A COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO REPENTANCE

Imagine we are in a classroom, but it’s no ordinary classroom. It is the complete idiots guide to repentance, and Jesus is the supply teacher, and as he enters the class, he says nothing.

He just writes the word REPENTANCE in capital letters on the board, followed by the phrase: “WHAT is it?”

He turns and looks at us.

Silence.

Hands go up around us to offer suggestions.

“Perhaps repentance is guilt”, someone says sheepishly.

“Perhaps repentance is a ritual act, looking somber and saying sorry but not actually ever living a different life.” adds another.

“Repentance is remorse and regret,” says a third pupil, while he is wondering if anyone ever feels it.

Just then Jesus the teacher writes something else.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” it reads.

Jesus looks around the classroom and raises his eyebrows, forcing us all to ponder like a big focus group. So we put our heads together.

‘Where our treasure is’, we figure, is another way of saying ‘what we most value’.

And ‘where our heart is’ is a way of describing where our essential being is – ie. who we really are.

So we confidently elect a spokesperson.

“What we most value,” says our spokesperson, “is inevitably who we will become.”

“If we dwell on guilt, we remain guilty.

“If we value rituals, we become ritualistic, and if we value money most, we become avaricious.

But Jesus interrupts our spokesperson and suddenly writes a third message on the board.

“Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

He noiselessly opens the floor to our responses again. More hands go up.

“Perhaps,” says someone from the back, “if we value the impermanent and changeable, a turbulent natural world or an unstable financial market - that is what we ourselves can become, turbulent and unstable.”

Jesus goes back to the word Repentance on the board, underlines it twice, and adds a big question mark.

I can’t stand it any longer, so I have a go myself.

“In God we live and move and have our being Jesus, as it says in Acts, which I know wasn’t actually written in your time, but all the same, it is in repentance that we re-consider who we actually are, and in whom we do have our being.

“And is there any evidence for this?” says Jesus.

I consider pointing straight back to him, isn’t it that obvious? But apparently not to him, so instead I hold up the gospel.

“The Greek word translated into repentance in the English language is meta-noia, Jesus. Meta, meaning after or beyond or above, noia, meaning perceiving or thinking, noia coming from nous, nous meaning the mind. “Use your nouse!”, as the saying goes.

Jesus doesn’t move a fraction of a muscle. I waver but go on.

“So if repentance or meta noia means beyond the mind, then mentally knowing all about God is by no means the same as actually knowing God.”

Jesus looks interested and invites me to go on.

“Repentance must take us beyond mental feelings.

On a roll, I look at the saviour.

“So actually” I say to Jesus, “true repentance is being beyond what the heart and mind can picture and measure in this world, being where no moth can eat, no chemical reaction can rust, and no thief can steal. You said as much yourself Jesus, well, according to whoever wrote Matthew you did anyway.

“Providing we are able to let limiting patterns go, we see who we really are - turned away from temporary estrange­ments with our neighbours towards a superior state of being: God.

“Repentance is not identifying with decaying nature and thief prone material but with divine reality, in whom everything sits. Letting go of what we are not, and becoming who we are.”

Christ breaks his silence. “And is there any evidence of this from Church tradition?” he says enigmatically. But I’m not entirely sure if he is being serious, the Kingdom must be more important to him than Church tradition. So I think of pointing to him again, but as I sense the end of the lesson, I offer Church history, just to oblige.

"Repentance is salva­tion, but a lack of understanding is the death of [this] repentance.” - Bishop Basil the Great, 4th century.

Sure enough the bell rings for the end of the lesson. Jesus picks up a complete idiot’s guide book and reads:

“God holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut it and seem to drop away from God, but God simultaneously ties it up in a knot – thereby bringing you closer. Again your sense of separation cuts the string – but with each new knot you are drawn closer still, and understand this,” Jesus says, putting the book down and looking at us: “In repentance, there is no dualistic feeling towards a Father who is separate from us. God is one, God both transcends this world and is the depth within it. Your Father is unseen; he sees what is in secret, and God will be your only reward.”

Jesus dismisses the class, in the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen

IMPERFECT AND JUST DIVINE

I was with trainee vicars recently – someone has to be. We met a lovely deaf woman called Hannah, who was asked through an interpreter if she thought she would be physically healed, or able to hear, before or after death.

“No”, she replied. “We are made in the image of God, and God is not a physically perfect human being.”

Hannah had accepted herself. Knowing we are divine can be hard, even and especially for religious people. But the message of Genesis begins by telling us how God created man in his own image, male and female, and God saw all that he had made, and it was good.

1 Corinthians 13 famously tells us how Love keeps no record of wrongs, but we bewail our sins as if God wants to be reminded of them:

“Remember not my sins, oh Lord!”

