This week, our readings are Malachi 3:1-4 and Luke 3:1-6.

The second week of Advent, in the scheme we follow, is one set aside to reflect on the work and ministry of the prophets—the men and women who, through the ages, have heard the voice of God and passed on to His people what He's saying. Often in scripture, that's a message around the mess human beings are making of the world and each other, and a call to live life differently.

This idea often gets summed up in the word 'repentance'—and sure enough, that's the language we find in our gospel reading this week, in which we meet John the Baptist, not as himself so much, but representing that ongoing prophetic ministry into the life of the New Testament, and not just leaving it gathering dust in the Old. We're told that 'He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.'

The problem with the language of repentance, though, is it's not really the right word, or even—one might argue—the right concept. The Collins English Dictionary defines 'repent' like this: 'If you repent, you show or say that you are sorry for something wrong you have done.' That tallies with how most of us think of it—recognising that we've done something wrong, then being sorry, and saying sorry for it. In other words, it's a word or concept focusing on our behaviours.

It can't, though, be about behaviour, because all behaviour is reasonable—in the sense that there is a reason for it—and trying to change our behaviours without addressing the reasons for them is just a recipe for repetition and an ongoing sense of failure as we watch ourselves, again and again, doing the things we know are wrong and dislike in ourselves. That's not what God wants for us—He hasn't, through the ages, been sending people to tell us to beat ourselves up!

As it turns out, that understanding of 'repent' isn't really the biblical concept at all. It's an accident of translation. We get 'repent' in our Bibles because of the influence of the Latin translations of the fourth century, which used the word paenitentia (you can see the short step from there to 'penitence' and therefore 'repent') to translate the Greek in which the gospels were first written. The Greek word, though, metanoia, if we don't bother with the Latin intermediary, arrives in English as literally 'go beyond your mind', or more naturally, 'change your mind'. The Hebrew beneath it, if you want to dig even deeper, in the Old Testament is shub, meaning 'to turn back'.

The call to 'repentance' in the prophets and the gospels is about something more fundamental than how we behave and what we do. It's about the orientation of our souls, the things towards which our innermost selves are attracted, about the fundamental building blocks of our thoughts, attitudes, and prejudices—it's about the deepest part of our core being and identity.

It's a call to be brutally honest with ourselves about who we are when everything else is stripped away, to stop averting our eyes from the focus of our hearts, and to see if the thing we're facing is really good, pleasing, and perfect. If it's not, we're invited to turn back towards God, to go beyond the patterns of thought we've become ensnared in, and to start the real work of changing our minds about ourselves and the world around us.

The amazing thing is that even by just beginning to do that, we open ourselves more and more to the presence of the Holy Spirit within us and discover that with Her at work, a lot of the heavy lifting gets done when we're not even looking. We will discover, as Malachi reminds us, that She will wash our hearts as with fuller's soap and refine our thoughts and minds so they sparkle like gold and silver. We will discover that our behaviours will start changing as a consequence, not a cause, and that our lives become ever more fitting to be presented before the Lord.

That sounds better than tying ourselves up in guilt, doesn't it? Perhaps that's why God has been sending people through the ages to remind us again and again; maybe it's time we listened to them and gave it a go?