7th March 2010 - "Why Repentence?"

Stephen Fielding - St Mary's and St Peter's, Tewin
Luke 13:1-9

This week I've been thinking long and hard about the central message of the gospel reading for today. It’s stern stuff, is it not? ‘Unless you repent, you will all perish’. This is Jesus at his most severe, the prophet of judgement and the holiness of God. What's it all about? Well we know that repentance includes saying sorry for our sins. We also know that it's much more about a complete change of heart and mind. And so what I want to do this morning is to take a brief look at two simple little questions - why repentance and what's the use of it?

Why repentance?

The big picture of which repentance is a part - the jigsaw, if you lik,e of which repentance is an important piece - is the great act of reconciliation by God in Jesus Christ. God's great saving act in the cross of Jesus - the death of Jesus as our way back to God, our way into heaven, our possession of the holy spirit of God. The whole glory of our world turns on this momentous, historic reconciling act of God in Jesus Christ. Wow!!! We look at the cross and we say – ‘ He did it for me’. ‘He did it for us’. So repentance starts with an acknowledgment of this great fact. It starts with the response of thankfulness and gratitude. ‘Lord, you did this for me. Thank you.’

But what has the Lord done? Get this right and we’re a step nearer to what repentance might bring us to do. Jesus has rescued us. That's what salvation means. That's what we have just sung: ‘Saviour since of Zion’s City, I through grace a member am.’ And now he's rescued us, he wants us to live as if that were so. It is not that we're climbing up to heaven by our own repentance or efforts, as if to climb up and say ‘ I've made it, please open up’. It's not that at all. It is rather that we are already in heaven, citizens of heaven already, and therefore we are to live according to its bylaws, its culture, and its climate. Viewed like this, what is repentance? It is thanking God for what he has already done, it is responding in the knowledge that we have been rescued, it is to say sorry to God when we have not lived up to our calling as citizens of heaven.

Somebody has called repentance a ‘glad returning into the right way’. And so it is. ‘A glad returning into the right way’. Sackcloth and ashes? I don't think so. The mark of our repentance is first and foremost the recognition of what God has done and then it is the mark of gratitude and joy. Only then does it become a matter of being deeply sorry for our sins.

So what's the use of repentance?

I want to make one point only. Jesus says, when we ask God for forgiveness we must make sure that we forgive others. He is absolutely willing to forgive us - that's his nature after all - but do not, he says, remain in a state of unforgivingness towards others. In other words, don't ask for your sins to be forgiven if there are outstanding sins against you that remain unforgiven. The unkindness of the person who has made you redundant and against whom you are feeling extremely resentful. The cruelty of a friend. The neglect of a child or parent. Any of the wrongs against us that we feel most keenly. We know only too well how they build up unforgivingness in us.

The story goes of a professor in American seminary who's been a missionary in China. Sam Moffat told the students how he had fled from his Communist persecutors in China. They'd seized his house and all his possessions, burned the missionary compound, killed some of his closest friends. Indeed his own family had barely escaped. So when he left China he had a deep resentment and anger and hatred. Finally, he told the students, he had a real crisis of faith. ‘I realised’, he said, ‘that if I have no forgiveness for the Communists, then I have no message at all’.

Or we say, the other person has to make the first move. I'm in the right. I'll forgive you if you tell me I was right after all……. if you'll give me some satisfaction in return. It's true, isn't it, and yet as we know it is not the way. It's very hard to forgive, but that is the calling and the test.

‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’

You will know the story of Les Miserables. Jean Valjean is a prisoner, with a record of conviction for theft, who is finally released from prison and looks for a bed for the night. Only a kindly Bishop will help him. The thief then steals some silver from the Bishop and next morning the police return with him and the stolen silver. The bishop’s response astounds him. ‘ So here you are, I am so pleased to see you. Did you forget that I wanted you to have the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, worth a good fr.200. Valjean was not a thief, the bishop said to the police. ‘The silver was my gift to him’. And when the police left, the Bishop said this to the man – ‘do not forget that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man’. Valjean’s repentance would be to do just that.

The power of forgiveness is very great, and we're called to exercise it. We are back indeed to the centrality of the Lord's Prayer - that terse but utterly comprehensive statement of the proclamation and preaching of Jesus. Here is the gospel in a nutshell - and by the way I cannot help thinking that we should have a group at some point that sits down and studies the Lord's Prayer together over perhaps a period of 4 to 6 weeks. That would be another Lent group worth belonging to.

So what have we been saying?

Repentance is ‘the glad returning into the right way’. It is our response to the gift of God's reconciling grace in Jesus on the cross. ‘He did it for me’. ‘He did it for us’. We need to pray for forgiveness, but it isn't the repentance that cleanses us – ‘the blood of Jesus, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin’. Meanwhile we are to be forgivers ourselves, as the Lord's Prayer unequivocally instructs us. To realise what God has done in Jesus, to be thankful for it, to say sorry for our failure to live as the citizens of heaven already rescued, to have the glad returning into the right way, and to be forgiving of others - why this would be a change of heart and mind befitting the true meaning of repentance.

Would it not?

Amen