- “What sins? I forgot them long ago, you’ll have to prod my memory.”

We are aware of ourselves as evolved creatures who suffer, kill, eat, reproduce and die, which causes us immense anxiety. Perhaps sin should do, but we shouldn’t be stuck on it.

The Greek word for repentance: “metanoia”, means a turning of direction, a change of mind and heart, a new consciousness. In repenting we recognise original goodness, the grace of the living God. “The glory of God”, said Church Father Irenaeus, “is a human being fully alive.” Jesus’ type of life was full because he saw all this whilst in the world. But not everyone does.

“Why do you keep talking about mistakes?” said one spouse. “I thought you had forgotten and forgiven.”

“I have,” replied the other, “and don’t you forget it.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.....ATTENTION.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On their golden wedding anniversary, a couple were kept busy all day with the celebrations and the crowds of relatives and friends who dropped in to congratulate them. So they were grateful when, toward evening, they were able to be alone in the porch, watching the sunset and relaxing after the tiring day.

The old man gazed fondly at his wife and said: ‘Agatha, I’m proud of you.’

‘What was that?’ asked the old lady.

‘I said I’m proud of you.’

‘That’s all right’ she replied with a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m tired of you too’.

We don’t always get back what we expect, and
paying attention can make the difference.

In Acts 3 1-10 we read that when the crippled man saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him. Peter said, "Look at us!"

I can’t help noticing that Peter has asked the crippled beggar to look at him, but the beggar hadn’t actually asked for that. People can avoid having to engage with what will heal them, and looking at someone is more than giving someone your attention, it is acknowledging and expanding their reality with an attention which is beyond being anyone's alone.

This is a healing grace, but the man wasn’t asking for healing, he was asking for money.

Peter couldn’t give the man what he was actually asking for. Perhaps it is just that the apostles didn’t carry silver or gold. Perhaps it is that our desire for money gets in the way and prevents our healing. Perhaps it was more than this.

"Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." Regardless of the money, Peter gave the man what Peter did have, and this resulted in the man becoming strong, where he had previously been weak.

Maybe you have walked past a Big Issue seller in a city and looked at him or her in the eye while saying no thank you, rather than just walking past and ignoring the same Big Issue seller. This provides real dignity, even without the money.

And what did Peter really give the beggar man, apart from his attention? Perhaps nothing else, perhaps this very act of attentiveness in itself is enough to make a crippled man become strong.

Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man's feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God.

Sometimes it is in giving attention to ourselves that we notice where we are crippling ourselves. As I was writing this I suddenly noticed the slump in my back and sat up straight.

And it is in giving attention to others that we notice how they open up, how they are no longer begging for mercy in the face of existence, but all of a sudden appraising its wonder and being full of its life.

This very attention is a work of prayer. I was with someone suffering from Alzheimers the other day and noticed her spring back to personhood as a result of the renewed attention being payed to her in the form of an interested and inclusive three-way dialogue.

But sometimes speech is not needed, pure listening is just what brings that person back into the realm of life, and allows them to relate again.

I wonder what Florence Nightingale would have made of the recent suspension of a nurse simply because she politely offered to pray for a patient – I like to imagine that this work of attention would have actually been a requirement of the job of nursing for Florence Nightingale. Because prayerful attention renews our beauty.

The man in our story had been begging at the temple gate called Beautiful. When all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at this temple gate, called Beautiful.

Having been given attention through Peter he no longer needed to beg for the Beauty of being alive, now he understood that he was beauty – and it was this understanding which enabled him to walk through the gate. No longer did he need to be carried there.

In the Symposium, Socrate’s pupil Plato said that one who contemplates absolute beauty and is in constant union with it will be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness, but true goodness, because one will be in contact not with a reflection, but with the truth. Not with the ideas of God, but with the reality behind them.

The attention which enables us and makes us appreciate beauty was available to all during the life of Jesus. This attention must have lived on, because the writer of Acts was willing and able to to reflect upon it, and tell us these stories about the name of Jesus of Nazareth 4 or 5 decades after his crucifiction.

On recognizing a former beggar, he said, other people were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him – the divine work of attending had spread outwards, as it still spreads outwards today, because it is infinite.

The wonder and amazement of being had filled more people with that prayerful attention to the experience and existence and Being we have called God.

This miraculous and unexpected attention was offered to the disciples through the life of Jesus, and in this narrative of ours it was offered to the beggar through Peter and John, and it still offers itself to us now with an ability to heal.

It is a presence without which we can remain lame. But the paradox is that the beggar didn’t ask for it, he actually wanted something else.

God’s grace is gratuitous and unexpected because it comes to make us fully human despite our circumstances, not because of them.