Repentance Is More Than Going to Confession
2nd Sunday of Advent
I must admit that I’m not normally one to pass up an opportunity to encourage you to make use of the sacrament of reconciliation, which is, by the way offered here at the Cathedral every day, and although it may seem that John the Baptist’s cry to Repent would afford as good an opportunity to promote confession as ever, I must also admit that there lies within the word the Baptist uses – Repent – a more fundamental and revolutionary command that we must heed before and alongside the sacraments of the Church for them to be of any lasting effect. Metanoeite! – the Greek word that commands repentance – commands more than a mere change of behavior and remorse for the wrong we have done and the good we have failed to do. Metanoeite is nothing less than a command to change one’s mind and purpose on the whole. The Baptist tells us that we don’t simply need to go to confession to repent, although, it must be said, he would probably pepper that into his homily today nonetheless. The repentance for which the Baptist cries commands, even more, that we must think differently, not merely taking up a new set of ideas or only inhabiting a new plan of life, but from top to bottom, putting on a new mind, taking up a new way of seeing, adopting a new way of being in the world.
What makes the newness of what the Baptist commands? It is the new of the kingdom which is now finally at hand, which is present in the one mightier who comes after him, that is, in Christ himself. Metanoite – Repent – is the command of commands to set aside ourselves and to take on the person of Christ. And the Baptist is the best preacher, because he practices what he preaches: he decreases and steps away and allows Christ to increase and take front and center stage. Metanoite, the call to the whole conversion of the person, is the essence of the Christian life: to let ourselves be removed and replaced by Christ.
Every Advent, the Baptist’s cry for metanoia reaches us again because the process of full-self-replacement quite simply does not happen overnight. We spend the majority of our adolescence and early adulthood attempting to become who we are, or at least snuggling to become who we want to be, establishing ourselves as individuals distinct and other than our parents and people around us. We work and labor with all our might in those formable years to become the person we envision ourselves to be. But the Baptist tells us that our identity and personhood are given, not made. We do not become ourselves on our own and through our own effort. We become ourselves only by finding ourselves within Christ, by metanoia that results in becoming one with him. Self-discovery of this kind requires unlearning years and decades of conclusions of who we thought we are and of who we thought we wanted to be. Metanoia means abandoning selfish pursuits and prideful ambitions, setting aside sinful indulgences and guilty pleasures, cutting off relationships that lack virtue, and dropping the mask of our self-deceit – all in exchange to become the person Christ will change us to be. In a word, metanoia is the aftermath of fire, the unquenchable fire of the ravaging love of Christ that consumes the self-creation our arrogance has made and leaves us only with the purified image of Christ himself the fire of his divine love has wrought.
John wants that upon his return Christ will separate out the wheat from the chaff, the good tree from the bad, those who have heeded the call to repent from those who have not. And this judgment will be final. The prophets before John often spoke about God’s relationship with his unfaithful people with the rural and pastoral imagery of a gardener who prunes back a wayward vine. As Israel grew throughout the centuries, she grew there she should not, and seeking to define her own existence, she moved only toward her own destruction. God, the ever-faithful spouse, never failed to call her back and admonish her, often using the harsh tactics of a gardener to snip and trim the vine, correcting her course so that she might flourish. But as the final prophet of the old covenant who bears the responsibility of announcing the dawn of the new, John proclaims God’s forthcoming intervention to be more definitive and dealing a more fatal blow. God is no longer, John announces, content only to trim back the arrogant, self-defining branch, merely to encourage the vine to grow where and how it should. No, he will focus his attention and strength now and only on the root and will stand over it with ax in hand ready to strike, if she will not repent, to cut the tree down to its very source.
Metanoia is the condition of entry into the kingdom, for on the day when the kingdom comes in full measure, when the spirit of the Lord rests on the one who judges all hearts, the created order will no longer suffer division: the wolf shall not be allowed to prey on the lamb, the leopard shall not be left to threaten the kid, the calf and the young lion may not be opposed, and the little child may no longer be their subordinate, the cow and the bear will have no right to make themselves rivals, the lion and the ox shall not be given food that separates them, the baby and the child may never consider the cobra’s den and the adder’s lair a place of hostility. For when the judge has sorted all things out, when all metanoia has been accomplished, no opposing polarities will be allowed to survive in the kingdom to come. And the division that marks our hearts now will then, at last, be resolved. All of creation – out there in the world and within us – will be restored, changed, and brought, at last, to peace.
In these holy days of Advent, the Baptist announces that the kingdom of heaven is at hand! If repentance means more than simply going to confession, what does it look like? How do we undertake this process of transformation? If I may briefly, defer to the wisdom of Bruce Springsteen: It’s hard to be a saint in the city. John the Baptist preaches in the desert of Judea but lives also in the desert within himself. He has set aside all distractions and pushed out anything that would distort his ability to hear God’s voice. We need desert time, too: time set away from noise and commotion, worries and responsibilities to hear the still small voice of God who speaks to us.
Time in the desert, however much or little we are able to make, will prepare us this Advent for the great and awesome mystery to which these holy days lead: when God took our flesh to himself, completed a metanoia of inestimable proportion, as he united his divinity to our humanity and made it possible for our humanity to be raised up to hi divinity. What we will find when these Advent days are through is the infant babe lying in a manger, the God-man, Jesus Christ. May we find him even now, not in the manger where ox and ass eat, but in the Eucharistic food set before us, as he gives himself once again, to change us, to unite us to himself.
Homily preached December 4, 2022 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
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eloquent homily. How we all long to find time in the desert!