Chapter 2
The mother of all metanoias
1-16Metanoia: yes, that’s what it’s all about! Real change, deep-down, at the deepest level. And the deep-down change we all need—all humanity needs—is, as we’ve seen, to break free of our natural-born self-centredness and start acquiring some skills and know-how in the art of selflessness, of putting others first for a change—at last, finally! No, not forgiveness for our sins, a nice salve for our guilty consciences—that is basically just more selfishness, looking for a God who judges us so that we can then inveigle them into making us feel better by forgiving us. Rather, we need help to stop sinning, stop being so jolly selfish all the time—a God, as I’ve speculated, who teaches, facilitates our learning, of selflessness.
Metanoia—there, I’ve said it again! From the Greek, meta- referring to change, transformation, and nous, meaning mind, thinking. So, roughly, a deep-down change in our mindset, in our way of understanding and approaching something. In this sense all learning is metanoia—real learning, that is, learning that lasts. But the particular metanoia I’m referring to here—I’ll write it with a capital “M” from now on, so you’ll know when I’m referring to it specifically—is the mother, father, grandparent of all metanoias. The amazing change wrought in a person as they undergo the gradual transformation from their natural-born state of pure self-absorption to one in which they are starting to be capable of intentionally practising some actual selflessness—yes, it is totally unnatural, but it can be done! But why is this capital M Metanoia the parent, the progenitor of all metanoias? Let me explain.
Jesus—yes, you just knew he had to be something to do with it!—used the word or its variants multiple times in sayings attributed to him recorded in the four well-known books about him we call, simply, the Gospels. It is true that he actually spoke a language called Aramaic, the lingua franca of that part of the world at the time, which would have included fragments of Hebrew and Greek, but “metanoia” was the word that appeared in the earliest full Greek texts of the Gospels, and it is usually translated into English as “repent” or “repentance”, although a word like “conversion” might better capture the sense of the full transformation involved. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”, Jesus exclaims in Matthew 4:17—and so on. Repent, acknowledge you are a selfish little so-and-so and that that is the cause of all your problems in life, start changing, start becoming more selfless, make the breakthrough to a new and better way of living.
It is invariably spoken with great drama and urgency: “No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish as they did”, referring to some local people who were killed by the Romans for not doing very much wrong; then he repeats the admonition two verses later in reference to another group who were killed when a tower collapsed on them (Luke 13:1-5). Your life is a disaster waiting to happen, Jesus is saying; that is, really, already happening. Metanoia is now the term widely used across multiple disciplines, including psychology, theology, and literary studies, referring to a deep, fundamental shift in one’s attitude or perspective, typically triggered by some sort of breakdown, crisis or significant life event—yes, the disaster in your life that is always just about to happen!
Breakdown: all metanoia, all learning, all real change in life, necessarily involves, first, the breaking down, the reaching the limits of, your old way of conceiving and doing things. It is usually painful, but in that moment, you suddenly find yourself vulnerable and open to new possibilities that might be offered to you from the outside, typically by another person, a teacher, counsel-giver or equivalent, who offers, shows you, a new and better way. At this point you have a choice, and the natural thing to do, I’m afraid to say, is to double down and dumbly try again to make the old way work; then, when you continue to fail, eventually close yourself right off and sulk your way into depression and despair. Natural, indeed! Unnatural it would be, conversely, to accept the kind offer, because what this would necessarily require—and now we are getting right to the crux of the matter—is belief, faith, trust in the person, the teacher or equivalent, who is doing the offering. Unnatural, yes, because, in that moment, we cannot find that belief, faith, trust inside ourselves, rather we have to receive it as a, so to speak, infusion, from the outside, from that self-same teacher-type person or equivalent.
What a profound transaction!—although, in fact, it is no more mysterious than what you can observe any day of the week with, for example, a little child at the end of their tether receiving a transfusion of trust, strength, courage and agency from their loving parent. But can you now see why the capital M metanoia is the mother of all metanoias? Naturally, self-centredly, we hunker down, close ourselves off from the world, cling onto our old ways, dig ourselves deeper into a hole; unnaturally, through belief, faith, trust in some one or ones outside ourselves, we let go of our self-centred selves and open ourselves up to a new, better, more selfless way. Of course, if there is no-one outside of us, outside of all humanity, to make the offer of the new, more selfless way, to give us the infusion of faith, courage, agency we need, to be able to make this pivotal, essential change in our lives, then it is the mother, rather, of all Catch-22s! But there is—someone outside of us, outside of all humanity—and that, of course, is the wonderful news I am here to share with you today. Old news, actually—but perhaps it is starting to make sense to you now in a new way?
