How Not to Repent, in three lessons (Mark 6.1-29)

When I arrived in France in 2003, I was strangely surprised by a lot of things. One of those things is something that frankly makes sense, but that I’d never seen in America. It was the messages on cigarette packs. A big white box, with writing in huge, black, block letters: “SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE”, or “SMOKING CAUSES BIRTH DEFECTS”, or the wonderfully simple “SMOKING KILLS”.

Then in 2011, it got even more brutal. They started putting photographs on the sides of tobacco products, pictures that come straight out of a horror movie: deformed fetuses, cancerous open mouths, blackened lungs. Suddenly walking down the street and seeing someone with a pack of cigarettes in their hand was enough to turn your stomach.

I don’t know how efficient these things were—plenty of people still smoke today, because everyone is convinced it won’t happen to them—but the initiative was a good one: show people the risk, so that they might not take it.

Mark is doing something similar in today’s text. He’s going to give us several examples of the risk that we all run, and at some of the potential consequences.

But before we get into the text, there’s a bit of context that we need to help situate us. The first bit of context is historical, to help situate us in the story. Up until now, Jesus has ministered primarily in Galilee (the region in which he grew up). His ministry in Galilee comes to an end at the beginning of chapter 6 (today’s text), when he goes to his own hometown. After this, Jesus goes to other regions, and eventually even to Gentile—non-Jewish—regions.

The second bit of context is more thematic. We see three different preachers in our text (or rather three different groups of preachers): Jesus, the twelve apostles, and John the Baptist. These three groups did not preach three different messages. The meat of their message is the same across the board, and that is a message of repentance.

When John baptized people, his baptism was a baptism of repentance (we see in chapter 1, verse 4). Then we read a few verses later, in v. 14-15:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

And then when the apostles are sent out, we read in today’s text (chapter 6, verse 12):

12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

The unifying call of all these messages is the call to repentance. But what is repentance?

The Bible tells us that for all of our variety and our distinctions, when it comes to people there are really only two categories that truly matter: those who are united to God, and those who are not united to God. Those who are united to God are defined by their union with him, and those who are not united to God are defined by their sin (which is rebellion against God).

Now in order for us to be united to God, God has to do a tremendous amount of work. He sends his Son Jesus, God the Son; Jesus gives us the perfect, sinless life he lived, and he takes our sin on himself and is punished in our place for that sin. He pursues us, he calls us from death to life, he gives us new eyes to see him and new hearts to desire him. We cannot understand, measure or overestimate the immensity of the work of Christ.

In comparison, our work is relatively small—but we do have something to do, and that is repentance. Repentance is how the Bible talks about the process by which we become united to God: we confess our sin—that is, we admit that we have sinned and deserve God’s wrath—and then we turn away from that sin to follow after God. Confess our sin, turn away from our sin—that’s repentance. And that repentance is an outworking of our faith—if we have faith in Christ, we will repent of our sin.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind as we work through this passage. We have three different episodes here, with three different preachers (or two preachers and one group of preachers). All three episodes highlight the message that Jesus has proclaimed since chapter 1: the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.

But each of these episodes shows us how not to do this: what it looks like to not respond to the gospel, how not to repent.

Lesson 1: Unbelief (v. 1-6)

Let’s read again, at the beginning of chapter 6:

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus comes to his hometown (Nazareth), and he starts teaching in the synagogue. We don’t know what he taught exactly, but it certainly left no one indifferent. The people who heard him were “astonished,” Mark says. They ask themselves where this man got all this incredible wisdom.

They’re also amazed because of what they’ve heard about Jesus: they know that everywhere Jesus goes, miracles happen. He heals the sick, he casts out demons—these aren’t things just anyone could do. And no matter how much Jesus warns people not to tell anyone what he’s done, practically no one listens to him—everyone is talking.

Now all of this makes their perplexity understandable: Jesus is doing incredible things. But that’s not even the main reason they are perplexed. They are perplexed because they know him. In v. 3, they say, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” Mark adds immediately after: “And they took offense at him.”

They don’t take offense at him because of what he’s doing or because of what he’s saying; they take offense at him because they know him. These people listening to him are likely people who have known Jesus his whole life. They knew him as a carpenter (which was his trade before going into ministry). They know his family. They’ve seen him in other contexts; they’ve seen him at meals and in conversation and in play. In other words, they’ve seen him as an ordinary person up to now—honorable, good, but ordinary.

But now Jesus has come along with this incredible teaching and this incredible ministry, and what they’re seeing doesn’t seem to match what they know about him. It seems too grandiose for a simple carpenter.

This isn’t hard to understand. My brother Jared is a great guy, a great dad, and he has a lot of talent. But he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. He can’t sing, he can’t play an instrument. So if he sent me a message tomorrow saying he’s learned to play guitar, and then sent a video tomorrow of himself doing some amazing riff, no matter how real it might seem, my first instinct would be to not believe it. Because I know Jared. I’d know that can’t be him. He must have done some technical trickery to make this video; he’s got to be faking somehow.

