An old sober booze hound, friend of mine, likes to tell the story about his first day off the drink. Apparently, some nondescript, former drunk, crusty old timer, sidled up to him after at his first 12 step meeting and said, “Don’t worry son the only thing you’ll have to change here, is everything!”
Metanoia is a lot like that. The English translation of the word ‘metanoia’ when used in scripture is most frequently ‘repent.’ However, the idea of repentance as we now understand it doesn’t do justice to the profound inside out, top to bottom, change of life, that metanoia, repentance, should convey.1 Perhaps a radical ‘change of heart’ and a consequent complete change in thinking and behavior gets closer to capturing the original meaning.
Mark’s gospel, which is generally accepted by scholars as the earliest of the Christian gospels,2 does not waste much ink before driving home the essential point that radical change is what’s on offer.
Change your hearts.
In his opening salvo with the wacky out-there Jewish prophet and wilderness guy, John the Baptist, repentance, metanoia, change of heart, is offered through baptism (Mark 1:1-8). Of course, the symbolism of baptism has held sway in Christian practice since its earliest communities were formed. And not least amongst those baptismal symbols, especially when applied to adults, is the idea of dying to the old life of self-centeredness and being reborn anew.
Moreover, the biblical symbolism of change or deep internal ‘spiritual makeover’ is not confined to baptism. A good argument can be made that almost every transforming act performed by the God with skin on man from Galilee, whether it’s giving sight to the blind, or enabling the crippled to walk etc., is a symbolic call to this self-same deep chance of heart or metanoia. In this schema, spiritually, you are blind before the change of heart, but end up with laser sharp vision. Or you’re unable to walk prior; but subsequently you’re out and about winning marathons.
Jesus was a serious heart change agent.
Make no mistake, Jesus was a serious heart change agent. After the baptizer, got hauled off to prison, a journey from which he would not return. The first utterance from the Galilean, realizing that the mantel had now fallen to him, at least in Mark’s telling of the story, is “repent,” metanoia (Mark 1:15). Central to everything else that Jesus subsequently gets up to, is this core message of “change your hearts.”
Indeed, every Hebrew prophet, worth their salt, right up to and including the aforementioned wacky baptizer, in one form or another proclaimed the urgent need for root and branch change. And when it comes to the specifics of what needs to be changed, metanoia, spiritual transformation of the heart, was and is a high-ranking contender. Consider the words of another wacky Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, “I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh,” (Ezek 11:19).
Why all this emphasis on changing hearts you may be asking? Well, it is because from a spiritual perspective the heart is ground zero, the center for action, it is the heart not the mind that ultimately determines the sort of person we are and can become.3
This is not a conclusion I came to either lightly or quickly. But it is a now my deeply held conviction based on two-and-a-half decades of actively pursuing metanoia in my own life.
From my experience, this business of changing your heart is more like a series of mini spiritual transfusions, and less like a wham bang thank you mam one off transplant. It’s a journey, perhaps the greatest journey of all, the metanoia journey, and one that I’m still on. I’ll have more to say on that in my next blog post.
- Guy D. Nave, The Role and Function of Repentance in Luke-Acts (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2002). [↩]
- Timothy R. Carmody, The Gospel of Mark: Question by Question (New York: Paulist Press, 2010), 1. [↩]
- Jan G. Bovenmars, A Biblical Spirituality of the Heart (New York: Alba House Publishing, 1991), Preface. [↩]
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