So, a capital G God, a divine parent rather than a bossy omnipotent creator, who gives birth to the universe, then, when humans come along, acts as our selfless love teacher to save us from our self-centred, self-destructive selves and broker mother Metanoia in our lives, with Jesus of Nazareth somehow a vital step in the process? Sounds far-fetched as usual; but, on the other hand, maybe it’s just too good to not be true?!
The important thing to realize is that—I think I am repeating myself here—it is not about getting forgiven for past sins—that is just an endless round of confession followed by the next bout of recidivism—rather about getting outside help to stop sinning. And stopping sinning is not about renewed resolve to obey laws and commands, even laws and commands we are convinced come from a great capital G God in the sky—rather about undergoing the Metanoia, the wonderful transformation anyone can undergo, from natural-born self-centredness to very unnatural selflessness. And then, almost as an added bonus, by the way, you find yourself obeying the laws and commands—the good ones at any rate—but now in the right spirit, not merely to selfishly avoid punishment, rather out of a genuine concern and respect for others. It’s a beautiful thing!
Commentary 2.1
“Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others, for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things”, writes Paul in his letter (2:1), apparently echoing Jesus in Matthew 7:1-2, minus the witty illustration: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged … Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
Paul does a lot of echoing of Jesus’ teachings about selfless life in community in his many letters, but rarely quotes Jesus directly. It is true that Paul did not have access to the four Gospels, replete with great Jesus’ one-liners, which were written only after Paul died, but there were surely other pre-existing oral or written sources at the time he would have had access to. On top of that, the Book of Acts records a number of direct interactions Paul had with Jesus closest disciples, including Peter, John and even James, the brother of Jesus. The real reason for the strange absence of Jesus the man from Paul’s letters, and the effective sidelining and even distortion of his teachings, may be, as I have already suggested, because Paul had his own agenda, namely to retrofit Jesus into the Judaism of his upbringing—to turn Jesus the man into Jesus the Christ.
Paul’s intent in this respect is clear from the very next verse of the chapter we are following, when the focus quickly moves from human judgement to divine judgement—which, by contrast, is completely righteous and, seemingly paradoxically, an act of kindness on God’s behalf. “We know that God’s judgment … is in accordance with truth … the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience … God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance …”. Then, if we allow God’s kind judgement to lead us to repentance (metanoia), we will reap the ultimate reward of “eternal life” on “the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed”. Yay! But don’t even think about not allowing God’s judgement to have its righteous way with you, because eternal punishment awaits you if you do: “for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but injustice, there will be wrath and fury … affliction and distress for everyone who does evil.” Help!
It is scary stuff, the subject of many a fire and brimstone sermon down the ages, and one of the sub-narratives of Christian doctrine most instrumental in driving people away from the church in droves in the modern era. Paul gets the notion of a future, final, universal judgment day, and beyond that, eternal life or eternal punishment, straight out of the old-time religion playbook, traditional Judaism in his case. Yes, they might still be arguing about it even today, liberal elements denying the literal truth of final judgement, resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell; conservatives excoriating them from the bimah or the pulpit. But everyone wants a God who does at least some judging, the thought of no just desserts ever for people who harm us, or harm innocent others with whom we empathize, being, very naturally, more or less unbearable.
A God who does some judging, at least—a God whom we are all, psychologically speaking, prone to believing in and, yes, historically, actually inventing—especially if no such God already exists! The problem is that there is just no evidence that the judgement we’re looking for ever happens. Yes, the Hebrew Old Testament is full of stories of the capital G God actually delivering the goods in this regard, impartially dispensing judgement and punishment to Jew and Gentile alike, often very brutally—bringing to mind the delicious line from Monty Python, referring to a notorious gangster, “he was a cruel man, but fair”! All these accounts of divine intervention, and other accounts of the like in other ancient narratives, are, however, invariably written well after the fact, with the benefit of hindsight, and with one eye fixed squarely on fitting the incident in question into the wider narrative of, yes, the omnipotent, judgemental, creator God and their dealings with us humans.
No, most of us have now finally started realizing, God simply does not intervene in the world to exact justice—as much as we would love them to. Bad people get away with blue murder every day of the week, and in many or even most cases go to their graves without ever being held to account. It is a painful realization, but the pain is more in the frustration of our desires than anything else—because the reason we find the thought of no justice ever psychologically unbearable is that our desire for it is essentially self-seeking—as all desires tautologically are. Yes, we want a God who judges those people who hurt … me, or who hurt others whom I, for whatever reason, identify with—either way, it’s always all about … me! Our natural desire for justice may in fact be, in the final analysis, no different to a desire for, dare I say it, revenge—and if we cannot exact it ourselves, we will go looking for a God who exacts it for us!