That’s the dynamic at play here. All we know about Jesus’s life in Nazareth before he began his public ministry is that as he grew, he “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (we see that in Luke’s gospel, chapter 2, verse 52). So he was well-liked, well-respected, and wise. But apparently he gave no one a hint of everything he was actually capable of doing.

So when he finally came, doing what he was born to do, everyone was impressed except the people who knew him. Jesus said (v. 4),

“A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

Why? Because the relatives know the prophet, and they can’t square what they know about him with what they’re seeing.

The end result is horribly sad—v. 5:

5 And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And he marveled because of their unbelief.

Familiarity, if we’re not careful, breeds unbelief—which is the first reaction to Jesus’s message that we see here.

Lesson 2: Indifference (v. 7-13)

In our next episode, we see Jesus sending out the twelve disciples on a sort of missions trip. This is, in some ways, a test run for them, to prepare them for their lives and ministry after Jesus is gone. V. 7:

7 And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— 9 but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. 10 And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.

So Jesus sends out the twelve, in pairs. He gives them “authority over the unclean spirits”—that is, in the same way that demons possessing people have to listen to and obey Jesus, they now have to listen to and obey the apostles as well. He also gives them power to heal, as we see in v. 13.

Before he sends them out, he prepares them for their journey. He tells them to bring almost nothing with them: no extra supplies, no extra clothes to stay warm, no food for the road. They are to rely entirely on God’s provision.

But Jesus does give them something for the road: expectations, and an order.

He tells them that as they go on their way, some people will take them in. We might think that he’s referring to the common practice in Jewish culture of letting travelers stay in your home for the night, but it seems that there’s more to it than that. Likely, Jesus is suggesting that the apostles should stay with those people who have repented upon hearing the apostles’ message.

Here’s why I say that: Jesus says in v. 11 that if there is any place that won’t receive the apostles, when they leave they are to shake the dust off their feet, as a testimony against them.

The image is simple. What do you do if you have to visit someone, and their home is absolutely filthy, crawling with fleas and dog hair? When you leave that house, you’ll want to shake yourself off, brush off everything that stuck to your clothes when you sat down.

Here, the shaking of the dust off their feet isn’t just a sign of cleansing (as it was common practice for Jews to do this when they would leave a Gentile region); it is also a sign of judgment against that place.

The only thing God ever judges in the Bible is unrepentant sin. Sin is rebellion against his commands. So if the apostles are pronouncing judgment on these areas, it is because the people living there have heard the apostles’ call to repentance, and not responded to it. So it’s not hostility; it’s not open vehemence. It’s more like what you do when a homeless person is asking for money and you don’t want to be bothered, so you shrug your shoulders, give an apologetic look, and move on quickly.

This is simple realism on the part of Jesus. Some people will listen to you, and others won’t. Some people will accept your call to repentance, and others won’t.

The reasons why people won’t accept God’s call to repentance will vary; but most often it’s just because people don’t want to. They hear the message, and they even understand the message…but they want other things more. The gospel goes out, and it falls on deaf ears. Notice that these people aren’t openly hostile toward the apostles; they’re not persecuting them. They’re just…not interested.

And against those who remain indifferent in this way, the apostles are called to perform a visible sign of judgment. Nothing else. No militancy, no brow-beating—rather, a simple sign for those who will not listen: I won’t be carrying the responsibility for your souls with me. Your indifference is between you and God.

Lesson 3: Violence (v. 14-29)

The next episode, the story of the death of John the Baptist, is a bit of an aside, but Mark doesn’t only include it for biographical or chronological reasons. He includes this story to tell us what else to expect: if some will respond to the message of repentance by indifference, and others by unbelief, still others will respond by violence.

King Herod—the tetrarch of Galilee, an administrator of the region under Rome—had put John in prison because John had called Herod on his depravity: Herod had married the former wife of his brother (who was still alive). The wife, Herodias, held a grudge against John, but couldn’t do anything about it because Herod was keeping him safe—he put him in prison to keep him from speaking openly, but he still kept him safe there. Herod feared John, Mark tells us, because John was a righteous and holy man, and although Herod understood little of what John said and accepted none of it, he still enjoyed listening to him.

But then comes this famous banquet for Herod’s birthday.  Herodias’s daughter (Herod’s stepdaughter) comes out and does a dance for the guests, and Herod is smitten: he makes a twisted and foolish promise that he’ll give the girl whatever she wants. Prompted by her mother, she says she wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t want to lose face in front of his guests, so he does it: he has John decapitated, and his head brought to the girl on a platter. Imagine: killing someone just to keep the party going.

