The first recorded words of Jesus, as he began his public ministry, were:

Mark 1:15 — “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!”

But what does the word ‘repentance’ mean?

Jerome, in the Vulgate, translated μετανοεῖτε as poenitentiam agite (‘do acts of penance’).  As Ian Paul notes, this does several things to Jesus’ command:

it shifts it from being focused on attitude and outlook to being concerned with ritual acts;

it moves it from being a response to God to being set in the context of the institution of the Church (whose priests alone could dispense forgiveness through the rite of penance and confession);

and it became a habitual ritual rather than an urgent response to the ‘end times’ coming of God.

In our own day, the gospel is often understood as saying that ‘God accepts people just as they are’.  But while it is true to say that God ‘meets us where we are’, it is also true that he doesn’t leave us there!

Then again, a ‘queer’ reading of Jesus’ teaching has been imagined.  Ian Paul points to this example:

‘Jesus is a queer person. The first thing that Jesus says, that’s recorded in Scripture, he says a word that has been mistranslated as ‘repent’, which then Empire took and said ‘Oh this is a way to control everybody!’

‘This word translates metanoia, a word that actually means ‘change your mind’, go beyond your mind, so what he is saying is: go beyond what you thought you had to be, go beyond what Empire is telling you you have to be, because you can be so much more than that.

Break through the chains, break through the boxes, break through the borders and the barriers, and become something fabulous! And that, to me, that is an act of queering.’

Once more: N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God) has stressed a political/eschatological, rather than a moralistic/pietistic, meaning.  Repentance, for Wright, ‘is what Israel must do if her exile is to come to an end.’  Wright supports this contention with a quotation from Josephus, who writes that in speaking to a man who had plotted against his life, he said he would pardon him ‘if he would show repentance and prove his loyalty to me’ (ei melloi metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai – ‘if he would repent and believe in me’).

Josephus is, in effect, urging the man to abandon his revolutionary ways and trust him (Josephus) for a better way.  Wright asks: if this is what the words meant in Galilee in AD 60, why should we suppose that they meant anything different in Galilee in AD 30?  In Jesus’ case, of course, true repentance involved allegiance to himself.  Wright finds such a meaning in Mt 11:20-24; Mt. 12:38f., 41/Lk. 11:29f., 32; cf. Mk. 8:11–13; Mt. 16:1–4; Lk. 5:29–32; Lk. 13:1–5 and elsewhere.

Ian Paul comments (without referring to Wright’s views):

‘There is no doubt that the coming of God’s kingdom means the inversion of current structures of power and the dethroning of the rich and powerful, as Mary in the Magnificat eloquently expresses in Luke 1.46–55.’

But it may be that Wright is (not for the first time) reversing the background and the foreground of the biblical picture of ‘repentance’.

With regard to the word ‘metanoia’ itself, we should resist the temptation to read too much into its component parts.  Its ‘literal’ meaning may suggest ‘a change of mind’, but this scarcely does justice to its actual usage.  In the NT it generally means ‘to turn’.

In the LXX, the verb metanoeo translates the Hebrew term shuv, and is, according to Abbott Smith:

‘the activity of reviewing one’s actions and feeling contrition or regret for past wrongs. It generally involves a commitment to personal change and the resolve to live a more responsible and humane life.’

Similarly, in the NT the verb and the noun metanoeo and metanoia are generally used in the sense of turning away from sin and towards God:

Matthew 11:20–21 — Then Jesus began to criticize openly the cities in which he had done many of his miracles, because they did not repent. 21 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

Luke 3:8 — “…produce fruit that proves your repentance…”

Luke 5:32 — “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Luke 13:2–5 — 2 He answered them, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered these things? 3 No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you will all perish as well!4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem?5 No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”

Luke 24:46–47 — [Jesus] said to them, “Thus it stands written that the Christ would suffer and would rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

Acts 26:20 (NET) — “I declared to those in Damascus first, and then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds consistent with repentance.”