Jesus came to change all that, as you will be able to see when you read on in my letter. But Paul is, nevertheless, definitely getting at the beginning of the truth in his account of the God who judges. Following Jesus, he is urging us to focus on ourselves first, before we cry out for judgement on anyone else. But no, God does not judge us either, and in thinking so we only dig ourselves deeper into a hole. Rather it is a realization, as I have described it, that it is part of our nature to be so incorrigibly self-seeking, that we are powerless to do anything about it, and that our only hope is to put our faith, trust and belief in a selfless love teacher outside ourselves and outside of all humanity—the God who, so to speak, un-judges rather than judges us!
Where do we go then with Paul’s rehearsal of the traditional narrative of final, universal judgement and eternal life? Or, to put the question another way, where do we go with the alleged resurrection of Jesus, for that surely is, if it really happened, a sort of sneak preview of future life beyond the grave? When we reject the God who judges, do both these things—Jesus’ resurrection and eternal life—therefore go out the window too? Well, we’re about to see what happens, so stay tuned. But first we need to deal with the little matter of, yes, as I’ve suggested, the Law.
L-A-W Law
17-29Yes, it is all good news so far: we have put the old law-enforcing judgemental capital G God to the sword, and found instead a selfless love teaching divine parent who, when we let go of our natural self-seeking ways and place our faith, trust, belief in them, facilitates the wonderful capital M Metanoia in us. But in the process, as we have just noted, almost as an unintended consequence, we find ourselves now going back full circle and becoming good obeyers of that same law we started by rejecting the divine author of—if you get what I mean! This is because law and judgement are not all bad—in fact some law and judgement are essential for the love teaching process we are talking about. Let’s now back-track a little and look at the critical role law plays in our lives.
Law: the rules and regulations of daily life in family, community and society, the laws of the land, sea and sky, even the law we think might have come down out of the sky, a capital L Law. The fundamental purpose, the spirit, of laws, any laws, in this general sense, is to place safeguards on, or enhance, our personal wellbeing and our relationships with each other in community. Everything from a parent telling a child they need to take turns when playing with other children, to the state telling its citizens to drive on a certain side of the road or sanctioning criminal activity. In each and every case, the law, and our obeying of it, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, the good of the individual and the community.
Law, in this sense, invites us, teaches us, to think before we act, to consider our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others objectively before we barrel on ahead doing just what we selfishly want to do. It teaches us a little selflessness, in other words, it brokers the Metanoia. If there is never any laying down of the law in our lives, we will never learn to be selfless, we will never change out of our natural-born self-centred state. And for law to do its trick in this regard, there must always be some judgement attached to it, some proportionate consequence or punishment, otherwise we will just keep going on our merry self-centred way.
So, some law and judgement are indeed necessary for the Metanoia to occur in our lives. But they are not sufficient for it. For starters, some laws are terrible laws, undemocratic, not focussed on the good of the community, not based on an accurate understanding of what is truly good for us. Laws which are self-serving, which might be imposed by a controlling parent or an authoritarian regime, favouring particular individuals or groups while discriminating against others. No amount of obeying laws like this will be good for you or for your community.
Moreover, any law we could possibly imagine, even the best of laws, will necessarily have its limit, beyond which our obedience to it might actually be harmful, the law in question becoming, as the cliché goes, “an ass”. Honesty is the best policy, for example, in anyone’s book, but the day might come when it would be a far better thing for you to do, to tell a lie to save your own or someone else’s life from an attacker!
So, yes, an essential part of the Metanoia involves us being trained or taught by obedience to law, but this will only get us so far. Beyond that we have to learn the much more sophisticated skill of being selfless, of considering others and the ways in which our actions in relation to various laws affect them, for good or for ill. Only then, as we do change and become more selfless, will we come to obey the law freely, in the right spirit, rather than out of fear of punishment—as we noted earlier. And only then will we know when it is actually the better thing to not obey particular laws, or, indeed, work for them to be changed—to be the ones to work to reform, develop, improve the law, enhancing its ability to sustain freer and more just communities.
The right spirit makes all the difference, in fact; the story of our hero Jesus of Nazareth and his run-ins with the law is amazingly instructive in this regard. The law of his day was very much a capital L Law, the so-called Torah or Mosaic Law, ascribed to the famous figure of Moses, who might have lived around the 14th-13th century BCE. Moses was already an old man (about 80) when he brought a bunch of stone tablets down from the mountain in the wilderness of Sinai, claiming that the Law written on them came from the hand of God themself. No, not just ten short commandments, as the well-worn story goes, but the whole L-A-W Law, sprawling across the first five books of the Hebrew Old Testament.
