Change Your Thinking
The core message of Jesus
“Change your thinking, because the kingdom of the heavens has come near” Matt 4:17
Before I write an extended number of posts on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, some preparation is in order, and understanding the intent of Jesus’s core message is vital to that preparation. These words of Jesus were the same words as John the Baptist before him and served as the fundamental preaching for both.
This message (expanded a bit in Mark, see below *) has two parts, a command and a reason. The command for a change of mind is connected intimately with the reason: “for the kingdom of the heavens has come near.” We need to unpack both parts.
Change your thinking.
The normal translation of the command metanoeite is “repent.” But the term repent carries a tremendous amount of religious and cultural baggage. Endless discussions have ensued over how repenting relates to actions (the oft-used phrase “to turn around” is indicative of this approach). But the fundamental idea of the verb metanoeō is “to change one’s thinking.” The noun metanoia denotes “a changed mind.”
Why is this distinction with actions so important?
It is essential to understand that a change of actions can be fake, but a true change of mind is not. John the Baptist had earlier exhorted the Jewish leaders to “do works worthy of repentance.” The deeds were not the repentance itself, but the outworking of a truly changed mind.
There were other words out there that pointed to change of actions or other types of change, but the core of this verb is noeō, “I think.” With the prefix meta the verb then has the idea of a transfer of thinking from one realm to another.
This command “change your thinking” implies that currently something is awry.
The thinking processes of the average person are focussed on the wrong thing (themselves, their selfish desires) and not on the right thing (God and God’s desires). Because of this, a person is unable to see the world clearly from God’s perspective; their own way of thinking is in the way.
What should be in plain sight is obscured.
Sight, both physical and spiritual sight, is fully connected to the brain, the center of thought. Without a change of that center of thought, true assessment of reality is impossible.
Consider this. The Bible only records three individuals to ever have the potential to see all things clearly. The first two, Adam and Eve, forfeited that very sight in their desire to be godlike. All humans since suffer from the same myopia.
Except for Jesus.
Jesus was the first since Adam and the only to this day who by his very origin from God had the ability and the will to see all things from God’s perspective. He was untainted by the scourge of pride and self-serving independence. As a result, Jesus could see all of the machinations of humanity clearly without becoming part of the drama of human desires.
By exhorting people to “change your thinking,” Jesus called us into a different perspective on the world and its self-destructive drives and interactions. When someone clearly sees the way of the world, that is humanity, which constantly tends toward self- and other-destruction, then that person—because of changed thinking—can choose to opt out of the drama and opt in for the ways of God.
The Bible gives examples: Moses, David, Isaiah and others in the OT; Peter and Paul among others in the NT. After Paul met Jesus on the Damascus road, the very physical scales that fell from his eyes days later were indicative of the spiritual scales that had obscured his sight from self-striving to please God, leading to violence against those who had allowed God to change them. Paul called his changed thinking “the mind of Christ” and wrote to the church at Philippi “have this thinking in you which also was in Christ Jesus.”
Of course, opting out of the drama does not mean opting out of its effects. Often, possibly more times than not, those opting out become even more liable to the ire of those in the drama.
Jesus himself was the pre-eminent example.
Changed thinking, with its utter reliance on the strength of God, is what gives the transformed person the power to continue seeing and to continue opting out, despite the pressure and even hate from others embedded in the human drama.
Because the kingdom of the heavens has come near.
The command to change your thinking does not stand alone, but is accompanied by a reason. Jesus supports his imperative with “because the kingdom of the heavens has come near.” Matthew, of all the Gospels, uses three different phrases to refer to God’s reign, “the kingdom of the heavens,” “the kingdom of heaven,” and “the kingdom of God.” Most interpreters understand the three as interchangeable, and so do I. The kingdom of the heavens does present an interesting perspective on God’s reign, though. God is the creator God of the universe and reigns over all. In using this heavens language, God’s immensity and human minuteness are contrasted. The kingdom of God is vastly infinite and infinitely dwarfs human kingdoms and hegemony in whatever forms they take.
But Jesus is not only making a sweeping statement about God’s universal reign; rather his focus is on its imminence (it is right at the door) and its immanence (God has entered the world of humanity in a tangible way in Jesus). Jesus has appeared to not only give physical sight to the blind, but to unblind the eyes of people to evil and to righteousness.
Get ready, he says. Change your thinking.
What does that thinking consist of? The teachings of Jesus, preeminently in the Sermon on the Mount describe precisely how we are to think and that way is the exact opposite of the world. The Sermon will be the focus of many posts to come.
*Mark’s version reads: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; change your thinking and place your trust in the good news” (Mark 1:15).
Observations on the Greek text
For the first week these observations will be free to all readers and free subscribers. Subsequently, they will be available for paid subscribers. Besides observations on the Greek texts that I address, later I plan to add both beginning and advanced Greek instruction for paid subscribers.
“Change your thinking, because the kingdom of the heavens has come near” Matt 4:17
μετανοεῖτε· ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.
This short text has two main clauses. The logic joining the clauses comes from the small word γάρ (“for” or “because”). Often causal clauses are joined to a main clause using ὅτι, but γάρ is used to indicate support for what comes before it (sometimes a series of supporting sentences each have γάρ). Notice that γάρ is always post-positive, that is, it will never be the first word in the sentence and though usually second may also occur further into the sentence.
The primary sentence is only one word, μετανοεῖτε (the plural pronoun subject “you” is indicated by the ending -τε). The form is from μετανοέω, a so-called contract verb (in a present tense indicative or imperative form, the ε contracts with the ε of the second person plural ending -ετε to εῖτε; at some point down the way, I will write a practical lesson on the formation of contract verbs).
The important exegetical question of this word regards the force of the imperative. We often think of an imperative as only a command, but in Greek, the force is dependent on the speaker and the audience. If the speaker had authority, then the imperative was a command. If the speaker was on equal terms, then the imperative was a request. And if the speaker had a lesser status (like a slave or tenant farmer) then the imperative would be a supplication. In any of those cases the audience (whether one person or a group as here) had the possibility of rejecting the command/request/supplication (though commands could carry consequences for saying no!).
Jesus spoke with authority, so μετανοεῖτε was definitely a command. But only someone who feared God would take the command to heart. Others would simply explain it away (as so many still do)—but to their eternal peril.
The second sentence, though simple, has some interesting features in both form and syntax. The verb ἤγγικεν is perfect active third person singular (indicated by the -κεν ending and the “reduplication” as indicated by a lengthened ε–>η). This verb ἐγγίζω is hard to pin down, but in the perfect tense it has the sense of “has arrived to stay.”
In English, one might expect the subject ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν (the kingdom of the heavens) to come first, but normal word order in Greek was verb (V) first, then subject (S), then any objects (O). Changing that order brought certain emphases. In this case the standard order of VS is used.
Perhaps of more intrigue is the relation of the genitive phrase τῶν οὐρανῶν “of the heavens” to the head phrase ἡ βασιλεία “the kingdom.” Genitives that follow nouns can have a multitude of nuances, but almost by definition a genitive noun attributes or tells something more specific about the head term. Here “of the heavens” indicates the source, or origin of the kingdom, and, as I said above, speaks too of the vast scope of the kingdom.
An Invitation
Are you interested in learning New Testament Greek? I will be teaching an intensive course with 50 hours of live instruction via Zoom from June to August. Please contact me at jack.painter@gmail.com or go to https://www.rightonmission.org/intro-to-new-testament-greek for more information. I would love to have you!