What is the call to repentance?

Sermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall-West on 29 January 2006

Readings:

Jonah 3:1—5, 10
Mark 1:14—20

The word that leaps out at me from the readings today is repentance. We heard today in the gospel, that Jesus called people to repent and believe the good news. Before him, John the Baptist had been saying the same thing. Repentance. What are we supposed to understand by that? It’s not a word we use very often in everyday speech. I am going to look at three different ways of looking at the idea, and each depends a lot on what language you use.

In the Jonah story we hear about a city, Nineveh, which used to be the capital of the Assyrian empire. The ruins are still there, opposite Mosul in Iraq. The story of Jonah was written at a time when the Jewish people were struggling with their identity and suffering very heavy persecution. It’s a controversial story, telling the readers that God is God of everybody, even the perceived enemy, even the wealthy, supremely powerful nucleus of antagonism and oppression of the people of Israel.

Imagine a villager from Iraq going to the Pentagon and telling the people of Washington their city will soon collapse because God is tired of their wickedness, especially their violence and their idolatry. It’s like that. And amazingly, in the book of Jonah, the president listens and tells all the people of the city to show some humility, to take off their showy clothes and put on the clothes of the street people, to stop their over-eating and over-consumption and to go hungry for so long it hurts, to stop worshipping celebrities and status symbols, and to humble themselves quick, before they are humbled, because this is a God known for bringing down the mighty and raising up the lowly. And amazingly they all do. They see the error of their ways and they are sorry and afraid of their future: they are penitent, they repent.

Being sorry

That’s the first way of understanding the word repentance, the first one: to be penitent, sorry, repeatedly. The English word repent comes from Latin. And this Latin concept of penance, it’s telling us to be sorry, not just once, but over and over again. The translation of the Bible used in the West in the early days of Christianity was a Latin one, language of the Roman empire. The Latin Bible, called the Vulgate, influenced European theology from the beginning; so we have this Latin meaning firmly entrenched in our approach to God.

We can enter into this repentance stuff. Jonah calls us to take responsibility for the violence, the idolatry inside us too, to acknowledge it and be humble.

Well I repent, I’ve been repenting for years, I am sorry about the violence I inflict on other people ,on the environment, on myself too. I really am sorry for a large percentage of the consequences of my existence. Sometimes I have identified with the woman in Luke 7:36 who bursts into a room and throws herself at Jesus’s feet, weeping uncontrollably. She’s pretty sorry too. We don’t know what about, everyone assumes it’s some sexual misdemeanour, it might be, but maybe she’s collaborating with the Romans, maybe she’s been exploiting the labourers on her farm, maybe she’s been using false weights on her market stall — who knows? But often I have wanted to be her, just so I can have Jesus’ words for myself: ‘her sins, which were many, have been forgiven, hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.’ To repent, to be sorry and to know myself forgiven by God makes me very grateful.

There is something about accepting my own weakness, my own innate humanity which means I go wrong every now and then, that draws me closer to God, because being humble about it, God accepts me as I am. Remember that story Jesus told about the Pharisee and the tax collector, praying in the temple. The tax collector is on his knees, beating his chest and weeping, ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner’ — it’s the Jesus prayer — he isn’t promising to stop being a tax collector, he’s just asking God to forgive him and accept him in the state he is in, it’s especially important for him to feel accepted by God, because certainly everyone else will hate his guts! And God does accept him. Then there’s the Pharisee, saying ‘Thank you God that I’m not like that miserable tax collector…’ He sees nothing wrong with himself, he thinks he’s arrived, he’s proud, but he’s heading for a fall. We all know which one Jesus is more sympathetic to, I know which one I’d rather identify with.

I remember, though, having a conversation with a friend a long time ago, about confession. She said she didn’t see why she should go to confession as she didn’t think she’d ever done anything wrong. Now I knew quite a lot about this lady, and I could think of quite a lot of things, and I felt irritated with her. How could she be so shallow? But then, what’s worse, being shallow or judging someone else? Do not judge, Jesus says, and you will not be judged. I don’t have the right to judge anyone, I don’t have the right to call any individual to repentance, only myself.

