Repentance starts with softening
Wonderings:
I wonder when or how you’ve felt really stuck.
I wonder when you’ve flipped your lid—when you’ve been so flooded with emotion that you acted in a way that seemed crazy later.
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Second Sunday of Advent in Year A in our lectionary.
Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Matthew 3:1-12
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating and life-giving God. Amen.
Two stories today. First story:
About 20 years ago I went to hear a talk by a long-time anti-war activist who happened to be an Eastern Orthodox priest. I don’t remember his name—let’s call him Father Mikhail—but I remember that he had long grey hair and a big bushy beard and he wore a black cassock. Father Mikhail looked like John the Baptist if John the Baptist had made it through seminary. He had spent most of his life telling truths that most people often didn’t want to hear: that the way of non-violence was the only path to the peaceable kingdom that the prophet Isaiah speaks of in our first reading—in which “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”
As an aside—I think one of the reasons I can get so emotional when the kids gather around our table at communion is that when they help lead in that sacramental moment it is a taste of redeemed life, of the coming community in which hierarchies of domination or control give way to a structure of community that nurtures life, and growth, and learning, and change. In which the growth and freedom of children show us grown ups the way.
(Also as an aside—thanks to Bella Deng for sharing with me some recent theology that argues really persuasively that animals and the rest of the non-human world are also promised healing and liberating in the kingdom of God; that the kid and the calf and the fatling are also waiting with us for a savior—and deserving of dignity that is denied to them by our industrial food system.)
But back to Father Mikhail, telling truths that people often didn’t want to hear: that the federal government spends more than 50% of its discretionary budget on the military, while public health and education combined make up only about 12%. Father Mikhail would show, rightly, how far out of line this budget is with gospel priorities—and like John the Baptist, he would call people to repentance.
Repentance. The Greek word metanoia literally means, a change of mind. But let’s remember that in the ancient world, the mind was not located up here, between our ears. “Mind” meant the center of our being. Mind was here, in the heart, or even here, in the gut.
So repentance means a change in the center of us. I think of it as an interior turning that shows up, in time, as a changed life.
Father Mikhail told a story that night 20 years ago that has stuck with me—about the courage it can take to allow that interior turning; to repent. In the early 90s, Father Mikhail gave a talk at a mid-sized Catholic parish in the midwest. It was his usual talk about Jesus’ radical, nonviolent understanding of transformative justice, and afterwards he gets a couple of the usual questions and then, right at the end of the Q&A, this older man in the last pew stands up and bursts out—“Are you trying to tell me that Jesus Christ would not have enjoyed a good boxing match!?”
And Father Mikhail is a little surprised: he’s never gotten that exact question before, but he patiently explains, no. And the guy storms out. Afterwards one of the organizers comes up and apologizes. She says, “I’m sorry about Father Nichols’ question: he’s a retired priest here. I don’t know why, but he really didn’t want us to invite you.”
Maybe 10 years later, Father Mikhail is invited back to the same church. And he gives his updated talk, and there in the last pew, is Father Nichols. This time he doesn’t ask a question. Instead he comes up afterwards and pulls Father Mikhail aside. He says, “I’ve been thinking about your talk since you last came.”
Father Mikhail remembers this guy, and now he’s nervous. But Fr. Nichols goes on.
“I’d like to apologize for my outburst. You see, before I was a parish priest I was a military chaplain, and I was the chaplain to the Air Force crews that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs that killed 200,000 Japanese civilians. And I had told those crews that we were doing the will of God, that God was on our side. And I had been telling myself the same thing for 40 years. But during your talk 10 years ago it started to dawn on me, so little, so late, that those Japanese were children of God. And it opened up something I’d always felt deep down, but had always run away from: that what we had done was wrong, that the whole work of war was wrong. But I just couldn’t face it that night. But I’ve spent a lot of the last 10 years wrestling with the truth in what you said, and what those airmen under my care did, and what I told them, and what I was a part of. I’m getting old now, but I’ve become a member of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. So I wanted to thank you. And I want to ask you tonight if you would hear my confession.”
Repentance is a change at the heart of us. And I think that Father Nichols shows us that repentance doesn’t happen by outrunning something, trying to leave it behind, or muscle through. Repentance begins with turning to face what is, and cannot be undone. And starting down a path of integrity that starts from right here.
In other words, I’m suggesting that repentance is not about punishment, not about suffering for our sins. But that does not mean it’s easy. Facing what hurts we have caused or ignored, what sinful systems we are complicit in—this is prime territory for shame, denial. But I would invite us to think of repentance as a softening, inside; an opening which offers us new freedom of movement.
