It is not easy to know what Jesus called his hearers to repent from; he speaks often of sinners, but rarely of their sins. The social consensus of his contemporaries about what counted as sin is not of much help; we know that he challenged his contemporaries on that very issue. So we have to infer what he wanted people to repent from by looking ah how we wanted them to live; sin appears here as a failure to live the life of discipleship as described in the Sermon on the Mount (Gnilka 1993, 212). . . .Devotion to wealth and hatred of the enemy are sins of which the followers of Jesus must repent. Especially for the powerless victims of oppression . . . the two injunctions translate into a critique of envy and enmity. What possible political significance could these seemingly private attitudes of the disprivileged and powerless have? one could be tempted to object. These unfortunate people may be "healthier" if they got rid of their negative feelings, a psychiatrist might counsel. But why would a prophet admonish the disprivileged to repent of them? More specifically, what possible social import could such repentance have?
. . . The most seminal impact of enmity, we might argue . . . consist in transforming the violent practices of the dominant into dominant practices. Once the link between violence and social status has been established, victims are prompted to seek redress for their oppression with violent means. The social impact of envy and enmity, singly and in combination, is to reinforce the dominant values and practices that cause and perpetuate oppression in the first place. Envy and enmity keep the disprivileged and weak chained to the dominant order - even when they succeed in tolling it! All to often, of course, the do not want to topple the dominant order; as [Zygmunt] Bauman says; they "demand the reshuffling of cards, not another game. They do not blame the game, only the stronger hand of the adversary."
The dominant values and practices can be transformed only if their hold on the hearts of those who suffer under them is broken. This is where repentance comes in. To repent means to resist the seductiveness of the sinful values and practices and to let the new order of God's reign be established in one's heart. For a victim to repent means not to allow the oppressors to determine the terms under which social conflict is carried out, the values around which the conflict is raging, and the means by which it is fought. . . .
Other than his coining of the neologism "disprivileged" to describe a certain segment of society, this certainly has a resonance with the words and deeds of, among others, Martin Luther King, Jr. Or am I off base here?
For the record, I think that this is not a total interpretation of what Jesus calls us to; no single interpretation is complete. In the context of a social and political theology, however, it certainly does have aspects that commend it to our attention. As long as we are willing to set aside traditional understandings of "repentance", "sin", even Volf's use of the care-worn phraseology of "changing hearts", this opens up all sorts of possibilities.
