repent and be baptized

The first evangelism event in history was spontaneous, and it didn’t end up the way you might have expected. With the Holy Spirit fresh on them at Pentecost, the disciples proclaimed the great good news of Jesus, and that God had revealed this crucified man to be the Messiah they’d waited for. Here’s what happened next, in Acts 2:37-38:

“When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’

“Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”

I’m sure that’s not what the people expected. I’m sure they thought they’d have to atone somehow, or do some arduous thing to demonstrate their remorse and prove their value. If they were at all like us, they wanted an assignment. We would want taskers, a list we could work through with an end in sight. Make it easy, like Saturday’s chore list, or hard, like getting through college. Just tell us what the requirement is so we can knuckle down and grind our way through it.

But although we like measurable requirements we can check off, like 10% of your earnings as tithe or 20 minutes of devotions every day, that’s not how salvation works. When the crowds asked Peter what to do, he simply said, “Repent and be baptized.”

Repenting is hard, because it’s a heart attitude and not an action. It takes constant attention to be sure we’re really remorseful for the bad things we do. And baptism is a statement of trust, that someone else will take care of this for us. This, like so many things having to do with God, is simple to understand and dismaying to contemplate. For the broken-hearted and beaten-down, this simplicity is welcome good news. For those of us who are confident in our performance thus far, the dismay comes in the change we’ll have to make inside.

Confronted with the truth about Jesus, as those people were, we end up asking the same thing: what should we do? If we ask, we’re going to get the same answer the got, Peter’s simple-yet-nearly-impossible two-step plan. But it’s our only hope.