Honest Repentance: Repentance
Notes
Transcript
ADAM HID TO NOT BE SEEN
ADAM HID TO NOT BE SEEN
The people of Nineveh were vicious and violent, not the kind of people you would think would be receptive to repentance. Yet Jonah delivered the Lord’s message to them: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jon 3:4). And it worked brilliantly. You could not ask for a more thorough-going repentance than that of Nineveh. The people repented even before the king decreed it, and by the end, everyone in the city, from the king all the way down to the animals, was wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes. It is a model of repentance in the Bible, and this evening we will contemplate it as a model for our own repentance as well.
They did much better than Adam. After Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, God called out, “Adam, where are you?” Adam replied, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself” (Gn 3:9–10). When we are confronted by God’s call to repentance this Lenten season, will we find the courage to be honest about who we are and sit in the ashes like Nineveh, or will we be afraid and hide like Adam?
HOW WE HIDE
HOW WE HIDE
John tells us that “Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (Jn 3:20). This is our natural tendency as well. Who wants to have their sins exposed? But repentance means coming into the light. It means exposing your deeds to your own conscience and to God. Perhaps also to a pastor or fellow Christian, if it’s a sin that particularly bothers you. But that can be intimidating, even though we know Jesus forgives us.
We naturally want to react like Adam: I was afraid, so I hid. One way to hide would be to confess our socially acceptable sins. Yes, I get angry with family members, or sometimes I’m lazy, or sometimes I don’t obey my parents. Aren’t we all like that? By confessing those sins, we figure that we have done our duty. We have met the requirement, so to speak, and have come up with something to confess. But it can be a smoke screen so that we don’t have to confess the deeper rage or lust or unbelief that we would be ashamed about if other people found out, the sins that do the greatest damage to our relationship with other people and with God. It’s not that superficial repentance is false. It’s probably true that Adam was afraid because he was naked. But by confessing that, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to confess the real issue: he ate the fruit in direct disobedience of God’s command.
I was afraid, so I hid. Another way we can hide is to move our thoughts quickly and keep our attention off ourselves. “Yes, I’m a sinner, but aren’t we all sinners? Besides, I will try really hard next time.” Perhaps my past track record shows that I am not very good at amending my sinful ways, but if I promise to do better, I can move past this uncomfortable part of the service, or this uncomfortable part of the church year, and move on to something less threatening.
HOW WE STOP HIDING
HOW WE STOP HIDING
But this is not what the Ninevites did. They sat in ashes. They spent time contemplating their sin, which is another way of saying that they spent time being honest about who they were.
Now what does it mean to sit in ashes? Ashes remind us of the curse that God pronounced on Adam and Eve after the fall: “Dust you are and to dust you shall return” (Gn 3:19). Ashes remind us that our sins have catastrophic consequences. This is not just a matter of violating some arbitrary rules. God’s law determines the structure of the universe. So, to sin against God’s law is to sin against the way we are designed. To sin is not only to oppose God, but it is to fall short of what we could be. It is destructive, like knocking out the walls of your house until you are sitting in a pile of rubble. To sin is to settle for living in a hell of our own making rather than in the boundaries that God established where life can flourish.
Now you may think that the next thing we need to do is to get rid of those parts of us that are sinful so that we can fit into the demands of God’s law. In that way of thinking, God’s law is like Cinderella’s slipper. In that story, you can only be the princess if you can fit into the shoe. In the Grimm’s Fairy Tale version (not the Disney version), Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters wanted to be the princess, so they actually cut off their toe to try to fit into the shoe. Our problem is that we are the wicked stepsisters in the story. How are we ever going to fit into the shoe?
But honest repentance doesn’t mean being able fit yourself into God’s law. It means recognizing our sin, grieving it, and sitting with it for a while. In fact, this evening I would ask you not to promise to do better. It doesn’t even matter whether you think you can do better. We will take that question up next week, but for tonight, just focus on being who you actually are before God.
Recognize too that when we repent, we are not thinking only about the things we feel ashamed of. Isaiah says, “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Is 64:6). This is reflected in our reading by the fact that the entire city repented from the king all the way down to the animals, from the highest to the lowest. It’s not just the base parts of us that need repentance, but our highest faculties as well: our reason and intelligence, our love, our selfsacrifice, because none of it is pure. It is all shot through with sin.
HOW GOD SEES US
HOW GOD SEES US
But repentance isn’t just feeling sorry for sins. It’s also faith in God’s promise of forgiveness. Yet even here, we often feel the instinct to hide. Sometimes we think forgiveness means that when God looks at us, he sees only Christ. There is certainly some truth to that, but it doesn’t go far enough. After all, what is our ultimate hope? On the Last Day, we want to hear the words, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Mt 25:34). So, Christ ushers us into the kingdom, and then what? We get to hide behind him forever? That sounds more like Adam. “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” What if at some point in eternity, God were to peek around Christ and figure out who we really are? Would he say, “How did you get in here?”
No, our faith is in the promise that Christ has reconciled us with God. That means that God says to us, “I know exactly who you are, and with full knowledge of that, I welcome you into my kingdom. I know your shame, and with full knowledge of that, I seat you in a place of honor.” Your honored welcome into God’s kingdom has nothing to do with how well you fit into God’s law or your sincere promise to be better, or even your ability to do better. That is determined only by the work of Christ, whose death has redeemed you from every aspect of yourself that would destroy you. The issue of turning from sin and doing better is important, and we will take up that question next week. But your success or failure at that can never add or subtract to what Christ has done.