Practicing Repentance
In those days Jesus
came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when He
came up out of the water, immediately He saw the heavens opening and the Spirit
descending on Him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are My
beloved Son; with You I am well pleased.”
The Spirit immediately
drove Him out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days, being
tempted by Satan. And He was with the wild animals, and the angels were
ministering to Him.
Now after John was
arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God, and saying,
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe
in the Gospel” (Mark 1:9-15).
Grace to you and peace
from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
With his typical stinginess
with words, St. Mark describes the inaugural events in Jesus’ ministry. His rapid-fire
approach draws attention from the details of the individual events themselves
and focuses on the movement between them: Baptism, temptation, and the
proclamation of repentance.
This is the movement of
our life in Christ, too. It begins with our Baptism into Christ, which is
followed immediately and continuously by temptation. We are not as resilient as
Jesus, so the movement in the text takes a slightly different turn for us.
Before we proclaim repentance to others, we need to repent ourselves.
Thus Lent. This
forty-day season is an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to responding to
Jesus’ call to repent. This means the movement of our text, is also the
movement of our life: Baptism, temptation, and the practice of repentance.
But what does that
movement look like in your life?
Likely, for all of you,
Baptism has already taken place. You have already been united with Christ in
His death and resurrection. You are members of His body, participants in the
resurrected life of Jesus Himself. Coming out of the water, you find yourselves
in another kind of wilderness where the Devil still prowls.[i]
Practicing repentance
involves more than acknowledging temporary feelings of guilt. It is more than a
regular participation in a transaction to clean the slate. Our worship services
begin with repentance and forgiveness, but the entire life of a follower of
Jesus is a life of turning from sin and returning to the Lord.
Repentance is comprised
of two things: contrition (sorrow over sin) and faith (trust in the promises of
Christ). Our Lutheran Confessions say, “contrition is the true terror of
conscience, which feels that God is angry with sin and grieves that it has
sinned. This contrition takes place when sins are condemned by God’s Word.”[ii]
Scripture vividly describes
these terrors:
For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy
burden, they are too heavy for me. I am feeble and crushed; I groan because of
the tumult of my heart. (Psalm 38:4, 8)
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; heal me, O
Lord, for my bones are troubled. My soul also is greatly troubled. But You, O
Lord—how long? (Psalm 6:2-3)
“In these terrors,
conscience feels God’s wrath against sin… The conscience sees the corruption of
sin and seriously grieves that it has sinned.”[iii]
As St. Paul discussed
contrition, he distinguished between “godly sorrow” and “worldly sorrow.” As
anyone with a few traffic tickets can testify, most of us regret being caught
in some violation of the law. We dislike going to court to pay a fine, or we
find ourselves embarrassed as we face the police officer. Perhaps we fear
possible future consequences (e.g., high car insurance rates). This fear of
punishment is one sort of “worldly sorrow,” and we, have all experienced enough
of it to recognize it instantly.[iv]
Another type of worldly
sorrow involves what the Scriptures sometimes call condemnation—the feeling of
despair that crashes in on us when we fear that we have used up our quota of
God’s grace, and therefore, that He will refuse to forgive us for a particular
offense. Probably all Christians struggle with the sense of condemnation from
time to time.
But there’s another
form of worldly sorrow that seems even more prevalent in our day—guilt. Secular
prophets like Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that once the modern Western world finally
threw off the constraints of religion, feelings of guilt would disappear. But
that has not proven to be the case; if anything, guilt has grown, even
metastasized, into an ever more powerful and pervasive element of contemporary life
as God has been kicked to the curb.
The old vocabulary is
still used to describe virtue and vice, but we no longer have the religious
framework to guide conversation and debate. Having departed from God’s Word, we
have words and instincts about what feels right and wrong, but no settled
criteria to help us think, argue, and decide what is objectively true.
You would think that would
lead to a culture of easygoing relativism. With no common criteria by which to
judge moral action we’d all become blandly nonjudgmental: “You do you and I’ll
do me, and we’ll all be cool about it.” But that’s not what’s happened. Moral
conflict has only grown. In fact, it’s the people who go to church least who
seem the most fervent moral crusaders. Religion may be in retreat, but guilt seems
as powerfully present as ever.[v]
Where does this guilt
come from? You and I know it’s ultimately from the Law that is written on our
hearts, our consciences. But without proper guidance of the Law, that guilt can
get misplaced. Wilfred McClay suggests technology plays a part. It gives us a
feeling of power, and power entails responsibility, and responsibility leads to
guilt. You and I see a picture of a starving child in Sudan and we know
inwardly that we’re not doing enough. “Whatever donation I make to a charitable
organization, it can never be as much as I could have given. I can never
diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough.” [vi]
McClay describes a
world in which people are still driven by a need to feel morally justified, and
yet they have no clear framework or sets of rituals to guide their quest for
goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense
that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace, and
forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.
People seem to sense,
if not fully understand, our brokenness. And that’s a good start, but if we
only see it as something that has been done to us, we’re going to fail
to benefit from that knowledge. Repentance will be replaced with a counterfeit
named with victimhood. Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around, but it’s all
somebody else’s fault, those who are around me, those who came before me. The
Law is a mirror that others must look into, a microscope that detects
all the sins of our forefathers without acknowledging any of our own.
And so we enter into
the 40 days of Lent. Forty days out in the wilderness, to be reminded that
there is more to life than food, than glory, than power, as our Lord Jesus
Himself showed us. But even more, to confess our sins, to say not only mea
culpa (“my fault”), but mea maxima culpa (“by own grievous fault”).
