Did you know? (Sunday, March 9, 2025)

In the Christian imagination, the word “repentance “belongs to the same vocabulary as “sin” and “salvation.” We need to repent of our sins in order to be saved. Rightly understood, this is correct. But repentance too has been trivialized. In the minds of many Christians, its first association is introspective guilt. It means feeling really sorry for what you have done or left undone, feeling really bad about the horrible person that you are. But the biblical meaning of “Repent” is not primarily contrition, but resolve. In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means primarily to return to God. Its metaphorical home is the exile. To repent means to return from exile, to reconnect with God, to walk the way in the wilderness that leads from Babylon to God.