A vast number, including both honest and steady-going men like Peter and Andrew as well as many shady and reprobate characters, responded to his message.  As St Mark tells us, “And there went out to him all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 1:5).  Only the nation’s religious leaders – the Pharisees and Sadducees – stood aloof.  They were the men who believed that their membership of the Jewish People and their outward observance of the Jewish religion, made their own repentance unnecessary.  Therefore John reserved for them his harshest utterance, comparing them to snakes which flee before a forest fire, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 3:7).

So this fierce, unflinching spokesman of God delivered to his hearers the most essential and the most unpopular of all messages – “Repent!”  It is the most essential because until a person repents of his or her sins, he or she has no personal relationship with God.  That becomes clear when we remind ourselves of what sin is.  It is a rebellious independence of God, the assertion of our own will as opposed to the acceptance of God’s will; and it manifests itself in all those particular sins of thought, word, act and omission which are so familiar to us.

And until we end that rebelliousness against God by our own repentance, there can be no communion between our darkness and his light.  People who repent have not only changed direction, they have changed sides as well.  They have turned their backs on their sins by turning their faces to God.  Thus repentance is a change from rejecting God’s Sovereign rule over one’s heart and mind to embracing that rule.

Such a change of attitude leads inevitably to a change in oneself – in one’s motives and aims, in the way one thinks and lives; in a word, a change from a self-centred life to a God-centred life, in which one is ready and willing to become what he wants one to be and to do what he wants done.  It means to begin with, renouncing out of love for God, all the thoughts and desires and conversations and actions and habits which cannot be shared with him, the all-holy God.  And as a prelude to all that, it means repudiating the sins of one’s past life by confessing them all, as those who were baptized by John confessed their sins.