"Repent?"
- Dr. Todd R. Wright
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Are you ready? Ready to pause and reflect? Ready to wrestle with this story? Ready to repent?
Matthew 3:1-12
December 7, 2025
Dr. Todd R. Wright
Every year, during Advent, we’re confronted with a voice crying out in the wilderness!
It draws us, just as it did the crowds Matthew says came “from Jerusalem and all Judea”.
Jill Duffield wonders why they came:
“Are they simply curious? Perhaps. However, we learn in the Gospels that they do more than gawk. They stay. They listen. They respond. They confess. They get baptized.
[Why?] What are people seeking and what do they find in [John the Baptist’s] harsh words?”[1]
I think the answer might surprise us.
I think they came because they felt a need to repent. And I think we do too.
Chelsey Harmon reminds us that this is part of what Advent is all about. She says, “It’s time for our annual trip to the banks of the Jordan River and to come to terms with whether we are ready — prepared — to repent and receive the kingdom of heaven.”[2]
Are you ready? Ready to pause and reflect? Ready to wrestle with this story? Ready to repent?
It might help to ease into our answer.
Repentance was not a new idea for the crowd that gathered on the banks of the river.
The Temple offered a place to confess and ask for forgiveness. To seek God and offer your sacrifices and hope for mercy. People had been doing it for centuries.
John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest. He was part of the religious establishment. He knew the prayers. He offered them to the people in Jerusalem, and back in his hometown, as a comfort
and a connection to the God of grace.
But something was missing … at least for some, or they wouldn’t have hiked to the wilderness.
Maybe they were seeking an authentic prophetic voice, someone like Elijah.
Maybe they were trying to connect to their roots, seeking God in the silence and raw beauty.
Maybe they were remembering 40 years of sinning and straying … and repenting that molded them as a people and cemented their relationship with God.
Or maybe they went because nothing else was working and they were desperate.
We host a group here at Village that could teach us about that sort of desperation (and I’m not talking about the bridge group!) They meet here every Friday night. You see them listed on the church calendar, but they try to remain anonymous. Still, their practices are well known.
They gather because they have regrets and long for change. They gather because they know they cannot do it alone. They gather regularly because the process of redemption takes time.
Ginna Bairby muses on how the NA model might apply to our text:[3]
“Most of what I know about apologies, I have learned in the rooms of a Twelve Step Program. The twelve steps talk not about apologies, but about amends. This is perhaps a better word than apology because making amends implies not just claiming ‘mea culpa’ but also taking restorative action to fix – mend – the situation and relationship. This is the territory of repair and restoration. [And] I think that’s exactly what John means by his favorite word: Repent. Literally, the Greek translates [as] “turn around” — change our ways in such a way that our future looks different from our past.”
She elaborates,
“In the twelve steps, steps eight and nine are the most directly related to the process of amends. Step eight asks us to “[make] a list of all persons we [have] harmed and [become] willing to make amends to them all.” In step nine, we “[make] direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” A typical amends involves naming what we have done wrong to the person we have harmed (confession) and telling them what we plan to do to differently going forward — or asking them how they might
like to see us repair the harm (repentance).
Notice there is no room in the process for self-defense or lengthy explanation. The template is simply, ‘I did wrong and hurt you. I am sorry. Here’s how I will change my behavior in the future.’”
So I’m wondering if John is inviting people – his neighbors, and strangers, and people like us – to make amends. I’m wondering if that is what drew people out into the wilderness. And I’m wondering whether that might really be what we are called to spend Advent doing.
So what would that look like?
It’s not just confession. It is changing course. It is a reorientation.
This past Spring, you may remember, I went out to the wilderness. I took part in an Outward Bound journey into Joshua Tree National Park, a place much closer to the wilderness of John than the Appalachian Trail that I had previously experienced.
The landscape was different. There was a lot of sand and signs of snakes. There were no streams or trails. So they taught us how to safely navigate with a map and compass.
Here’s the thing – with no magic voice to help you navigate, you had to constantly check your position. If you had strayed off course, you had to reorient yourself. And then you had to keep walking in that new direction … until you had found the road, or the cache of water, or a place to set up camp for the night.
For John, repentance, reorientation, started with baptism, “a visible sign for this [sort of] change, an immersive rite typically reserved [at that point] for Gentile converts to Judaism, to signify their comprehensive conversion. But John is calling on the children of Abraham to undergo this baptism, too, as if to say, ‘We all require conversion.’”[4]
And like our experience of baptism, it was not something a person did alone.
As one scholar puts it,
“The whole community is involved … as witnesses, as fellow sojourners, as encouragers, and as the [welcoming] family of God.”[5]
And that created community, like NA, is committed to more than a single moment of change. They are committed to a lifetime of reflection and repentance, of course corrections and living in new ways.
That sounds like a lot, but it really just means checking your compass and taking a step in the right direction; and repeating that day after day.
So are you ready to repent?
Rabbi Eliezer, a prominent sage of the 1st Century, taught his disciples "Repent … one day before your death." One of them asked, "How will we know when that day is?" He replied, "All the more reason to repent today, lest you die tomorrow"[6]
Or perhaps you are more familiar with the Tim McGraw song, “Live like you were dying”, which contains the lines:
“He said, ‘I was in my early 40s with a lot of life before me
When a moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days looking at the X-rays
Talkin' 'bout the options and talkin' 'bout sweet times’
I asked him when it sank in
That this might really be the real end
How's it hit ya when you get that kind of news?
Man, whatcha do? And he said
‘I went skydiving, I went Rocky Mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'’
And he said, ‘Some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’"[7]
Either way, Advent is the perfect time to follow John’s advice and repent so that you might receive, and experience, and help make real for others, the kingdom of heaven God is offering! Amen
[1] From her reflection on the text for the Presbyterian Outlook, 12/6/19
[2] From her reflections on the text for cepreaching.org, 12/7/25
[3] From her reflections on the text for the Presbyterian Outlook, 12/7/25
[4] From the SALT project’s reflections on the text, 12/2/25
[5] From Chelsey Harmon’s reflections on the text for cepreaching.org, 12/7/25
[6] I found references to this exchange many places, including https://yucommentator.org/2023/09/repent-today-lest-you-die-tomorrow/
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