The Nature of Repentance
Sermon preached by Dn. James Wilcox on Sunday, January 12, 2025
Matt. 4:12-17; Eph. 4:7-13
Last week we witnessed the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry which began with Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. This week, we come to the first declaration of His public ministry, which is the call to “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!.”
Now when we hear the likes of such a statement — this call to “Repent!” — it often conjures up imagery of doomsday prophets with long beards standing on street corners casting judgement upon anyone who crosses their path. It’s an all too familiar image. But in reality, we need better imagery of what it means to repent, for this understanding of repentance is very reductionistic. We might often think of repentance as being sorry for something we’ve done wrong, or simply feeling bad or regretful, or even carrying guilt over sinful behavior. And here again, I’d say this is a bit reductionistic, or at the very least, an incomplete picture of what it means to repent.
Translated from the Greek, the word repentance is metanoia, or “a change of mind.” And for this reason, David Bentley Hart in his translation of the New Testament, chooses not “Repent!” as it appears in today’s passage, but the phrase “Change your hearts!” Repentance, in light of this, should be understood as a formative transformation of the heart that realigns one's desires with the will of God. Taken this way, repentance should be seen as something positive, not as something negative as we might think of it. St John Climacus tells us that repentance is the “…daughter of hope, and the denial of despair.” Met. Kallistos Ware likewise states that “Repentance is not a paroxysm of remorse and self-pity, but conversion, the re-centering of our life upon the Holy Trinity… to repent is to look, not downward at my own shortcomings, but to look upward at God’s love.” (Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works. (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 45.)
Now if the proper definition of repentance invokes a changing of one’s heart and mind, it’s fair to ask how exactly do we bring ourselves to change our hearts and turn them toward God. In actuality, a true inward turning of our hearts is enacted when we learn to see the world as it truly is! Oftentimes it is something that simply happens to us and catches us unaware. And how we respond when it does can help us to open our eyes to the world a bit more. And If this answer seems a bit esoteric, consider how it is expressed in various forms of artistic expression in our modern era.
Leonard Cohen once wrote that: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” This of course implies that when we break a little, the divine light which is all around us, has the opportunity to seep inwards. If we allow it.
Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer and Nazi resister who is the subject of Terrence Malick’s film “A Hidden Life,” (also the featured film at our Film & Faith series this coming weekend) writes from his prison cell that: “When you give up the idea of surviving at any price, a new light floods in. Once you were in a rush, always short of time. Now you have all you need. Once you never forgave anyone, judged people without mercy. Now you see you own weakness… so you can understand the weakness of others.”
But one of my favorite modern examples comes from Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. In this film, the protagonist Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) is the subject of a reality television show, yet he is altogether unaware that he is the subject. He simply lives day to day thinking he’s an ordinary guy living an ordinary life just like everyone else, all the while unaware that there are cameras hidden everywhere he walks. From the moment he was born this “show” has been his only reality, and he knows nothing apart from it. All of the people he loves — his wife, his family, and his friends — are all paid actors. They don’t love him, but they act like they do. And all of this is undertaken because money to be made off of Truman’s ignorance. Truly, reality television is the “opiate of the masses.” But one particular morning, something happens to Truman. As he’s making his way down the driveway to start his car, a light fixture plummets down from way up in the skydome of the set, and it crashes on the street in front of him. Puzzled as to what this could be, he walks over, examines it, picks it up and turns his head skyward. This marks the beginning of Truman’s awaking. Other clues suddenly appear and direct him toward a reality that has been has always been there, but has been obscured from his eyes. Truman soon learns that his own existence has never been anything of his own choosing, but that he’s been commodified from womb, and his life has been entirely scripted up to this moment. Ultimately, this breaks Truman. It is from this awakening, however, that Truman sees the world as it is, and he makes the choice to walk away from all that he’s known in order be truly free.
Awakenings are something we also encounter in Scripture. In roughly one month’s time, as part of our preparation for Lent we will read about a different type of sojourner who wanders far from home and squanders everything he has, only to become destitute. I’m speaking, of course, of the Prodigal Son, and it is from this parable that we learn of hid self-imposed exile. I don’t need to recall all the details of the story, suffice it to say that in his desperation the Prodigal “comes to himself,” or as the original Greek phrases it “he came to his right mind.” In other words, through his brokenness he had an awakening, which allowed him to see the world as it truly is. And freely, He chose to restore himself to his Father.
And so here is why awakening to ourselves — allowing ourselves to be “woke,” as the phrase goes — is so important: None of us can first come into repentance and turn ourselves around, unless we have an awakening experience in which we come to our right sense of mind, and into our right state of being. Being “woke” has never had a negative connotation in the Christian Church, because wakefulness and watchfulness have always been part of what it means to guard oneself from falsehood, or false teaching. Those who fear “wokeness” are simply afraid to have the mirror turned back upon themselves. For if it were, it would expose them, and they would have to reckon with who they are, and what it is they’ve actually done in their lives that they’re so afraid of. But this exactly what repentance IS — knowing who we are, and what we HAVE done and allowing this to be transformed — allowing our hearts to be transfigured! — by God’s love!
Friends, each of us WILL stand before God one day, and when we do there will be no secrets. God sees through everything. The gift we have in this life is the gift of time. God has granted us the time — here and now — to work on our hearts, to come to our right minds, to “let the light seep in,” to assimilate and attune our hearts to the working of the Holy Spirit. And believe me, it is better to work this out now in this life, than do it in the hereafter.
And if you don’t know where to begin, consider this insight from author and pastor Frederich Buechner. “Tears,” he says
You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before... You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from, and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.
When Jesus tells us to “Repent! For the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he is telling us to examine our hearts — to change them! — to awaken to the fact that God is in our midst and the Kingdom of heaven is at hand! We simply need to the eyes to see it.