The Beautiful Reality of Repentance

Almost thirty years ago, I saw a movie that has stayed with me ever since. The Mission, directed in 1986 by Roland Joffe, isn’t exactly the kind of film that an eleven year-old would normally be drawn to, and I’m sure there was much in this narrative about Jesuits in 18th-century South America that I didn’t fully grasp when I first watched it. But because film can be such a powerful visual medium, there were scenes that left an indelible impression on me, so that I find myself going back to them even now, decades later. One such moment occurs when Mendoza, the murderous slave trader who is seeking to change his life, comes to the end of a journey. He has made his way upriver to the Jesuit outpost where the missionary priests are ministering to the Guarani tribe. In the past, he might have traveled this arduous route in order to kidnap and sell the people who lived there. Now, he has another purpose—penance. As he stumbles over boulders and climbs up cliffs, he drags behind him a bundle containing his armor and sword—the tools of his trade—as a symbol of the pain he had caused through a lifetime of greed and a career of brutalizing the vulnerable.

When he makes his final ascent and enters the Guarani village, there is a moment of palpable tension, as the tribespeople decide whether they should cut the throat of their enemy. When one of them uses his knife instead to cut away Mendoza’s burden, sending his armor crashing into the river below, the scene is swallowed up in a moment of exhilarating joy. The tribe, along with the missionary Father Gabriel, break into delighted laughter. Mendoza weeps loudly, smiling in dumbfounded relief as the tears flow down his muddy cheeks. In that moment, as well as any artist possibly could, Joffe captures the beautiful reality of repentance. Without the kind of serious acknowledgment of sin that repentance requires, it is hard to imagine how Mendoza would have experienced that moment of liberating grace. Every step he had taken, dragging that burden behind him, had prepared him to receive forgiveness, from both God and from the Guaranis, with a humble and grateful heart.

It’s impossible to deny the significance of repentance to the life of faith. The ministries of the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus were all rooted in the idea that the people of God must turn from their sins and be renewed, in order that they might anticipate God’s kingdom in hope. And yet, in our current context, even many Christians have lost a handle on what it means to repent, or why it matters. Far more common is the attitude described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he accuses the church of peddling “cheap grace.” “In such a church,” Bonhoeffer says, “the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin.”

Jeremiah would have been horrified at this sort of degradation of God’s mercy. In the passage we read this week from chapter 14 of his book, the land has been suffering under a crippling drought. The cisterns lack water; the ground is cracked; even the animals lack grass. In desperation, someone (perhaps the prophet) cries out on behalf of the people, that God might forgive their sins and restore the land. God’s answer is not one of comfort, but rather judgment. He speaks of the people’s love of wandering, their unrestrained flight from God’s commands and instruction. Because of these things, God says, punishment will come upon the people of Judah.

But if God is angered at the lack of repentance, and the half-hearted worship of his people, his real ire is directed at the false prophets who seem to be telling the people what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear. When they prophesy deliverance and false peace, God says that they are giving the people “false visions, divinations, idolatries, and the delusions of their own minds.” By telling the people that everything is going to be alright, they stand in the way of the truth that might set them free. By candy-coating the sins of Judah, these so-called prophets actually rob them of the liberation that comes with real repentance. And so, God’s condemnation of these prophets is unsparing: “I will pour out on them the calamity they deserve.”

Of course, while we might whitewash the sins of our neighbors from time to time, as these false prophets in Jeremiah have done, it is our own sins that we are far more likely to ignore. It is our own righteousness that we are far more likely to exaggerate. It is our own need for repentance that we are far more likely to neglect. This reality is at the heart of the parable that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 18. As is so often the case, Jesus subverts the expectations of his audience in this parable by casting a Pharisee and a tax collector as foils to one another, and then telling us that it is the latter, rather than the former, who went home from the temple justified before God. This assessment seems to hinge on the two men’s very different approaches to prayer.

The Pharisee should be the expert in matters of faith, having been schooled in Torah from an early age. Yet he demonstrates that he knows next to nothing about the appropriate posture of prayer. His prayer is a distortion or inversion of what prayer is supposed to be. There is thanksgiving, but it is thanksgiving that is focused entirely on the self: “I thank you for how awesome I am,” is essentially what the man is saying. There is confession, but it is only a confession of the good works that the Pharisee has done, meant to elevate his standing in the eyes of his fellow temple-goers. And perhaps most importantly, where there could be repentance, the Pharisee instead directs his focus at the sins of others, specifically those of the tax collector praying at the same time in another part of the temple courts. Instead of a “There but for the grace of God go I,” the Pharisee looks at the tax collector and says, “Now that’s a sinful person. He could learn a thing or two from me.”

As a contrast, Jesus points to the tax collector. This man doesn’t stand up in the front of the temple courts, so that his spiritual performance can be seen by those present. This man can’t even look heavenward as he prays. He can only fix his eyes on the ground as he beats his breast and pleads with God for mercy. The weight of his sin rests heavy on his heart. The burden of his disobedience wears him down. He doesn’t identify himself as a do-gooder or a spiritual hero, like the Pharisee did. As he asks for God’s grace, he only uses one word to describe himself. He is a sinner, who needs God desperately. And so, when he goes home, as Jesus says, justified, we can imagine the joy that carries him out the door, as he steps out into a new life, one that is shaped by a narrative of true repentance and powerful forgiveness.

This is a feeling that the Apostle Paul would have understood. In his second letter to Timothy, as he draws near to the end of his life on earth, he can look forward to the crown that awaits him. He can acknowledge the ways that others have sinned against him, but he can also forgive those who have wronged him throughout his life. And he can do all of this not in a spirit of pride, or of bitterness, but with a certain measure of humility, because before he said “I have fought the good fight,” he also declared, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.” Paul’s life—his commitment to the Gospel, his love for a God who had redeemed him—is a testimony to the power of repentance, and to the transformation that can occur when we acknowledge the weight of our sin, and then embrace the liberation that comes with forgiveness.