“When they said ‘repent’… I wondered what they meant”
2nd Sunday of Advent: John the Baptizer comes preaching repentance. As Cohen sings – we don’t know what repentance means. So often we think of a stern moralistic preacher wagging his finger in judgement, predicting the doom of our civilisation.
Funny that, given all I’ve been reading up on in the last month or two.
From today’s Epistle: “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation”. The thing I’ve been worrying about most is timing. How much time do we have to lay plans for alternative forms of life? What’s the shape of the slope on the other side of Hubbert’s Peak? How bad is it going to get?
“The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare”
Thing is, as Tom Wright often argues, this language is not about the prediction of heavenly events, but of the collapse of present day political structures. The ‘elements’ in 2 Peter are the powers that be.
There is a longing – and it is there in residual form in much secular doomsaying – for God’s judgement to come and for a spectacular end to our world. That is what the Book of Revelation is about after all. Yet it is also the case that Jesus defers the expectations, for ‘about that day and hour nobody knows’.
It’s a displacement of our own – often deeply buried – awareness of our own sin, that is, our own awareness of how far we have fallen away from what it is to be truly human. Our culture is so profoundly inhuman, not least in the monopoly of time, and deep down we know this. We want it to end, and so we long for it to collapse, and we long for the father figure to come in and sort it all out for us. Yet we also fear such a judgement for the very same awareness of our wrongness implicates us in the wrong doing itself. So in our terror we offer up sacrifices to appease the wrath of the vengeful deity “Lord spare us”.
The religious authorities recognise the power that this gives to them. They wag their finger and engender the terror. They exult in the coming judgement. They set up temples and demand sacrifice. They exist, parasitically, on the guilt and sorrow of the meek.
Into this situation comes the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. It is an invitation into life, it is not a death sentence, for “He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
Repentance – turn your life around – worship a living God – choose life – life for a community here and now, not the salvation of an individual soul at the end of time.
This offer of forgiveness comes first (like the resurrection) – no wonder they chopped off his head.
It’s all about time. The living God wants us to return to him, to break our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh, to become the community that we were called out of Egypt to be – and to be a blessing to the world, to show forth God’s blessing through that very same way of life which we show and which we share.
There is judgement – but it is not the judgement of a vengeful and wrathful deity. God’s wrath is simply when we experience the consequences of our own actions. God’s grace is when we are spared.
In the years to come we will experience the consequences of our actions (Kyrie Eleison) and many in positions of authority will seek to claim that this is the wrath of God – giving themselves authority at the same time.
Let us not believe them.
Instead, let us remember that Advent is the time for penitence (choose life!) and for hope – hope in the God of grace and love and vulnerability, revealed when he came to earth as a baby.
“With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day”
In the darkness of these days that are passing away, let us set all our hope on the mercy of Christ, and look “forward to a new heaven, and a new earth, the home of righteousness”.