Practice: Repentance or Metanoia?
As I’ve covered in my post on metanoia in Mark 1:15, I differentiated the Greek word metanoia from the typical English translation repent based on different orientations to time.
Metanoia is fundamentally an orientation to time that delays truth. When Jesus calls Simon and Andrew in the lines that immediately follow, he offers them a metaphor: ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.’ If this is a demonstration of metanoia—which I believe it is coming exactly after Jesus’ first recorded words in the earliest Gospel—there is no hint of repentance. He does not say that their life is foolish and mistaken; he simply calls them into a metaphor that cannot possibly have literal meaning at that moment.
Repentance means judging ones past according to an eternal standard and orienting to the future as an atonement for the past. This risks trapping the future with ressentiment—the judgment of the past that poisons one’s orientation to the future.
Metanoia looks forward without knowing what one will or should or can see. ‘I will make you fishers of men’ can have no meaning at that moment. Yet Simon and Andrew follow, and as they follow, we learn through the demonstration of Jesus’ example, what this can mean. The metaphor’s meaning fills out, but only by moving with it.
Mark’s Gospel is full of delayed understanding. Why does Jesus speak in parables? 4:11 and following verses tell us ‘so that they won’t understand.’ Meaning is delayed and only accessible in the following.
How do we turn this into a practice of time? Some questions to ask yourself:
Is your primary orientation to the future one of judgement—what others should be doing; what you should be doing; what has gone wrong and needs fixing? None of these are necessarily wrong, but when they become our dominant orientation to the future, ressentiment looms large.
Are there things that you might need to treat as metanoia—an openness to delayed meaning. Are there things that just need you to take the first step? Volunteering, perhaps, at a local charity? Attending a church service even if you are an avowed atheist without judgement, even without believing just to experience the community and the ceremony of worship?
There are many ways to undertake this practice of metanoia. As a parent, do you imagine your primary relationship to your children as judgement? Are they doing things they way that you would do them? Are you trying to correct your mistakes through your raising of them? Do you see your children as younger, smaller versions of yourself? All of this smacks of repentance, not metanoia.
What would happen if you respected their decisions for what they are: figuring out how to navigate a world that they (or you) don’t fully understand. What if metanoia calls you to listen without immediately formulating a judgment as your response?
Repentance and judgment as our default practices of time run deep. Learning the practice of metanoia. Can open up a new experience of time—one that isn’t immediately founded on precious certainties.
See more Practices of Time
For a deeper comparison of metanoia and repentance, see Metanoia and the Experience of Time: Beyond Repentance and the Practice of Change in Mark’s Gospel