have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (23:37). Repent and repentance refer to a change of mind and heart in which a person realizes the heinousness of his sin, shudders in the face of God’s coming judgment, renounces his sin, and determines, by God’s power, to live as God desires. Matthew’s gospel does not offer a precise definition of the terms repent and repentance—the vocabulary was already well known to its readers because of their