Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth
Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.
Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.
And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.
It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.
The prodigal son who has wasted his inheritance “with riotous living” in a far country “came to himself” – a wonderful phrase – and said to himself, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and no more worthy to be called thy son.” He returns only to be met by the Father’s love who, when “he was yet a great way off,” “saw him, and had compassion, and ran,” and embraced him, gathering him back into his love like the shepherd with the one lost sheep and the woman with the one lost coin. The shepherd and the woman rejoice in the finding of that which is lost because it is precious in their sight and thus things are returned to their wholeness, to the company of others. The parable of the return of the prodigal son drives the point home even more strongly. It is death and resurrection, “for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and his found.”
The parable of the return of the prodigal son is imaged wonderfully in Rembrandt’s famous painting by the same name, a painting which inspired Henri Nouwen’s wonderful meditation on the parable. The two preceding parables emphasize the priority of God’s love as the principle of the possibilities of such a return in us. We are recalled to the divine love whose essential goodness is the very principle of our lives.
Repentance is our metanoia, the turning of our minds and souls back to the principle of our being and truth; in short, to God. This is not about beating up on ourselves and wallowing in self-pity, itself a form of self-regard. It is about being recalled to God. That is our joy. Our self-righteousness which creates such insidious and invidious distinctions among us is really a denial of the truth of God’s love. Can there be more gentle and yet more moving teachings than these parables? The gentleness of Christ moves us to repentance. It is the counter to all the forms of our self-righteousness. Even more, it is all our joy.
In our liturgy we are constantly circling around and into the love of God, constantly being recalled to our rightful minds. Metanoia is about that conversion of our minds by reflection, by a constant awakening to God and his truth for us in our lives. It is our labour, to be sure, but it is also nothing less than the motions of divine grace in our lives. Joy, chara, is closely associated with grace, charis. Far from being something negative, repentance is truly positive. We are more than lost and dead; we are found and alive in God’s love. Such is the joy of our being sinners who repent.
Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 3, 2018