The baptism of repentance

And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Mark 1:4)

In most of John’s name ‘the Baptist’ follows. It means John is the Baptist. It is a similar phenomenon to Jesus that a common noun Christ used for him as a proper noun. The most basic reason that John got a nick name ‘Baptist’ was due to his main work, baptizing. Even Jesus was baptized by him and through this we can assume wideness of baptism performance and universal acceptance of his baptism.

The performance to immerse a person and pull out of it is a sort of religious ceremony. As a birthday ceremony focusing on the fellowship of gathered people rather than candles, song and a hero/heroin of birthday, in baptism also a certain spiritual incident is a core of it rather than water and a word, “I baptize you.” The incident is no other than repentance. So Mark explained it in today’s content, John was preaching a baptism of repentance.

As we are going to deal with the word ‘repentance’ repeatedly throughout this meditation, I feel better to stop here today. The reason that I try to mention the conception of repentance is not only its importance in Christian faith but also its ample misunderstanding. In fact not only a word repentance, other words that takes a position of the center of faith has multiple layers in its meaning and huge possibility of misunderstanding. Salvation, God, faith and love are few of them.

Shall we simply observe how the meaning of repentance is getting dull of its sense or being misunderstood? We have a tendency to think the word, repentance as regretting past disobedient to our parent, lying to others and compensating cheating. The most important example for such tendency is the story of Zacchaeus. As we know he decided to pay back four times the amount if he had cheated anybody out of anything and gave half of his possessions to the poor with repentance after meeting Jesus. The core of this story is not Zacchaeus’ moral change but God’s sovereignty that allows salvation even in such sinner’s house. Sometimes there are preachers to force the public to repent in such way in a revival service or special meeting. What is worse they demand the people to write their sin’s list on paper. Probably sensible people may be greatly impressed by such performance. However, the phenomenon impressed by someone or something is quite different from the phenomenon captured by God’s favor. If we consider such religious impression only, pseudo-cults are much more powerful than us.

The Greek ‘Metanoia’ translated into repentance means a fundamental change of one’s life direction. It is not the thing like a problematic student goes to a teacher to write a reflection report but changes the foundation of ultimate concern from the things on the earth to the things in the heaven. That is not the level of changing one’s behavior like a gangster to an exemplary student but the level of existence that is shifting one’s concern from this world to the other world. If we understand it as humanistic term repentance is called as ‘paradigm shift’. It doesn’t mean practical changing of one’s behavior is meaningless in Christian faith. To those who are repented may follow practical changes in their life. However, the Bible asks us much deeper and fundamental change.

Is really such fundamental changes has happened to us? Does our soul direct to heaven, the hidden world of life? Have our soul began to move toward the world of life in heaven that only can be opened when we entirely put down everything related to us. Is such passion working as a driving power of our life today?