We're fast approaching Holy Week -- that culmination of Lent. There's a lot of talk in Lent about repenting.
In Matthew's Greek the word is metanoeite (3.2). The traditional translation is repent. The GNB paraphrases: "Turn away from your sins". Eugene Peterson's translation in The Message cuts to the chase: "Change your life" (today we might say, "Get a life!").
But today I took a step back. I entered into a conversation with a friend of mine about racism. I was claiming that we Americans have a 250 year sin which demands confessing. He said we can't and shouldn't repent of past sin. That was then. This is now.
But I think he's wrong. Racism is a sin. It's my sin.
The Greek means, literally, "change your mind" -- and that's where I want to start, with where we are, with the fact that, actually, not only are we not very good at changing our minds, but indeed changing your mind is considered a weakness, and in public life a grave weakness, indeed a form of political suicide. There is even a new term for it ("flip-flopping").
Of course, we all change our minds. We just never admit it, for fear of looking weak. Which is immoral. It's deceit. And even if it's not deceit, it's lunacy. Where would we be without changing our minds?
Only a fool makes up his mind and ignores the facts.
So that's the first thing that appears to me: Relentance involves changing your mind, thinking differently about things. Why? Because you see something you never saw before. What did John the Baptist see? That the rupture of all ruptures -- the kingdom of God! -- is seismically shifting the plates of the universe.
This transformation of our imaginations -- this seeing, by faith, the transformation of the world into the kingdom -- is crucial, but because the Bible talks about repentance in connection with sin, we are talking about a moral transformation as well. Cue the classic conversion story: Once I was a thug, or a thief, or a drug-dealer -- in short, I was a sinner -- but now I've got religion, I've been born again, I've been saved, and I don't do those terrible things anymore.
So, let me ask: Is that what John had in mind?
I don't think so.
We treat sin like there's a checklist -- one we can use to mark off our life in good moral accounting.
So I think we really have to start rethinking there. Start rethinking what sin is.
Sin isn't primarily about my own personal moral shortcomings. Sin, in the Bible, is communal and social too. It's quite clear that Jesus links repentance with Jubilee in Luke 4. Good News to the oppressed has a lot to do with repenting. Human flourishing is at the heart of repentance.
And that's precisely what makes those who run the religious establishment so nervous. They thank God that they're not like the moral degenerates who ruin things for Israel. So it's the good moral folk in the Gospels who end up rejecting repentance.
Am I saying that Jesus calls us to take responsibility not only for our own actions but also the actions of others?
Yup. That's exactly what I'm saying.
I'm a white male. I benefit from over 250 years of the evils of racism. It's not history, because it's real life. For me, yes. But more importantly it's real life for sisters and brothers who continue to find systemic abuse, neglect and oppression.
I am, willy-nilly, involved in those systems. All the economic, political, cultural, religious and private systems that still oppress. That involvement is most sinister when it's least realized. You can't fix what you don't think is broken.
If we deny the fact that we really are one another's keeper, unless we can change our mind about changing our mind, the moral corrosiveness of sin will continue to eat at us. We're straining at the smaller sins and ignoring our own, larger ones. Myself included, here.
If I don't take responsibility for the sins of others, how can I take responsibility for national sins like war? Or sins of my church or community? Or sins of my family? If all there is, is me, what's not sinfully idolatrous about that? What makes me the moral center of repentance?
This is precisely the quandary that drove Bonhoeffer to leave the safety of New York City to return to Germany. He knew if he didn't act in solidarity with German sin, he couldn't preach repentance to Germany after the War.
The price of acting responsibly as a Christian is solidarity.
So what Bonhoeffer did -- what I want to do every day -- is model on Jesus. At the very outset of his ministry, even before -- indeed as a precondition of -- his preaching repentance (Matthew 4.17), what does Jesus do but submit to John's baptism of -- what? -- of repentance. And why? Why else but to show his solidarity with sinners by becoming (as Martin Luther powerfully put it) peccator pessimus, the chief of sinners.
That's what makes solidarity so hopeful. Because, like Barth said, "Precisely when we recognize we are sinners do we perceive we are brothers". I am complicit in the world's wrongs. All of it. All of them. This delusion of innocence is just that -- a delusion. In finding my imagination opened to all the ways I'm complicit, I find I'm also opened in compassion.
I can make choices -- say Yes and No -- in ways that make a difference. As a sign and parable of grace, life is opened and goodness is spread. And I bear witness to a coming Kingdom that refuses to recognize the human barriers we intend to erect between us (Galatians 3.28). Because Jesus and our life in him is what really binds us together.
In the very first of his revolutionary Ninety-Five Theses, Luther wrote: "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said 'Repent', willed that the whole life of believers should be one of repentance". Repenting about repenting too. Because -- look! -- the kingdom of God is breaking in, now.