Repenting
L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew's Church, Savannah
Ash Wednesday—March 8, 2000
"Turn ye even to me, saith the LORD, with all your heart,
and with fasting,
and with weeping, and with mourning: And rend your heart, and
not your garments,
and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious
and merciful, slow to anger,
and of great kindness, and repenteth him of
the evil"
(Joel 2:12-13).
It may seem very strange to us, indeed, when the Prophet Joel writes
that the Lord God Almighty "repents him of the evil." Such a statement
might even tempt the careless reader to think that "God sins," so that
God has something to repent in the same way that we do, making him not
very different from every sinful human being who has ever lived upon this
earth.
Such a thought might be comforting to some people, especially of the
sort who do not like repenting very much or who are given to saying about
their own sins, "everybody does it." The "little problem" they would be
ignoring, however, is that they have just invented a "God" who is nothing
like the God who reveals himself in the Bible and nothing like the Father
in heaven that Jesus Christ taught us to believe in and to pray to. What
we need to do, then, on this Ash Wednesday, as Jesus Christ’s Church assembles
to sanctify a time of solemn fasting, prayer, and repentance, is to look
for the true and much more wonderful message that these words contain.
We should begin by recognizing that "morality" is not an abstract "code
of conduct." Morality is the way that God lives, both within the communion
of the Blessed Trinity and in his dealings with his creatures. God is "goodness"
and "justice" and "mercy" in and of himself. Whatever he does or says is
good, just, and merciful because it proceeds from Who he is. This is the
message that God gave Moses when he told him from the burning bush, "I
Am Who I Am."
Thus, the Ten Commandments that God later gave to Moses and the moral
teachings of the rest of the Bible, including especially the words and
commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son made flesh, are not inventions,
even of the divine imagination. They are the application of God’s life
to our life, and invitation from God to man to live as God has lived, and
will live, eternally.
Nor should we forget the fact of God’s eternity. God created time and
space, but he is not limited to them. God exists apart from time and space,
without a beginning and without an end. God enters into time solely for
our welfare, and not for his own. We must describe God’s actions as taking
place in the past, present, or future, but these time frames are a matter
of indifference to God, except as they concern his love for us. "I Am Who
I Am" doesn’t have to bother with "I Am Who I Was" or "I Am Who I Will
Be," since these are mere repetitions of the same truth.
When we are speaking of God apart from the mighty acts of goodness that
he has taken and is taking in human history, our verb tenses (which are
all about time) will drive us out of our minds if we are not careful. It
is perfectly good enough, then, for our present purposes, to understand
that Joel is not telling us that "God repents in time" or that he acts
one way today, changes his mind, and acts another way tomorrow. We should
also remember that God, who is goodness, never does anything that he regrets
because nothing he does is regrettable.
So what does God’s "repentance" mean? It means his calling back of a
judgment that he has rendered in time and space, not because he has changed,
and not because his eternal purposes and decrees have changed, but because
the human beings to whom he delivered the revelation of his will and judgments
have changed.
An analogy may help. One of our children is bouncing a ball against
the side of the house. We tell him to stop at once, or we are going to
punish him, and so he stops. Unless we are insane, we do not punish a child
who has obeyed. Such punishment, under the changed circumstance of his
obedience, would be unjust. Furthermore, such punishment would have the
opposite effect of what we intended. Our purposes were twofold. We wanted
peace and order in our household, and we wanted our child to learn how
to behave properly. Thus, we haven’t changed our minds when we withhold
the punishment that we had promised to the disobedient child from the child
who actually obeys. And neither does God when he withdraws a decree of
punishment from either a person or a people who turn from disobedience
to obeying and serving him.
Of course, more is at stake when we speak of our Father in heaven, rather
than of our human parents on earth. The punishment that God decrees upon
the disobedient is truly "evil," not because God ever does evil to punish
us, but because our punishment is to experience all or part of the evil
of our own disobedience without God’s protection from it.
Since God is goodness, and justice, and mercy, and life, to be separated
from God is to be separated from goodness, justice, mercy, and life. Nothing
could be worse or more horrible, since if this separation is made permanent,
it is called "hell." I do not doubt, to use our limited earthly language,
that hell is a place of eternal torment. I do not doubt the flames and
the devouring worms that our Lord spoke of when describing it. But what
really frightens me is that these things are only the "outward and visible
signs" of hell, the way that water is the outward sign of Baptism. The
flames and the worms are only a hint of what it means to be separated from
God for eternity, of what it means to spend our lives in this world or
in the world to come apart from his protection.
When God "repents the evil," he responds to our feeblest efforts to
obey him, if they are at least a part of an honest struggle against our
own sinfulness to turn again to him. God does not change, but we change.
His solemn decrees either draw us back to him in obedience, to live with
him forever; or they are his just recognition that we have chosen to die
forever with the devil in hell.
Precisely because God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great
kindness (just as the Prophet Joel tells us), God also calls out to us
and says, "Turn ye even unto me, with all your heart, and with fasting,
and with weeping, and with mourning." What Joel describes here is "human
repentance," a miraculous invitation from God to become like him in the
only way that we can: by submitting to the power of his grace, by turning
away from everything in our life that is disobedient, sinful, and false,
and by turning to the one and only Living God.
By his invitation to repentance, God gives us the opportunity to imitate
him as loving children. He allows us to recall and to repudiate the sentence
of death that we have imposed upon ourselves by sinning, and to replace
it with a life of grace. By his Son’s death and resurrection, he gives
us the supernatural power to take on his holy commandments, not as strokes
of the lash, but as the blueprint for our reconstruction and rehabilitation
in his own image and likeness.
Heaven is God’s choice; hell is ours. God is perfectly, utterly sincere
in his eternal desire that we should live, and all he asks is our own sincerity
in asking for our imperfections and sins to be taken away. We "rend our
hearts, and not our garments" because whatever outward signs of repentance
we may show the world, what matters to God is that we repent of the evil
in our hearts, asking him through prayer and self-discipline to fill our
hearts with nothing but himself.
But if we are too proud to repent or ashamed to be seen repenting by
a sinful world, the sentence of God’s justice will be carried out. There
is no doubt about that. Neither is there any doubt that Jesus Christ has
borne the entire price of sin on behalf of every person who turns to God
and repents. Repenting in Lent, or any other time, does not save us. God
does that. But true repentance is always the acceptance of God’s invitation,
by God’s grace, to live and to never die.
Please note: These sermons are offered for your meditation. If
you wish to use them for some other purpose or republish them, please credit
St. Andrew’s Church and Dr. Tarsitano.