Unbelief is the core of all sin, but to say so is a ploy if we do it to
minimize what it is we are doing, or not doing, in our lives.
For this, the Law is
more than helpful.
Have we had problems
with our parents? Of course, we have! But have we played a part in causing
those problems? Does our own anger and rage reach to the violence of murder?
Well, we know the angry one is liable to the charge. But then our own desires
for pleasure and convenience, makes murder necessary as we see in the life of
King David or the current abortion holocaust. Violence is justified if it
furthers our own cause. We say we don’t steal, but we do demand justice, which
means taking other people’s money. Gossip remains an indulgence, and still
destroys other’s reputations and lives. Instead of speaking well of others and
putting the best construction on their words and actions, we find our own
righteousness in a cancel culture which aims to show the sins of others, so
that we may feel good about ourselves. And yes, coveting. It’s in the air.
Others are wealthy, and we’re not, so we want what they have.
Now is not the time to
minimize the Law; it’s time to actually preach the Law in such a way that the
Gospel might once more be sweet in our ears. And we must never minimize the Law
in such a way as to say it is temporary, as if it is done away with, and not
fulfilled, and we are left in our sin.[vii]
Worldly sorrow comes
from Satan; it brings death. By way of contrast, Paul commends “godly sorrow.”
This kind of sorrow for sin leads us to the next step in God’s process of
repentance. Recognizing our sin and sorrowing over it, we confess it. The word
for confess in Greek means literally “to speak together” or “to say the same
thing.” When we confess our sins, we simply say what God says:
· We have indeed done
what His Law has forbidden.
· Our action (thought,
attitude) was wrong.
· Our sin hurt God; it
hurt us; it hurt other people.
· We deserve God’s
punishment.
When we honestly
confess our sins to God in this way, we do not try to excuse ourselves. We do
not try to shift the blame for our sin onto someone else’s shoulders. We do not
trivialize what we have done, nor do we minimize the consequences we deserve.
As the apostle John wrote, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and
the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
Standing before God
stripped of all self-righteousness, we hear the beautiful words of our Father’s
absolution: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our
sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Absolution is, for the
Christian, a glorious emancipation proclamation. The Latin word from which we
derive the word absolve literally means “to set free; to release.” Absolved
from our sins, we find freedom from their guilt and from the punishment we have
deserved. But also—and this is critically important—we receive in God’s
absolution release from the power of our sins to enslave us.
That freedom comes, not
as we try hard to amend our sinful lives, but as we rely on the Holy Spirit’s
power to “cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We realize that in our own
strength, we cannot obey God. And so, we ask Him to work these things in us.
Contrition. Confession.
Absolution. Yielding to God’s Spirit. We repeat this process of repentance as
often as we need it. We may, at times, find ourselves mired in a sin that we
confessed only minutes before. In fact, we may find ourselves repeating the
steps of the cycle a dozen times within a 10-minute period. But God will not
become impatient or angry with us. He simply invites and encourages us to use
the medicine He has prescribed. We can take it as often as we need it; we need
not worry about overdosing.
Perhaps all this seems
too simple. Admittedly, it is simple, so simple that we could easily let our
pride prevent from using the process our Lord has given us to enable us to live
more fruitful, less frustrating lives of discipleship. It is simple. But it
works. It is the only thing that works. And Jesus yearns to help us use it.
And so He equips us for
such a life. He baptizes us into His death and resurrection, bringing us
forgiveness, life, and salvation, teaching us through His Word, feeding us with
His body and blood to strengthen us in our faith toward Him and in fervent love
toward one another. Then He sends us out in the world, providing us with
opportunities to practice repentance in our daily vocations.
As we sit, stalled in
traffic; as we push a wobbly-wheeled grocery cart up and down the aisles of the
grocery store; as we coach softball or chair a congregational meeting; as we
play with our grandchildren or kick our shoes off and turn on the television set—as
we do all these things, our Lord gives us opportunities to practice the
principles He has taught us. We never work on these on our own. Our Teacher
always stands beside us, reminding us of His Word and offering His
encouragement and His help.[viii]
Sometimes we will
succeed; other times we will fail, even fail spectacularly. In this life, we’ll
never get it perfect. That’s when we repent. We confess our sins and failures,
hear and trust in Christ’s forgiveness, resolve to do better with the help of
God and continue practicing repentance over and over until the day the Lord
calls us home.
Go in the peace of the
Lord and serve your neighbor with joy! You are forgiven for all your sins.
In the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture
quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001
by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
[i] Nafzger, Peter. https://www.1517/articles/gospel-mark-19-15-lent-1-series.b
[ii] McCain, P. T. (Ed.).
(2005). Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions (pp. 160–161). St.
Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House.
[iii] McCain, P. T. (Ed.). (2005). Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions (pp. 162). St. Louis,
MO: Concordia Publishing House.
[iv] Fryar, Jane L. (1992). Go and Make
Disciples: The Goal of the Christian Teacher (pp. 57-58) St. Louis, MO:
Concordia Publishing House
[v] Brock, David. The Strange Persistence
of Guilt.” The New York Times, March 31, 2017, Section A, Page 23.
[vi] McClay, Wilfred M. “The Strange
Persistence of Guilt.” Hedgehog Review.
[vii] Scaer, Peter. “Ash Wednesday, Sin, and
Brokenness.” Facebook post, February 18, 2021.
[viii] Fryar, Jane L. (1992). Go and Make
Disciples: The Goal of the Christian Teacher (pp. 59-60) St. Louis, MO:
Concordia Publishing House
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