This penitential dimension takes us into humility and allows us to dare to hope for God’s forgiveness, but it’s not the end of the story, and if we get stuck with this one dimension we can get a bit morose, we can get hung up with guilt and self-hatred, the flip-side of self-righteousness. Really, if God accepts us as we are, we’ve got to learn to accept ourselves too, and everyone else as well. I like the bit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where the clouds open and God appears… Arthur and his knights fall to their knees and God says, ‘Oh stop grovelling…’

‘Sorry’ says Arthur…

‘and don’t apologise, every time I try to speak to someone, it’s sorry this and forgive me that and I’m not worthy…what are you doing now?’

‘I’m averting my eyes, Lord’

‘Well don’t!’ …

Stop grovelling. Blame, guilt, anxiety, burden, unworthiness, leads to a feeling of separation from God. Separation from God is never the right answer, it’s a dead end.

New mind, new heart

But there are other ways of looking at this word in the gospel, repent, and one of those is in the same passage from Jonah. The people of Nineveh do penance, and God changes his mind, he puts the brakes on the impending doom of the city and leaves them alone. God has metanoia: a Greek word which means new mind. Change of heart, wiping the slate clean, cleansing and renewal…Now metanoia is the word we find if we read the gospels in the Greek they were written in. Because the gospels weren’t written in Latin to start with, they weren’t written in the language of scholars and rulers, they were written in a version of Greek which was spoken among the ordinary people at that time. A kind of everyday Greek. And metanoia is the Greek word in the scripture that tends to get translated as repent. So in the story of Jonah, when God changes his mind, you could say he repents. There are several texts in the Hebrew scriptures where God is described as repenting or changing his mind, especially about punishing people. God interrupts the process of catastrophe which is the consequence of people’s sin, and saves them from the destruction they have invited upon themselves, because God is merciful even when people are not.

Metanoia comes as a breath of fresh air after all this penitential wallowing in guilt stuff — great, we can stop beating ourselves up now and make a new start.

There’s a big personal dimension to this for me. Five years or so ago, I had a breakdown. The victim side of me that wants your sympathy will tell you I was being bullied at work, was exhausted from working too hard and being a mother of a baby, in a marriage that was on the rocks. It was the fault of my boss, my baby, my husband, my parents for bringing me up wrong, my friends who didn’t help me, my two closest friends who both left for other countries…poor me…but I don’t like the word fault, it simply happened because of the way I was.

But in coming to terms with my difficulties I wanted to call a lot of people to repentance —English-Latin style repentance, penance, saying sorry. And not getting the apologies and the signs of humility from others made me even more hurt and angry. I wanted people to be sorry for hurting me, and they weren’t, and that hurt me even more. But over time I came to see how self-destructive I was being, this resentment and blame wasn’t ever going to get me anywhere, neither was too much self-criticism about what a mess I’d made. The only way to healing was to just stop expecting people to apologise. I had to let the whole thing go and try to start again, and having decided to do that, I found that things fell into place so that I was helped to get back on track. People appeared at the right times and places to move me on, to change my mind, to cheer me up. It wasn’t the English-Latin version of repentance that I was experiencing but the Greek one, about new mind, new heart.

And there’s lots in the scriptures to support this sort of journeying, images of being cleansed and healed, people given a fresh start, their past melted away. Ezekiel: a new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put in you, and you will be my people and I will be your God….Psalm 51: wash me and I will be whiter than snow, purge me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed… Jesus’s words in Luke to the woman who weeps at his feet: ‘your faith has saved you, go in peace.’ Go in peace free from your guilt and worry, walk free and start again.

So we have the Latin instruction to be sorry, and the Greek one to start again. But in terms of drawing us into relationship with God it still isn’t the end of the story. We haven’t really got into the gospel yet. Let’s hear again what Jesus is down as saying: in Mark chapter 1, Jesus takes over from the respected prophet John the Baptist, saying in the version of the Bible that we use in church, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Well, is that Latin-English repent, meaning be very sorry?

or is it Greek repent, meaning have a new mind or heart? start again?

Well, no. I don’t think Jesus is talking about either of these particularly. Of course both do have a place in scripture, and huge value on the spiritual journey. but we have to remember that Jesus wasn’t speaking Latin or Greek. Jesus’s native language was a dialect of Aramaic. Aramaic was the common language of the region, it had been the language of a culture older than the Roman empire, the Persian empire. Aramaic was very closely related to Hebrew, which Jesus also spoke and read when quoting the scriptures.