And I think that is the fullest meaning of repentance. A softening, inside, of some resistance to what is true—which is that we have messed up, fallen short AND that we are beloved beyond measure. Repentance allows us to expand our view and see new paths forward—and God gives us the freedom, the capacity and the courage to follow a new way, towards repair.
So shame and denial can keep us stuck. The other big thing that gets in the way of repentance is blame—the focused hope that somebody else will suffer for their sins. And here is where I want to tell one more story: the story of the community for whom the Gospel according to Matthew was written, which might help us get perspective on how and why this Gospel can have so little softness; why there might be so much yelling in it, so much unquenchable fire. And this story might help us hear today’s Gospel text, paradoxically, as an invitation to soften.
The Gospel of Matthew was likely written about 40 years after the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Somewhere around the year 75 or 80 of the common era; 75 or 80 AD. And it was written in and for a community of Torah-observant Jews. Matthew’s is the most “Jewish” of the 4 gospel accounts, in that Jesus thinks and reads scripture and teaches like a rabbi. This gospel also draws the most continuity between Jesus and Moses, and puts the most emphasis on Jesus as a Son of David. Matthew’s gospel makes continual reference to Hebrew scriptures that tell of a coming messiah, a coming king who, in the language of our psalm, “shall defend the needy among the people; shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.” Their fervent hope was that Jesus would come back—and soon—to be that eternally righteous king who “shall live as long as the sun and moon endure, from one generation to another.”
For this community, Jesus was the savior of the people of Israel, who was sent by God to bring Israel back to the focus of the Law and the prophets: loving God, loving one’s neighbor, protecting the poor and the oppressed. He was to be the restorer and liberator of Jerusalem, the holy city of the people who claim Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as their ancestors.
But Jesus was betrayed by the small but powerful faction who had thrown their lot in with Rome, and traded their integrity for political power and collaboration with the Roman empire’s regime of domination.
For Matthew’s community, these leaders—that “brood of vipers”—they were directly responsible for the death of Jesus. And they blamed these Sadducees and Pharisees not just for the death of Jesus 30 or 40 years before, but also for a much more recent, present trauma in their lives.
In the year 70, the Roman army had had enough of Jewish resistance, and they brought the hammer down on the people of Israel. They didn’t have an atomic bomb to drop on Jerusalem, but they aimed for that kind of display of overwhelming force, of indiscriminate violence and destruction. So first they desecrated the Temple: the holiest, most cherished place in Matthew’s world. The Romans spit on that place; they intentionally defiled it. And then they set fire to the city, trapping innocent people within the walls. Fire everywhere. Unquenchable fire.
Matthew’s community wrote out this Gospel just after that. And there is so much beauty and order and healing and liberating vision in it—and as we’ll see as we read this Gospel together over the next year, this community is also kind of thrashing around, trying to make their pain go away, trying to get some relief, trying to make meaning of their trauma. And one way they are doing that is by telling the story of Jesus as a way to put blame where it belongs.
We just get a hint of this today in this story about John the Baptist, calling the Pharisees and Sadducees a “brood of vipers,” saying “just you wait until the one coming after me gets here.” But when I hear mention of “unquenchable fire” in Matthew’s gospel, when I hear about their yearning for a final judgment in which the righteous and the unrighteous will be separated and dealt with accordingly, I hear a community that is desperate for healing, looking for redemption. But in the heat of their pain and grief, they can only imagine that redemption as a replay of the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them. Another scene of destruction; another fire: only this time, it will be only the bad guys who suffer, and not the innocent; it will be payback.
What I want to invite us into as we read this Gospel over the next year is a form of intergenerational repentance. Again, repentance which is not shame, or punishment, or suffering, but which begins with softening, with humbly acknowledging how we got here, and opening ourselves to the possibility of turning down a different road.
Our spiritual ancestors in the community around Matthew, they were hurting. Their grief was white hot, and that grief often came out as anger. As the desire that somebody would burn in hell for this. We can acknowledge that, we can understand that, we can feel compassion for that. We can soften toward our ancestors, who were doing the best they could to carry forward the loving, liberating, and life-giving gospel of Jesus, their paradoxical Savior, and ours.
In our softness, we can choose to turn toward their grief, and away from their grievance. In our softness, we open ourselves to their radical message that God’s justice will come; and we can choose to open ourselves to an imagination of that justice that is bigger and stranger, and more healing, and more liberating than our ancestors could bear to dream of.
Amen.
