Repentance — such an old-fashioned, churchy word, so reminiscent of unctuous preaching and Elmer Gantry hucksters.\u00a0 Or so some of us think.\u00a0 Yet, even if the word has fallen on hard times, the idea of change, of renouncing bad habits and poor commitments, of rethinking what we love still makes sense to most of us, and rightly so.\u00a0 Few people outside the confines of the world’s privileged elites of power, wealth, and celebrity are so convinced of their own perfection as not to acknowledge the need for repentance now and then.<\/p>\n
Psalm 38, one of the Psalter’s penitential psalms, lays out both the need for repentance and the steps such an action requires.\u00a0 As in most laments, the poem expresses the suffering of the poet (and all subsequent singers of the song) in terms of bodily pain and decay (verses 1-14 sound like a hypochondriac’s dream world, though in this case, the description is true), and in terms of social isolation (verse 11’s [12 in Hebrew] “those loving me and my neighbors stand before\/apart from my affliction; those formerly near me stand way back”).<\/p>\n
Unlike most lamenters, however, the psalmist takes responsibility for sin, as in verse 18’s “for I recount my inquity and have remorse for my sin.”\u00a0 At the same time, this psalmist does not cower before a distant God who remorselessly punishes sin.\u00a0 Rather, the psalmist associates God with his or her suffering, not only by pointing out to God that the arrows of the Almighty have already brought enough pain to get the sinner’s attention, but also by commenting on the performance of the psalm itself, describing it as a way of reaching out to God.\u00a0 So verse 9 [Hebrew 10] says, “O Lord, before you is all my desire, and my sighing is not obscured from you.”\u00a0 The psalmist has done all he or she can do and now awaits salvation.<\/p>\n
Hence the poem’s conclusion: “Do not abandon me, O Yhwh my God.\u00a0 Do not be far away from me.\u00a0 Hurry to my rescue, O my saving lord.”\u00a0 For the psalmist, the most devastating consequence of sin is its isolation from God, its capacity to shatter hope in a meaningful and orderly world, and thus its capacity for utterly crushing the soul of the sinner.\u00a0 Other texts, of course, talk about other consequences.\u00a0 But here the radical individualism of repentance comes to the fore.\u00a0 I<\/em>, and not someone else, am a sinner.\u00a0 I<\/em> must change.\u00a0 I<\/em> must find my way back to a merciful God.\u00a0 Individuality is both a blessing and a curse.\u00a0 The naked “I” is most manifest as a consequence of sin; the aloneness of the individual is the result of our capacity for evil, not the highest good.\u00a0 And yet I cannot shift responsibility from myself to another, for in doing so I erase myself and lose all opportunity to be part of a relationship with others.<\/p>\n But then again, repentance in this text and in general rests on a key assumption about the nature of the human being and thus of God.\u00a0 That assumption is that God desires human beings to change, grow, mature, and live according to justice.\u00a0 Repentance is not a futile begging for mercy, nor is it a way of appeasing an otherwise stubbornly hard-nosed God.\u00a0 Repentance is not a way of crushing human independence, as the Romantics of the modern and postmodern period often understand it (see, for example, Shelley’s poem “Prometheus Unbound,” and in some ways Aeschylus’s ancient original, “Prometheus Bound”).\u00a0 Repentance is a way of keeping us from crushing ourselves.\u00a0 It is an act of turning back to the course of goodness and life, for our own sakes.\u00a0 Repentance matches our deepest desires with our outward actions.\u00a0 And as such, it is a gift of mercy we give ourselves.<\/p>\n This week, there are some things I need to repent of.\u00a0 Maybe it’s the same for you.\u00a0 And next week, there will be more.\u00a0 Let us have the courage to receive forgiveness and healing through the honest discipline of repentance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Repentance — such an old-fashioned, churchy word, so reminiscent of unctuous preaching and Elmer Gantry hucksters.\u00a0 Or so some of us think.\u00a0 Yet, even if the word has fallen on hard times, the idea of change, of renouncing bad habits and poor commitments, of rethinking what we love still makes sense to most of us, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n