So they went off and preached repentance. Mark 6:12 NABRE
Jesus provides witness to His Apostles and decides it is time for them to go out on their own; healing, anointing and preaching. Jesus gives them instruction about how to enter a town and leave if necessary, to accept hospitality and to not take advantage of the people’s generosity. With their instruction and given authority from Jesus they go and they preach repentance. The word used for repentance is metanoia, a call to turn away, change direction. The idea is for people to turn away from sin and toward God in a compete change of heart. To repent is a wholehearted conversion or return to the Lord, we acknowledge wrong doing and a wrong path, seeking forgiveness and acceptance from God. The call to repentance is a central element of Jesus’ preaching. Mark opens his gospel describing John the Baptist in the dessert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Mark 1:4) When we repent we turn from how we are living, how we depend on our self and how we think we are in control to dependency on God, to proclaim the need for God in our life and to accept God’s help in all we live and accomplish. Jesus’ mission for the apostles to preach repentance demonstrates how Jesus has come to make a change. The usual way of following God, the ritual procedures and the feast days are not enough to accomplish this dependence on God. Jesus wants the community to know God more personally and to pray more directly. God desires all people to come to Him all the time.
We cannot be great without God’s help, we may succeed by human standards but in the eyes of God to truly be great we must follow the will of God and depend on God to multiply our accomplishments.
Do you need change in your life? Can you turn more directly toward God?
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