4. Repentance: From Preparation to Return
If the Kingdom of God is the central horizon of Jesus' proclamation, the next question is obvious:
How should a human being respond to the reality of God's reign?
Jesus' answer includes a word that was already familiar to his Jewish hearers:
Repent.
Repentance was not a new religious idea. It belonged to the biblical and Jewish vocabulary of returning to God, changing one's conduct, and turning away from wrongdoing. John the Baptist also made repentance central to his proclamation. Historical discussion continues concerning precisely how Jesus understood and practised repentance, but there is substantial reason to distinguish moral repentance from particular ritual practices of repentance.
The important question for this study is therefore not whether Jesus invented repentance.
He did not.
The question is:
What did repentance mean within the vision of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed?
Repentance in the world of John
John the Baptist appears in the Gospel traditions as a prophetic figure calling people to repentance in anticipation of God's decisive action.
His message has an urgent character.
Something is coming.
Therefore, people must prepare.
Repentance, in this setting, naturally carries the sense of turning away from wrongdoing in preparation for the divine action that is about to take place.
Jesus begins from a related vocabulary.
But the framework changes.
Jesus announces:
The Kingdom of God is at hand.
The announcement is followed by a call:
Repent.
The two belong together.
If God is already reigning, then repentance is not simply preparation for a distant future.
It is a response to a present reality.
Repentance as turning
The idea of repentance is often expressed through the language of turning.
To repent is to change direction.
A person is travelling one way and turns around.
This image helps us move beyond an understanding of repentance as merely feeling sorry.
Remorse may accompany repentance, but repentance involves more than emotion.
It is a reorientation of life.
The question is no longer simply:
“How do I escape punishment?”
It becomes:
“In which direction am I going?”
If I am moving away from God, repentance means turning toward God.
If I am living according to values opposed to God's reign, repentance means changing direction.
If I have become trapped in resentment, pride, greed, violence, or self-centredness, repentance means allowing God's reality to redirect my life.
Repentance is therefore not merely something that happens before entering the Kingdom.
It is one of the ways in which a person enters into the reality of the Kingdom.
Repentance is not merely preparation for God's coming. It is participation in God's already-present reign.
The lost son: repentance as coming home
One of the most powerful illustrations of this idea is Jesus' parable traditionally known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
It is important to remember that the story is richer than a simple illustration of repentance. It is also about the father, the elder brother, mercy, restoration, resentment, and the meaning of being lost and found. Nevertheless, the younger son's return provides a powerful narrative image for the movement of repentance.
The younger son leaves his father's household.
He wants life on his own terms.
He travels to a distant country and eventually finds himself in a situation of profound degradation.
Then comes the crucial moment.
He “comes to himself.”
He remembers home.
He remembers his father.
He recognizes where his present direction has taken him.
And he turns.
He goes home.
That movement provides a remarkably simple picture of repentance:
Leaving → awakening → turning → returning.
Repentance is therefore not simply the rejection of a particular behaviour.
It is a return to relationship.
The surprising father
But the most startling part of the story is not the son's decision to return.
It is the father's response.
The son expects to return as someone who no longer deserves to be treated as a son. He prepares a confession and imagines a diminished position within the household.
But while he is still far away, his father sees him.
The father runs toward him.
He embraces him.
He welcomes him.
The father's response is dramatically generous and forms the central surprise of the story. The parable has therefore long been read as a story not only of repentance but of the father's willingness to receive the returning son.
The son thinks primarily in terms of worthiness.
The father responds in terms of relationship.
The son thinks:
“I have lost my place.”
The father says, in effect:
“You are still my son.”
This changes the emotional meaning of repentance.
Repentance is no longer merely a movement from guilt toward acquittal.
It becomes a movement from alienation toward relationship.
From distance toward home.
From estrangement toward belonging.
Repentance and the Father
This is why repentance cannot be fully understood apart from Jesus' teaching about God as Father.
If God is imagined primarily as a distant judge waiting to punish, repentance may be understood mainly as an attempt to avoid punishment.
But if God is understood as the Father who welcomes the returning child, repentance takes on another character.
The sinner does not merely escape something.
The sinner returns to Someone.
This is a fundamental movement in Jesus' vision:
Kingdom → Repentance → Father
God's reign is announced.
The human being turns toward that reign.
And the God encountered there is not merely sovereign but Father.
Repentance is therefore not self-hatred.
It is not despair.
It is not the permanent definition of oneself by one's failure.
It is the recognition that one's present direction is wrong and the willingness to turn.
“Come home”
This makes the language of repentance surprisingly positive.
Repentance can be frightening when it is presented only as condemnation.
But Jesus' story gives repentance another dimension.
Come home.
The invitation is not merely:
“Admit that you are bad.”
It is:
“Recognize where you are going. Turn around. Come home.”
This does not make wrongdoing unimportant.
The son does not pretend that nothing happened.
He acknowledges what he has done.
But repentance is not completed by confession alone.
He gets up.
He goes.
He returns.
Repentance becomes embodied in movement.
This is consistent with the broader pattern of Jesus' teaching: inner transformation and outward action belong together.
The elder brother: another kind of distance
The story does not end with the younger son's return.
There is another son.
The elder brother has never left the household physically.
Yet he too is distant from the father.
He cannot understand the father's joy.
He resents the welcome given to his brother.
This is important because it prevents us from reducing repentance to the obvious sinner's return.
A person can be physically near a religious community and yet remain spiritually distant from its deepest values.
A person can obey rules and still fail to understand the character of the Father.
A person can remain at home and still need to come home.
The story therefore challenges two forms of distance:
the distance of rebellion and the distance of resentment.
The younger brother is lost in a far country.
The elder brother is lost within the household.
Both need to encounter the Father's heart.
This observation becomes especially important when we later consider Jesus' teaching about righteousness, neighbour, forgiveness, and love.
The issue is not simply:
Who is inside and who is outside?
The deeper question is:
Who understands the character of the Father?
Repentance as a change of vision
Here we return to the central methodological insight of this study.
Jesus uses a familiar word:
Repentance.
But he places it within a new vision.
Repentance is not merely a religious duty imposed upon a guilty person.
It is a response to the discovery that God is already at work and that one's present direction is out of harmony with God's reign.
The person who repents begins to see differently.
God is no longer merely the One before whom I must justify myself.
God is the One toward whom I can return.
The world is no longer simply a place in which I must protect myself.
It becomes the place in which I can begin to live according to God's reign.
Other people are no longer merely competitors, threats, or outsiders.
They become persons with whom I am called to live in love.
Thus repentance becomes the first movement of a transformed way of seeing.
From preparation to participation
The distinction between John and Jesus should not be exaggerated. Both call people to moral transformation, and both stand within the prophetic tradition of calling Israel back to God.
Yet Jesus' Kingdom proclamation gives repentance a distinctive place within the pattern developed in this study.
If God's Kingdom is already at hand, repentance is not simply preparation for an event that has not yet occurred.
It is the decision to begin living according to the reality of God's reign.
The future may still matter.
Judgment may still matter.
Hope for God's final victory may still matter.
But the decisive response begins now.
The future may be God's promise.
Repentance is our response in the present.
Or, more simply:
Turn around.
Come home.
Rediscover who you are and whose you are.
This leads naturally to the next question.
Who is this God to whom Jesus calls people to return?
The answer increasingly comes through one of Jesus' most familiar—and yet most deeply transformed—words:
Father.
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