The message here is pretty simple: the call to repentance will meet with resistance, and sometimes that resistance will be fierce. A call to repentance is a call to abandon depravity, but some people, who love their sin, will respond by digging even deeper into that sin.

The question is, what is the consequence? In the first episode, the consequence was that Jesus couldn’t do anything in his hometown, and left. In the second episode, the consequence was that those who rejected the apostles’ message would receive a sign of judgment against them.

Mark doesn’t tell us what the consequence was for Herod—which is kind of the point. After this passage, Herod disappears from Mark’s gospel. We see him mentioned in the other gospels, and incidentally, when Luke writes the book of Acts he tells us that Herod dies a spectacularly gruesome death because of his pride. (If you’re interested, you’ll find that story in Acts chapter 12.)  But for Mark, after this point, Herod is gone. He could have been a powerful figure as an ally of John the Baptist—and, by extension, of Jesus—but instead, he is written out of the story.

For all of his pride, Herod becomes a non-character in the story of Jesus—truly unimportant.

Which is how it goes most of the time. Throughout history, the gospel has always met with violent opposition. And yet the violence committed against some Christians only serves to anchor the faith of those who witness it. Rather than frightening Christians into renouncing their faith, historically speaking, Christianity has flourished under persecution. We see the faith of the men and women who have died for their faith throughout history, and while it is frightening, it is also fuel for our faith, because it helps us remember that the gospel is worth dying for.

And that is what we remember from the martyrs of the faith. We remember much about John the Baptist, but very little about Herod; Herod becomes totally inconsequential, while we still feel the impact of John’s ministry today. That’s how it almost always goes. We generally remember the martyrs, not the murderers.

There’s no real resolution to this passage, which sort of leaves us hanging. Of course that’s the way things often work in real life, so it’s not a surprise: we read what happens in this passage and we can easily think about it as a story. But nothing about the three episodes of this story we’ve seen is truly past. Everything we see here is always current, because people will always respond to Jesus, either with unbelief, or indifference, or violence—and really, they all come down to the same thing.

No matter how you reject the gospel, you’re still rejecting the gospel. It is simply impossible to “sort of” accept Christ. It’s all or nothing.

Lesson 4: Repentance (v. 12)

But there is a fourth way of responding to Jesus. We don’t see anyone really respond this way in this passage, but we definitely hear it called for. When the apostles go out, what do they do? V. 12:

They went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

This is the call of Jesus’s teaching, of John’s teaching, and the apostles’ teaching. It is the opposite of the responses we saw illustrated in our text. It is the first goal of all gospel proclamation: the kingdom of God is at hand; so repent, and believe the gospel.

Earlier we talked about what repentance is: it is confessing our sin and turning away from it in faith to follow after God.

The question is, how is it possible?

This is a more important question than we may realize, because we can understand the people in Nazareth who can’t get past what they knew about Jesus. We can understand the people listening to the apostles, who simply can’t buy what they’re teaching. And if we’re honest, we can even understand Herod, who wants what he wants and goes after what he wants and will do anything to keep it; we may not go as far as he did (thank God), but I think we can all identify with the temptation to save face and to pursue pleasure at all costs.

But it’s not just about what these people did or didn’t do—that’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that on our own, we can’t just “turn away” from our sin, because sin isn’t just what we do; it’s what we are. It is the nature that has been handed down to us ever since the garden of Eden; every cell in our bodies is infected with this cancer.

You can’t dress it up, and you can’t hide it, not from God. If a piece of meat has gone bad, it doesn’t matter how you marinade it to hide the flavor—it still will taste off, and it will still make you sick.

So if we can’t dress sin up to make it look better than it is, if we can’t hide it from God, what can we do?

John’s baptism was wonderful, but it wasn’t complete. It was a picture of purification and of renewal, but that purification and renewal is impossible unless God intervenes.

And that is the answer to our question. What can we do? Nothing. But Jesus can. He is the only one who can make repentance possible.

Jesus didn’t die as a symbol. He didn’t die as a way to throw some makeup on sin and pretend it was gone. He didn’t die so we could buy a cross on a chain that we wear around our necks to make us feel like we’re better than we really are.

Jesus died to kill our sin. He died to remove the sickness, to remove the cancer. To excise the tumor. He took our sin on himself and he was punished for that sin in our place. When he died, so did our sin. When he was buried in the tomb, so was our sin. And when he was raised, he left our sin there in the tomb. All of our sin, past, present and future, is dead if we are in Christ. The record has been canceled, the debt has been paid.

Which means that if we have faith in Christ, we are able to repent. We are truly able to turn away from sin.

Just imagine what it would be like to try to repent without Jesus! In fact, we don’t have to imagine it, not really. People try it all the time. And it’s miserable.

