“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” I was sitting in a college classroom listening to my Presbyterian professor begin our course on the Reformed tradition when I first heard these words. They fell like hammer-strikes on my ears and were engraved in my memory. The professor then informed the class that this was the first of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. In the six years since, that statement has motivated a personal quest to understand the depths and power of repentance.
Luther’s guilt-plagued conscience is the stuff of Reformational bedtime stories. But, as with all bedtime stories, we often rush headlong into the happily-ever-after of “the just shall live by faith.” The hallowed Reformation rediscovery of sola fide is not complete without remembering how Martin Luther reminded us about the joy of repentance. For Luther, repentance begins where we all know it does: awareness of sin, guilt, and fear of what sin deserves in judgment. What I and, I suspect, many of you, heard in teaching on repentance emphasized this, and urged us to apologize to the Lord for those things which we were guilty of. Perhaps, in this repentance, we felt motivated to “do better” and sin less. Brother Luther challenged me—and continues to challenge all of us—here. Awareness and guilt of sin, and fear of its consequences, are only the first part of repentance—the fruit of the Law. Repentance doesn’t end there.
It doesn’t end there, because repentance begins and ends with the work of God. In repentance, we find not only conviction and awareness of judgment, but our final absolution. All the ways that we’ve heard the Gospel—“I love you.” “I redeemed you.” “I rescued you.” “I healed you.”—have been captured in the words of the crucified Jesus: “It is finished.” Freedom. Sheer, joyous, Christian freedom. Freedom from sin. Freedom from death. Freedom from the Law’s terrible roar. This is what we have been sentenced to by Brother Martin: to endlessly hear that our sins have been forgiven and we have been granted all of the righteousness of Christ. That is the work of repentance, and the task that Luther invited us to in his life and ministry. There is no drudgery here, but only the joy of knowing that God has set us and our misdoing, misthinking, and misloving to rights.
In many ways, I am still on that quest to explore the depths of repentance. I haven’t found the bottom yet. The more aware of my sin I become, the less introspective I am—because repentance turns my gaze away from my navel and directs it to Jesus. Oh, I am deeply aware of the terror of judgment, but in repentance I find the sweet, restful solace of knowing that the judgment has been passed on my sin, and by the grace of God, I have been set free to enjoy the loving fellowship of God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dave Ketter is the lay pastor of the Village Church in Ambridge, PA, a mission of Church of the Savior (ACNA). He is passionate about proclaiming the good news about God’s absurd love for us in Jesus and blogs at actstwo39.wordpress.com.
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