Coming home

What we read as ‘Repent, and believe in the good news…’ is, in Aramaic, tubu w- haimenu basbarta. Tubu (or shubu I think in Hebrew) is a really big word. It means return, restore, bring back. It’s big because it’s central to the experience of the Jewish people. After years of exile, banished from their homeland Israel, the people long to return, and one day they do, They come home, and their return means the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the re-launch of their faith as Judaism. And return was also the principle behind the concept of the jubilee: every seven years, debts were cancelled, slaves freed and property given back to the true hereditary owner. Jubilee: a kind of interruption in the economic process which stopped anyone getting too rich or losing everything, a divine plan to stop excess and poverty. Every seventh year, there was tubu, return, restoration, giving back, part of the levelling-out process.

So. Tubu is where things and people go back where they belong. Exiles come home. There’s no grovelling and wallowing in guilt here, this is joy, this is the prodigal son coming home. Ok, this son is a real so and so and he’s ripped his dad off. His dad knows that. he doesn’t ask for penance, he doesn’t make speeches about how he expects his son to turn over a new leaf, he is brought back into the family home rejoicing. What we read as repentance, a word telling us to be so sorry for what we have done, is tubu, a word full of forgiveness, acceptance and joy.

Jesus is saying tubu — come home. Come back to God. Never mind what mess you are making of your life, just come back, let yourself be brought back. Tubu.

That makes me wonder where I am, if I am called to return. How far from God am I? How have I become so separate? Well, like Adam and Eve hiding and then creeping out of the bushes covered in fig leaves, shame can separate me from God sometimes. But God doesn’t care about fig leaves, God would rather have special time with each of us, walking in the garden as he used to in the cool of the evening, before we ran off and hid. So in a sense, too much penance can separate us from God, too much unworthiness and shame makes us start to think God doesn’t want to be bothered with us. But she does: what’s all this stuff about lost sheep? God brings the lost sheep back to the flock, it doesn’t have to do penance and it’s not got any great plans to change its behaviour and try not to wander off again, it’s just a sheep. The shepherd accepts its sheep-nature, and if it wanders off again he or she will go and fetch it again and tubu: bring it home where it belongs.

Feeling ashamed can make me hide from God. It’s not just that though. There’s more than guilt that separates us from God, there’s fear. Insecurity. I was thinking a lot about this during the holy week after Christmas, and on one of the days the OT reading was about how Aaron let the Hebrews make a golden calf to worship because Moses had been gone so long up the mountain. The people were afraid, they needed something to pin their hopes on, and he let them have an idol. When Moses came back down with his tablets of stone, his rules for following God, he was furious, he ordered the execution of three thousand people. This is horrible. But it’s the sin of putting trust in a false god that is seen as the true crime by the scripture writer. False gods. What’s the first commandment, the primary one? No false gods.

When I am afraid and put all my trust in somebody or something other than God then I am idolatrous and I am separating myself from God. I am saying, I don’t trust you, I trust this thing or this person instead. It’s a statement of atheism. But I have to learn that only God is totally trustworthy. and not only that, God is a jealous God, it says in Exodus 34:14 for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. To come back to God is to let go all idols and to put all our trust in God as God, not some theory or some nice spiritual kind of feeling, but when it comes to the crunch, as the one we really do trust.

Now what happens in the gospel reading is important, because having announced that people should come back to God, tubu, Jesus then meets two people, engaged in their family business. Fishing is their security, they depend on it. But not to the point where they are idolatrous, we see that because they are ready to let it go, they are ready to prioritise the call of God. This is what Jesus means by repent: ‘Come to me. Come with me. Through being with me, and being in love with me, through letting me love you, come to God, come home with me, come home to God. In God’s house there is room for everyone. Come home. Never mind who you are, never mind what you have or don’t have, never mind how messy and difficult and wrong your life feels, never mind what anyone else thinks of you, never mind your future, never mind. Just lay it all down, and trust me. Trust me like a little child will trust a loved parent. Trust me like a sheep will trust a shepherd. Trust me like I trust God. Watch me as I walk to my death trusting God, and watch me walk through death and into risen life.’ This is tubu, Jesus’s call to repentance, tubu is about transformation that can only happen by surrendering everything to God in trust.

So. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Let us be sorry for the mess we make, yes, and let us be ready to accept a change of heart and mind and be renewed, but most of all let us hear Jesus saying tubu — tubu w- haimenu basbarta. One by one, in the silence of our own hearts, we can go home to God, where we belong. That is the good news: it’s time to go home.

Amen.

This page was last updated on Thursday, 2 February 2006

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