The word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert. John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luke 3.2-6)
Each year, as summer begins, there is an event on June 7th that takes place across the globe, at least here and there, called “Change Your Mind Day.” More than a catchy name, the event utilizes Buddhist meditational techniques to assist participants in changing their minds, from restlessness to rest, from complexity to simplicity, from blindness to insight.
In St. Louis, the event took place one year on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, once a traffic bridge, but now the world’s longest pedestrian bridge, spanning the Mississippi River for a mile and a quarter. Single-file on one side of the bridge, 175 people sat with legs crossed and eyes closed as they meditated, the sounds of the great Mississippi providing a thunderous white noise that blotted out the noise of their own trafficking minds, as they sought a new way of seeing the world.
Long before there was a “Change Your Mind Day” on the Mississippi River, there was a guy on the banks of the Jordan River with much the same mission, urging people to change their minds. Cut from a different mold, this man, wearing buckskins and sandals, walked out of the desert one day and began to preach to anybody who would listen, telling them it was high time to make some changes in the way they thought.
His name was John and, because he also performed baptisms in the river, an exterior ritual meant to signify an interior change of mind, was given the moniker, “the Baptist.” We meet him today at the Jordan, as we do each Advent season, the gatekeeper to Christmas, meaning we don’t get to the holiday dinner table without passing by John and hearing his call to change our ways.
Described by the writer Luke as “a voice of one crying out in the desert,” John’s mission, as the evangelist calls it, was to proclaim a baptism of repentance. Having heard the story many times over the years, as each Christmas season draws near, we’ve become tone-deaf to the words, growing comfortably familiar with John, something we never should do.
John was not the cuddly, huggy, softy therapist-type, not by a mile, and if we want to experience the real intent of the birth of the Messiah, then we have to be man enough or woman enough to hear his message loud and clear, like the waves beating on the shores of the river behind him. Ignore or soften his words, like errant teenagers breezing past their parents after missing their curfew, and we may get to the safety of Christmas, but we won’t have grown-up much as we dash up the steps.
Unfortunately, the word repentance that John uses regularly as the linchpin of his preaching has been misappropriated by misguided messengers to indicate punishment, as in penitent or penitentiary, implying we must do time for our offenses. The real meaning of the word is found when we look at its Greek equivalent, metanoia, which signifies a reversal, especially of a decision, a turning around, especially in the direction we’re going–in other words–a change of mind. Metanoia is driving down a road and realizing we’re going in the wrong direction, requiring us–if we want to get where we’re intended to go–to take the next exit and go in a different direction.
John, with the prophet’s keen vision to see things most of us don’t see, recognizes that the world is going in the wrong direction and, like the flagman on the road, waves a red flag before us, indicating we need to detour because the road ahead is dangerous and hazardous to our well-being. Obviously, we ignore his flag-waving at our own peril.
As we hear the evangelist tell us, “Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent,” a sure indication that pursuing the wrong path is not going to go well for us. Better to turn around, metanoia, and find a better way, even if it isn’t the quickest or the easiest way. Or, using a military analogy, we can say metanoia is the same as the order, “About face,” calling us to make a turn of 180 degrees from the direction we were going.
Of course, the reality is that few of us are able to make an about face, a complete change of direction, not abruptly anyway. Like a big ship in the ocean, we can only change direction slowly, gradually maneuvering ourselves around, and whereas a ship might do it in five miles, it is going to take many more miles for us, usually a lifetime.
As one spiritual writer astutely said, “The real spiritual struggles of life are, more often than we care to know, the struggles of a lifetime. They are embedded in us like thorns in the flesh.” That fact reminds her of the ancient monastic story told of an inquirer to the monastery who asked an old monk, “What do you do in the monastery?” The aged monk answered, “Oh, we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up again.”
In other words, metanoia may be the work of a lifetime, not a change of mind at a minute’s notice. The problem, of course, is that too many of us come to accept things as they are, not willing to keep getting up, content to stay where we are, doing what we’ve always done, never changing our minds on anything. The opposite of metanoia, we might say, is complacency, an uncritical satisfaction with who we are and with what we think.
A writer of a newspaper column once told of a man she knew who was, in her words, a bigot, a tyrant, and a creep. In other words, not one of her favorite people. She said that the man went into therapy for three years because, at some point, he felt bad about his personality. However, after three years of therapy, the man was still a bigot, a tyrant, and a creep. The only thing that changed was, as she said, he had learned to live with himself.
And therein is the ever-present danger, the same warning that John the Baptist issues, that we decide we can’t or won’t change, telling ourselves, “It’s just the way I am,” avoiding the more difficult question of asking ourselves if it is the way we were meant to be. Years easily pass with never changing our minds on one thing. We become complacent, comfortable, content with who we are and where we are and what we think.
When that happens, metanoia can’t find a way into our minds because they’re closed and locked as tight as Fort Knox. But instead of guarding gold, we’re safeguarding our prejudices, our predilections, our present mindset, nothing short of a strike of lightning falling from the sky dislodging us from our high horse as it did Saul, who finally had his eyes opened and who took a different path.
Without that metanoia, that change in mindset, we continue to see the poor as failures, not as fellow humans; we see our indulgence as a right, not as stealing from others; we see our positions as means to enrich ourselves, not as means to serve others. Multiply that mindset by millions of people and we find ourselves living in an inhospitable, hostile, and wholly ungodly world.
A psychologist tells that one of his most important eye-opening experiences came from his own five-year-old daughter. One afternoon, as he was weeding his garden–something he found no pleasure in–and growing unhappier minute by minute, his daughter was having a great time, throwing weeds into the air, singing and dancing.
He yelled at her, telling her to stop. She walked away, but returned a few minutes later. Looking at him, the young girl said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.” He turned to look at her. She said, “Do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day.”
She continued, “But when I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch.” With that, she turned around and returned to the house, leaving him to ponder where in the world she had gained such wisdom and why in the world had he grown so blind. With a sudden insight, gift of his daughter, he realized he was a grouch and resolved to change.
If we don’t have a five-year-old daughter to show us the way or if we have convinced ourselves we’re okay the way we are, ignoring John’s call to change our minds, instead happy with our rock-solid, iron-clad, time-proved mindset, we may never experience metanoia, an unfortunate and unimaginable way to live in a world already full of grouches sorely in need of a change.
Today, John offers us another possibility, a way forward that requires going backwards, turning around the way we think and act, seeing things in a new and in a better way, in the way God sees things, not in the way men see things. Open to repentance or metanoia, freed from our locked mindset and able to change our mind, we can envision a new world, a world where there is hope, where there is humility, where there is humanity.
Only then will we find our way to a stable in Bethlehem, where the One who came to save the world from itself is to be born, the same one a bearded, bold, and ball of fire preacher predicted, urging us to “make straight his paths,” so that “all flesh will see the salvation of God.”
–Jeremy Myers
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