How we can be spurred to ‘genuine repentance’

LENT 3C | 23 MARCH 2025 | LUKE 13:1-9 

Though the two historical events alluded to in this gospel are lost to history – neither appears anywhere else in the New Testament or in any other source – Jesus uses them to argue against, first, the conventional view that the fate of the Galileans sacrilegiously murdered by Pilate and those who lost their lives under the rubble of the collapsed Tower of Siloam must in some way have been related to wrongdoing on their part; and, secondly, the similarly conventional view that repentance is motivated principally by fear of divine punishment. 

Fear may indeed inspire regret, but not repentance. Fear can be dulled over time and guilt can be rationalised in an instant. And anyway, it is truer to say that we are punished by our sins, not for them and most of our sins are more regression than transgression. 

What spurs us to genuine repentance is the sense of sheer futility that our sins carry – they never get us to where we genuinely want to be but rather trap us in fantasy and immaturity. But even more tellingly, repentance follows from the realisation that God’s forgiveness is ours even before we ask for it, as so powerfully illustrated in the parable of the prodigal son. We are not forgiven because we are sorry for our sins; we are sorry because we realise, or better, it is borne in upon us, that we are already forgiven (to paraphrase McCabe). Repentance follows, in other words, from the realisation that we are loved unconditionally. 

To repent is to set or re-set our heart on God, but not in obedience to command or out of fear or to disburden ourselves of guilt: rather, in response to his love and our need and desire, our deepest need and our deepest desire, for God. And though repentance is traditionally associated with the penitential season of Lent, this annually recurring liturgical season only brings into relief our whole life’s quest. 

The first step in that quest is to acknowledge that our hearts are not where we want them to be. This is easier said than done because, though emptiness in the heart is harder to bear than anything else, we all too readily assuage the pain by filling them with what, in our saner, maturer moments, we know will never satisfy our hearts. We accommodate our hearts to the desires and needs we feel on the surface of our lives: our need of material security or sensible well-being or approval and praise, for instance, or even more beguiling, our need to be needed. 

But none of these satisfies the restlessness of a heart that is either empty or misplaced. Nothing less than a change of heart will do. A change of heart is, of course, how repentance is spoken of in the gospels, which is very different from the way most of us have been schooled to think of repentance. Undoubtedly, elements of what we have learned, such as penance, discipline, sacrifice and labour, are involved in repentance (and some, such as compulsiveness and scrupulosity, are not) but none of these is what repentance is essentially. 

It has often been pointed out that this distortion in our understanding of repentance can be traced to a mistranslation of the Greek into Latin by St Jerome (d 420), in his Vulgate version of the Bible, the only one available in the West until relatively modern times. He translated ‘change your mind and heart’ as paenitemini, ‘do penance’. It took no less than Erasmus (1466-1536) to spot the mistake, possibly while working on his edition of the Greek New Testament at Queens’ College here in Cambridge from 1511 to 1514. (Luther, as you might expect, was quick to make much of the error once known.)  

The difference of perspective implied in these different understandings couldn’t be greater. For one thing, the former implies that repentance is a grace given us, the latter that it is the fruit of effort. Each also implies a quite different idea of God: the former as a scolding schoolmaster or pushy parent, the latter as an indulgent Father, as in the parable of the prodigal son. 

The truth is that God doesn’t want even our best effort: he wants us, otherwise he would not have created us. Repentance is rooted in the realisation that it is not we who have chosen him, but he who has chosen us. Repentance, in other words, is intimately related to gratitude. It does, of course, involve turning away from our sins, but that is the corollary of setting our hearts on God. 

Again, to set our hearts on God is not essentially a matter of effort, but grace. Our hearts are moved and thereby changed by attraction, which is how God draws us to himself. How could we not find the source of all the beauty, love and goodness we experience in this life irresistibly and overwhelmingly attractive? 

Unsurprisingly, attraction and gratitude to God run like antiphons throughout the psalms: 

Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God. (psalm 41) 

O God, you are my God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. Even my body pines for you, like a dry, weary land without water. (psalm 62) 

Commenting on psalm 41, St Augustine says that the whole of our life is “a holy longing”. Longing for the beauty and goodness of God lasts all our life, not just the five weeks of Lent