Repentance

 ‘Like the time I ran away,
turned around,
and you were standing close to me’
from ‘Awaken’ by Yes on the album ‘Going for the One’  

My last post was about ‘Reflection’, and this one is entitle ‘Repentance’, and I intend another entitled

‘Resilience’. It seems that three point alliterative sermons just keep happening, even in retirement!

The message of John the Baptist calling people to repentance is well known, and features in the Sunday Gospel readings in Advent. I think that we sometimes tend to think of the call to repentance as being a somewhat grim thing; the stuff of thundering sermons delivered by frowning preachers to fearful congregations. And, to be fair, John the Baptist was certainly what we might call a ‘plain speaker’! I cannot imagine many preachers today declaring to their listeners that they are ‘a brood of vipers’.

But I don’t think we should necessarily see ‘repentance’ as a grim and forbidding process, or even as being somehow contrasted to the ‘good life’ presented elsewhere in Scripture or the ‘life abundant’ of which Jesus speaks. After all, Jesus also called people to repentance.

Repentance – at its root – means a change of mind or heart, or a turning away from one direction and turning to go in another. In terms of our faith journey, it means turning from going our own way (or the ‘wrong’ way) and choosing instead to go God’s way. And God’s way is the way of life abundant. 

It is to do with undertaking an ‘about turn’ or a ‘U-turn’ on the road when we realise that we are headed in the wrong direction.

Perhaps we should view repentance (or ‘turning’ or ‘returning’) in the light of some of the words from Isaiah chapter 30 when the prophet says ‘in returning and rest you shall be saved… the Lord waits to be gracious to you…’

I don’t know about you, but for me all of that places repentance in a more positive light. 

And perhaps that is why – for me – the words from the song ‘Awaken’ by Yes (quoted above) have such resonance. How often I have turned away from God, even run away; and then, when I have finally turned around (‘repented’) there God was, close to me, and offering grace and mercy, and the path to abundant life.