Turn Around

Quite often, when I’m at work and with one woman in particular, I find myself saying the phrase, “Turn around.” Some days she’s headed for a busy road and I need to gently instruct her to go the other way. Other days she’s headed for food or a drink that would probably make her sick and I have to ask her to “turn around.” She has a cognitive disability and doesn’t always make decisions that are in her best interests.

Whenever I say this phrase to her, I can’t help but think of a gospel song called “Turn Around” by Jonny Lang. “The road that you take might lead you astray, but don’t be afraid to turn around.”

Seems fitting. She needs to trust that my way is going to be better for her in the long run and she needs to have the courage to act on that trust.

This idea of turning around is essentially what Jesus meant when he said “Repent and believe” in the Gospel accounts.

Most of us have grown up equating that phrase, “repent and believe,” with “confess your sins and believe in Jesus.” While “repent and believe” doesn’t necessarily not mean “confess your sins and believe in Jesus,” to a first-century Jew, they interpreted it a little differently.

Well-known New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says this in his book, The Challenge of Jesus:

How are we to unlearn our meanings for such a phrase and to hear it through first-century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it at around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion and who was sent in AD 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee.

His task, as he describes it in his autobiography, was to persuade the hot headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better [plan]. So when he confronted the rebel leader, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the words he uses are remarkably familiar to readers of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to “repent and believe in me.”

If we look at the phrase “repent and believe” in this light, the New Testament, and much of what is recorded from Jesus’ last several days before his trial and suffering, makes a lot more sense – the climax of which is seen in Jesus’ “triumphal entry.”

“As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.’” Luke 19:41:44

After all of his miracles signifying a different kind of kingdom, and after all of his counter-cultural preaching, Jesus enters Jerusalem and is struck with the reality that the Jews aren’t going to listen to him and the city will eventually be destroyed. So what does he do?

He weeps.

He had pleaded with people to forget about their swords and the preconception that the Messiah would come and forcefully restore glory and power to Israel. Instead, he preached a Kingdom that would come through peace, love, and faith in a God who would give up His own Son so that not just Israel but the entire world would receive a different kind of glory and power – the forgiveness of sins and the Spirit’s power working in us to carry out what He purposes to do here on earth in God’s inaugurated kingdom.

They needed to give up their own agenda and to trust Him, and to trust His way, but most didn’t, and Jerusalem was destroyed.

This different kind of Kingdom that started when Jesus came down to us and was resurrected is incredibly difficult to live out on a day-to-day basis. As crazy as it probably seemed to first-century Jews hearing Jesus’ message to give up their ideas of a forceful, victorious Messiah, sometimes it seems just as crazy to me to trust in God’s plan and not my own agenda.

Conventional wisdom would tell me to do certain things with my money, time, knowledge, vocation, and so on, but in Scripture, Jesus flips all of this on its head and preaches a completely different way of life – a Kingdom way of life.

This is the way of humility, service, mercy, justice, peace, and purity.

Whether it’s from hearing the song “Turn Around” or telling the woman I work with the same thing, there is always something to remind me daily that I, Chris, need to turn around. This whole “Kingdom way of life” thing doesn’t come naturally to me.

Like the woman I described at the beginning, I’m constantly doing or believing things that are almost like taking one step into a busy street. Left to my own path and my own agenda, the result would be extremely messy and destructive. 

But luckily there is an alternative, and Someone who I can put my faith and trust in and follow His way because I know that He has my best interests in mind and loves me to death.

Where are you headed in the wrong direction and need to make the decision to turn around?

-CK