It’s a constant fight to pretend we’re something we’re not, to convince God that we’re better than we really are. It’s endless list-keeping: these are the things I did wrong, so let’s keep track of all the things I did right, because if the “wrong” list is longer than the “right” list, then I’m still not holy enough. And we’re always scared, because what if we forgot something? What if we think we’re doing pretty well, but when we come and stand before God, he’ll say, “Yeah, all that was good…but you forgot about this, didn’t you? Sorry—that’s a deal-breaker.”

Trying to repent without Jesus is endless vanity, endless fear, endless failure, because we can never be good enough to make up for our sin.

But now, in Christ, we’re free from all that! Think about it: how freeing must it be, to have no one whose approval I have to win? To have nothing to prove, even to God himself? In Christ, we don’t have to pretend we’re not sinners—in fact, our being sinners is exactly why we can come to God with confidence, because the one who repents in faith proves nothing to God except that he is good. We’re not saved by our own goodness, but by his.

So we can confess. We can come to God, warts and all, and say, “Yes, I am a sinner—but your Son has covered my sin. Thank you for sending him—I place all my trust in him alone.”

That is the first step of repentance, and it is gloriously simple.

And if we grasp that first part of the good news, the second part makes complete sense. What is the only logical and natural response to the realization that we have nothing to prove to God except that God is good?

It is to turn away from sin, and to follow after God.

We don’t do it to earn God’s approval, because in Christ, we already have it. We turn away from sin because faced with God’s incredible goodness to save us, our sin becomes distasteful. Why would I want to wallow in that for which I’ve been forgiven? Why would I want to find pleasure in the sin for which Jesus died?

I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but if I said, “Raise your hands if that question made you feel guilty,” I’m guessing most of us would. Because all of us have a tendency to do just that. God shows us immeasurable grace, and we thank him for it—and then some time later, we find ourselves having returned to the same tired sin again, and we wonder, “How did that happen?”

The answer is that we forget. We forget that God is good, and we forget that we’re forgiven. It is so easy for our old taste for sin to come crawling back. And this is why repentance isn’t a one-time thing: it is a habit of every minute of every day.

Every day, we put ourselves before God’s Word and we tell ourselves, once again, what he has done. Every day, we confess our sin to God in prayer. And every day, we remember the immensity of his grace, to remember why our sin is worth casting aside and putting to death, why Jesus really is worth following.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: if we are not repenting of our sin, we are rejecting Jesus. But that rejection won’t always come in the way we expect.

Sometimes, it will be violent, yes, even if that violence isn’t always physical. Some people—perhaps even some people here today—will want nothing to do with Christ, and will reject him with much vehemence, slinging bitterness and insults.

But it won’t always be violent. Sometimes rejection of Christ will just look like indifference. We hear the message of the gospel, and it does nothing to us. We don’t see ourselves as sinners, so we feel we have nothing to confess, and you could talk to us until you’re blue in the face, it won’t change our minds on the matter. You don’t have to hate the Christian faith to reject Christ—you just have to…not accept him.

And some of you—especially if you’re in the church, and especially if you’ve been in the church for a long while—may fall into the trap of rejecting Christ without thinking you’re rejecting him.  You’ve spent most of your life hearing these stories, singing these songs… And what happens, far too often? You get bored. You get used to Jesus. And before you know it, without even realizing it’s happening, you’re just play-acting—and you do it well, because you know what being a Christian looks like. You’re doing a reasonably good job at pretending to be a good Christian, but your heart is cold; you’re unimpressed, because it’s all so familiar. If we’re not careful, we can become so familiar with the gospel that we just don’t fully believe anymore, not in any way that has any real bearing on our lives.

We should note well that in this passage, Mark never says that the people who heard Jesus’s message or John’s message or the apostles’ message didn’t understand their call to repent. Mark never tells us that it all went over their heads—it did to some people, sure. But in this particular passage, the people’s theological comprehension wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they didn’t accept the message—it doesn’t matter why, because the end result is the same: they didn’t fall on their knees before a holy God and repent of their sin.

This happens all the time. It happens to people who have spent their entire lives in church. It happens to pastors. It happens to theology professors. You can know everything you need to know, and still not know God.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Losing our love for God, falling into unbelief, or rejecting Christ—these are not foregone conclusions. There is another option, and that is repentance by faith in Christ. That is the call of this text: Don’t be like these people who rejected Christ. Listen to John’s message, and the apostles’ message, and Jesus’s message. REPENT. And follow him.

Don’t repent merely to escape judgment. Repent because repentance is better. Repent because we don’t have to do it alone. Repent because you can: because Christ opened that possibility to you.

It will be costly, for sure. Everyone in this passage who rejects the gospel thinks they are preserving something precious for themselves by saying no to Christ: their own idea of what makes someone important, the status quo of their daily lives, or their reputation with others.

But whoever loses his life for Jesus’s sake will find it.

Repentance is costly, absolutely—but it is better. And it is always possible.