2nd Sunday of Advent 10.12.06 Repentance
What did you go out to see? Our Lord asks the people. This is not just any old prophet. This is someone bringing in a new era, a new state of things.
How much difference is there to being a Christian? What amount of change is required. When John preached repentance how much change was he asking for?
Is repentance a minimal adjustment or a major transformation?
You might think from the way some people talk that the only difference between being a Christian and being anything else is that the Christian goes to church for one hour a week.
The Christian has one hour less golf, or shopping, or dog obedience class but otherwise the two lives are exactly the same.
This is not how it is meant to work.
The Christian is one who is like Christ. Filled with His Spirit, overflowing with good works and transformed in his whole attitude.
It is inconceivable that the Christian could be the same as everyone else when we have received a whole new kind of life.
When it comes to repentance, we cannot just mean mentioning a couple of sins in confession, but otherwise everything is ok.
We are not comparing ourselves with our neighbours but with Christ.
If we are to compare ourselves with others we will come off well and will be able to say truly that we are not so bad.
But we belong to Christ and we draw our light from Him.
When we compare ourselves to Him we have to say we have not been so good at being ‘other Christs’.
So Repentance has to be a clean out of the whole system, and being drawn into the life of Christ.
We can say the same thing in two ways:
Repent, behave yourselves, keep the rules (and all true, too)
Or, Come to the water, receive the abundant love that is being offered to you.
We all would like to receive more love, but may not all want to change our lives.
In fact, though, the receiving of love will move us to change our lives. By that stage we will want to change and it will not be a burden.
Take Scrooge at Christmas. He was so transformed by his dreams that he wanted to be generous.
It was not just that he knew he had to change, but he wanted to. So the change was delightful to him.
Zacchaeus another example. He spontaneously wanted to give back four times as much as he had stolen, so great was his joy at discovering the new life.
Repentance is not a burden but a path to new joy.
but we need help to keep the vision of what is expected and what is possible.
We stop both too soon.
We have little faith and we do not expect God to work miracles.
We have low expectations of our own behaviour so we do not ask for or exercise the grace which enables higher things.
We settle for ‘one hour a week’ or ‘two hours a year’ for those who go only at Easter and Christmas, and call ourselves religious.
The invitation is there for us to break into a new layer of life, to discover the better air the other side of the fog. So we seek a deep and complete repentance. We will not try to minimise our response.
Let the grace of Christ carry us beyond minimalism or technical Christianity. Let Him change us on the inside so that we each become a new person in Christ.