This Law was a marvel to behold, covering in mindboggling detail every aspect of the people’s lives together in community, and, remarkable for its time, there was no mention anywhere of a human ruler, a tribal chief or king, who would be the chief enforcer and beneficiary of the Law. Yes, the Law did establish a priestly caste, descendants of Moses’ younger brother Aaron, who had a virtual monopoly on interpreting and administering the Law for the people. Then later, after Moses’ death a number of famous military and religious leaders referred to as “judges”, like Deborah, Gideon and Samson, rose up organically out of the ranks to help the people out of various scrapes they had got themselves into—usually as the result of their own folly in not following the Law, as the Old Testament narratives explain. After the period of judges, various dynasties of kings did finally emerge, running the show mostly like conventional autocrats; then by the time of Jesus, the Romans had taken over and these local kings were basically puppets of the occupying power. But none of this subsequent history detracts from the truly revolutionary nature of the original Law, which, in excluding the notion of a human absolute ruler, effectively prescribes an early prototypical form of, dare I say it, democracy.
By Jesus’ time, yes, however, things had long since gone pear-shaped. Not only were the people under the thumb of the Romans, but the priestly caste—the infamous scribes and Pharisees of the Gospel accounts—had turned the Law upside down, making it a terrible burden for the poor people, an elaborate patchwork of pointless, oppressive rules and regulations, law seemingly for the sake of law, which the people complied with only out of fear—fear of the self-seeking authority of the scribes and Pharisees themselves, and fear of the judgemental old God lurking behind their tyrannical demands. At least that seems to be how Jesus saw it—and he spent the final three years of his life, approximately, teaching and railing against it and its perpetrators, before they, the scribes and Pharisees, prevailed on the Roman authorities to imprison and execute him and finally shut him up.
That all sounds like a terrible failure too—but instead it turned out a raging success! Jesus, through his teachings and his life, delivered the solution to the problem of the Law, the how-to of obeying it in the right spirit, the Metanoia required to enable the Law to do its job of building freer and more just communities. This was Jesus’ wonderful message of the Kingdom, a coming objective state of human relationships in the world based on selfless cooperation—the Metanoia of the whole human race if you like, and a fulfilment of the ideal of (yes, I’m going to say it again) democracy. But before we get to the Kingdom, we’d better try to work out exactly how Jesus pulled all this off—other than just by teaching selflessness, denouncing the scribes and Pharisees and getting himself executed for his troubles, that is!
Commentary 2.2
Paul continues Jesus’ diatribe against the scribes and Pharisees in his letter. “But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God … ” (2:17), he starts out, launching a blistering, finger-wagging tirade. “Woe to you … hypocrites!”, Jesus had warned (Matthew 23:23), and Paul follows on with his own list of their hypocrisies:
“… you … who teach others, will you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by your transgression of the law? For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you.’” (2:21-24)
The concluding accusation is a reference to an even older finger-wagging tirade by the prophet Ezekiel (36:22)—clearly these sorts of things had been said before!
Paul then addresses the rather uncomfortable topic of circumcision, the word or its variants appearing no less than ten times in the following five verses—ouch! But his conclusion might come as a relief to those of us who feel vaguely guilty about having escaped the knife:
“For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not the written code.” (2:28-29)
Phew! Paul really hits the nail on the head here. “It’s the spirit of the law that matters, not the letter”, is what this injunction became in time, and it now has a universal, timeless quality—but you notice that it is a capital S Spirit Paul seems to be referring to, a not insignificant designation he, and we, will have more to say about shortly. The practice of male circumcision was emblematic of the legalistic, exclusivist approach in Judaism that Paul, following Jesus, was keen to challenge. Paul was hell-bent on liberating the Jewish people from the crushing burdens of the Law, in the process breaking down the barrier between Jews and non-Jews, opening up the message of the new Kingdom of grace and love to the whole world. And in Paul’s mind Jesus had something very much to do with making all this happen—not just Jesus’ teachings and his refutation of the Law’s chief enforcers, but the amazing man himself who was crucified for his troubles and whom Paul, as we’ve already noted, was intent on turning into Jesus the Christ.
All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (2022).
Thank you for reading Chapter 2 of New Romans – hope you enjoyed it. Chapter 3 is slated for release on 13 July, so stay tuned. To make sure you don’t miss out on future chapters, contact me at fergmcginley@gmail.com or subscribe to this website at fergusmcginley.com
