new way of life.

The first danger is treating repentance as a ritual without change.

I struggled with this when I was younger. Coming from a mainline Protestant background, I often saw infant baptism handled in a way that felt careless. Families would sometimes come to church after months or years away, bring a child for baptism, and then disappear again. The lack of reverence troubled me.

That struggle eventually led me into Mennonite spaces. Mennonites come from the Anabaptist tradition, which means they practice believer’s baptism. Many believe infant baptism is not valid, and that a person must choose baptism as an adult disciple.

At first, I thought this solved the problem. But over time, I saw the same issue there too. Baptism still became a ritual without change. Some people spoke of being “ethnic Mennonite,” as though faith was simply something inherited by culture. Baptism became another marker of belonging rather than a living encounter with grace.

I saw something similar in some Pentecostal spaces. Many classical Pentecostals teach the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues as evidence. But there too, the gift could become a ritual without change. Instead of receiving and sharing spiritual gifts freely, people felt pressure to perform the expected sign.

Even in the Greek tradition, the word metania refers to certain bows or prostrations used in prayer and liturgy. That is beautiful when the gesture comes from the heart. But even there, the danger remains. The outward action can be severed from inward conversion.

This is the danger in every tradition.

The sacrament remains holy. The ritual remains meaningful. But if the heart is not being turned toward God, we have missed the point.

At Holy Wisdom, we practice infant baptism because we believe it belongs to the faith handed down to us. We believe baptism is a sacrament of grace, not a reward for religious understanding. But this Gospel reminds us that baptism and chrismation should never be treated casually. These mysteries call us into a changed life. Behind the sacrament stands the grace of God.

The same is true of the Eucharist. Every Sunday we celebrate the mystery of bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ. We enter into communion with Christ and with one another. Yet even the Eucharist can become a habit if we stop attending to what we are receiving.

So we pause. We confess. We reconcile. We remember that the Holy Mysteries are not religious routines. They are encounters with the living God.

The second danger is using repentance as a weapon.

Many of us know this pain.

There often comes a moment in the life of an LGBTQ person when a church says, “You need to repent of your sexual orientation or gender identity.” Repentance becomes a clobber word. It becomes a way to push people down while pretending to speak for God.

This has happened to LGBTQ people. It has happened to women called to ministry. It has happened to Black people who sought freedom while Scripture was twisted to defend slavery. It has happened to smaller churches and independent movements when larger institutions demand submission and call it repentance.

Holy language becomes a battering ram.

Words given to us by Christ and the apostles get turned into tools of control. They are used to silence people, erase them, or force them to conform.

But that is not what Jesus is doing in Mark.

When Jesus called people to repent and follow him, he was not reinforcing the religious status quo. He was disrupting it. His call scandalized people. It drew followers out of familiar structures. It gathered those on the margins. Tax collectors. Sinners. Women. The poor. The sick. The occupied. The overlooked.

Matthew himself was a tax collector. Others who followed Jesus came from places respectable religion preferred to avoid.

So repentance must never be used to bully or subjugate. It is not a weapon for the powerful to use against the vulnerable. It is a call to become more fully alive in Christ.

And that brings us to the third truth.

Repentance is a way of life.

We often love dramatic conversion stories. Someone lives in sin. They meet Jesus. Everything changes overnight.

Sometimes grace does move that way.

But for most of us, repentance is slower. It is daily. It is the long work of theosis. It is the Spirit reshaping our thoughts, desires, habits, and bodies until even our mortal nature is drawn toward resurrection.

This is why, in our liturgy at Holy Wisdom, we restored corporate confession and reconciliation before Communion. We did that intentionally. Every week, we are reminded that conversion is ongoing. Every week, we confess our sins before God and one another. Every week, we seek peace. Every week, we come again to the Table.

This is not because God is stingy with mercy.

It is because we need to be healed again and again.

We need to make peace so that we do not dishonor our baptism, our chrismation, or the Eucharist we receive. We need to be reminded that the Holy Mysteries are not religious habits. They are gifts of grace.

And the truth is, this work is difficult.

There are mornings when we wake up tired. We did not sleep well. The news is bad. Something went wrong. Loving our neighbor feels hard.

There are nights when work has drained us. We come home with little mental energy left for Scripture or prayer.

That is why we gather.

We come together to commune with one another and with God. In that communion, we confess. In that communion, we repent. In that communion, we receive Christ in the Eucharist and are sent back into the world to follow him again.

St. Paul tells us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. That does not mean we live in terror. It means we take this life seriously. We do not treat salvation as a one-time transaction. We grow into it.

There will be seasons when we feel close to Christ. There will be seasons when we feel far away. There will be times when reconciliation with our neighbor feels almost impossible. There will be times when loving our enemies stretches us past what we think we have.

Still, we return.

We confess.

We repent.

We change our mind.

We take one more step toward Christ.

And we do not do this alone. At Pentecost, we remembered that the Spirit dwells within the Church. Each of us has received spiritual gifts. Each of us was anointed with the Holy Spirit in chrismation. It is the Spirit who works in us. It is God who comes toward us before we ever move toward God.

So this is not about waking up every morning and forcing ourselves into holiness by sheer effort. It is about receiving the grace of God, again and again. God is the one who reaches for us. God is the one who heals. God is the one who reconciles. God is the one who makes us whole.

That is the healthy way to understand repentance.

Not as ritual without change.

Not as a weapon.

Not as shame.

Repentance is the lifelong turning of the whole person toward Christ.

Many of us carry a painful history with this word. Some of us were taught that repentance meant fear. Some were told it meant rejection. Some were told God could not love them unless they became someone else.

But God is love. And the God who commands us to love even our enemies does not stop loving us when we struggle, question, fall, or fail.

So as we enter this season of Metanoia, let us begin again.

Not with panic.

Not with shame.

Not with performance.

Let us begin with humility. Let us make the small choices that draw us closer to Christ. Let us grow in holiness one step at a time. Let us cry out with the saints and sinners before us, “God, have mercy on me.”

And let us trust that mercy will meet us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.