On Repentance

I continue to take up the themes of John Piper's book, What Jesus Demands of the World. This series is neither an extended review of the book or a recapitulation of its contents, but a interaction by one reader with the "demands of Jesus" as laid out by Piper.

The second "demand" is repentance.

From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matt. 4:17.

Of repentance Piper writes:

Repenting means experiencing a change of mind so that we can see God as true and beautiful and worthy of all our praise and all our obedience. This change of mind also embraces Jesus in the same way. We know this because Jesus said, "If God were your father, you would love me, for I came from God" (John 8:42). Seeing God with a new mind includes seeing Jesus with a new mind.

Repentance of this kind comes of realization and recognition of who God is and what he has done. It is the burden of all the New Testament Gospel accounts to bring readers to that realization and recognition.

What then? With every such recognition, in whatever degree, comes a corresponding degree of repentance. There is a well-known poem by James Wright which describes something like this. The poem does not use the word repentance, nor is Wright talking about Biblical repentance here, but in his poem we see the motion of the mind that moves from recognition of something true and beautiful and on to a sense of repentance that is not abject ("woe is me, a slug, a worm, a total creep") but the beginning of a life that incorporates that new recognition into its understanding and is lived accordingly. The poem is called Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

[See all previous posts in this series here.]