“Everything Has Become New!”: Reconciliation and Repentance in the New Testament
The healing of broken relationships is central to the experience of faith. The Bible urges us to be reconciled both to God and our fellow human beings. These different types of relationships (human-divine and human-human) cannot be kept separate, but affect and interact with each other. Sometimes our relationships with others affect the quality of our relationship with God1 and, at other times, our relationship with God affects our relationships with other people.2 Thus, the effects of God’s reconciling work do not move in only one direction, but flow back and forth, creating and renewing all kinds of relationships. Estrangement from and reconciliation with God and our fellow human beings is a theme that is found throughout the Bible. For this essay, we will focus on two particular examples of the theme in the New Testament: reconciliation in 2 Corinthians and repentance in Luke-Acts.
Reconciliation in 2 Corinthians
The apostle Paul had a complicated relationship with the church in Corinth. He left behind an extensive correspondence with that community which reveals both the heights of his affection for them and the depths of hurt and frustration they caused each other. This is what makes reading his words about reconciliation in 2 Corinthians so interesting. Paul spoke of reconciliation with God in the midst of working to affect his own reconciliation with the Corinthian community.
The problems between Paul and the Corinthians began when other missionaries came to town after his departure, preaching a different version of the gospel. This led to a painful conflict between Paul and the community. He returned to the city to try to straighten things out, but it did not go well. Next, he sent them a harsh letter, which he would later refer to as having written “with many tears” (2 Cor 2:4). Finally, Paul sent his mentee, Titus, to the city on his behalf. Titus returned to Paul, reporting that the Corinthians had renewed both their affection for Paul and their dedication to the gospel message he preached. In response to this welcome report, Paul wrote another letter, known as the “letter of reconciliation,” which forms part of what we call 2 Corinthians.3
Within this letter of reconciliation, Paul writes about the radical change in perspective that arises from Christ’s death on the cross. Christ’s death changes us because we participate in it: “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Cor 5:14). Since we have died, everything has changed, including our perspective on our fellow human beings: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view… if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor 5:16-17). Our worldview and our relationships change radically because God has “reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18). Reconciliation begins with God and is given by God through Christ. This idea of reconciliation was so central to Paul that he calls his ministry a “ministry of reconciliation.”
Modern Christians tend to interpret this reconciliation in very individualistic terms: that Christ died to atone for the sins of individuals, so that those who believe can be reconciled to God, one by one; however, Paul’s vision of reconciliation is much grander. He explicitly identifies the recipient of God’s reconciliation, and it is not the individual: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (5:19). According to Ched Myers and Elaine Enns, this, along with the “new creation” language, identifies the passage as apocalyptic: “Conversion is not only an inner change of heart, or a private change of mind, but a revelation of everything. This is at once both profoundly personal and political.”4 To Myers and Enns, however, this is not a world-destroying kind of apocalypticism, but a world-transforming kind. In Christ, God was working to restore and renew the world, and those who proclaim Christ’s gospel participate in this work of reconciliation and restoration. As God’s ambassador, Paul proclaimed the news of God’s reconciling work and sought to live out its implications in his relationship with the Corinthians.
Repentance in Luke-Acts
Although Luke does not frequently use the word “reconciliation,” his idea of “repentance” is interesting to explore in conversation with ideas of reconciliation elsewhere in the Bible. In Luke-Acts, repentance is the vehicle through which people experience reconciliation with God. In Jesus’ final words to His disciples before His ascension, He says that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in His name to all nations” (Lk 24:47). The primary mission of the followers of Jesus is to proclaim a message of repentance and forgiveness of sins. This mission is faithfully enacted by the early Christians in the book of Acts, where the theme of repentance and the command to repent feature prominently in the speeches of Peter and Paul.5
We tend to think of “repentance” as feeling sorry for our personal sins and perhaps doing some type of penance, but the Greek word used by Luke is much richer. At its most literal, metanoeō means to change one’s mind. But its full connotation as used by Luke indicates that repentance happens when people are converted from one way of thinking to another way of thinking. As Joel Green writes, repentance “connotes the (re)alignment of one’s life—that is, disposition and behaviors—toward God’s purpose.”6 To repent represents a complete changing of one’s life, a turning towards God. It is being converted to the way of Jesus. As Paul would say, “See, everything has become new!”
In Acts, people experience this kind of repentance when they hear the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. When they repent upon hearing about Jesus, they are reconciled to God. One of the most interesting stories in this regard is the story of Peter and Cornelius. Acts indicates that Cornelius is the first Gentile convert to Christianity. After Peter’s preaching converts Cornelius and his household, they all receive the Holy Spirit and are baptized. After this, Peter goes to Jerusalem to tell the believers there what had happened. In response to his story, the believers say, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (11:18). There are two interesting things to notice here; first, the repentance leads to life. Again, it is the conversion to God’s way of thinking that brings salvation to these new Gentile believers. Second, notice that it is God who gives them the repentance. So repentance, and the reconciliation that flows from it, are always something initiated by God and facilitated by the Spirit. Although it is repentance that leads to life, this does not mean that we save ourselves.
The Reconciliation of All Things
For Luke, it is repentance that leads to life. Jesus’ story causes people to turn around from their usual way of being in the world and turn back toward God. In this turning, as Paul writes, people stop looking at the world from a human point of view and begin looking at it from God’s point of view. Within the individual, within community, and within the world, new creation breaks forth. Whenever we start to think God’s work is all about us as individuals, the Bible reminds us of these ever-growing circles of reconciliation and renewal. It reminds us that God’s vision of restoration is always bigger than our own. As Colossians tells us, in Christ God “was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20). God was pleased to reconcile “all things.” Through the cross God was at work, initiating a plan for the reconciliation and renewal of all that is.
Although reconciliation is initiated by God, not by us, repentance is the proper human response to God’s initiative. Therefore, when Peter, Paul, and others instruct people to repent in Acts, we find the imperative voice. In our own preaching and ministry, we can also call upon people to align their lives and their ways of thinking ever more closely to the purposes of God, even as we acknowledge that reconciliation is initiated and enacted by God, not by us, and that it is forged for the benefit of the whole world.
Notes
1. This is implied by Matt 5:21-24. In this passage, Jesus said that when you are going to offer a gift to God at the altar, you should first go and be reconciled to anyone you have harmed. Trouble in human relationships can interfere with your relationship to God.
2. Eph 2:12-14 expresses that it is our reconciliation with God that allows us to experience reconciliation with one another. It reminds us that through the cross of Christ, God has brought Jews and Gentiles together; God has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” When we participate together in reconciliation with God, we are also reconciled to one another.
3. Many biblical scholars believe that 2 Corinthians is a composite of several different letters that Paul wrote to Corinth. There is not unanimous agreement about how to divide the letter, but many believe that 2 Cor 10-13 contains part of the “letter of tears,” and that the “letter of reconciliation” can be found in 2 Cor 1-7.
4. Ched Myers and Elaine Enns, Ambassadors of Reconciliation: New Testament Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, vol. 1 (New York: Orbis Books, 2009), 10.
5. See Acts 2:38, 3:19, 5:31, 8:22, 13:24, 17:30, 19:4, 20:21, and 26:20.
6. Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 858.
