Sheep and Coins

Repentance was this idea that we can look at what we’re doing, realize it’s very wrong, feel reeeeally badly about it, and then do the opposite thing.   This was virtually the universal understanding of repentance among Jesus’ contemporaries, and clearly, it still lingers to today.  But then Jesus gives the Pharisees and us these three parables about kids and coins and sons that together, tell quite a shockingly different story about repentance than anyone would have heard before.