I Repent

I Repent

I grew up in a Southern Protestant tradition whose congregants never burned Palm Sunday’s fronds for Lent’s ashes, and so the liturgy and pageantry of my first Ash Wednesday experience was oddly unfamiliar. The content of the homily was not, though: it resonated with the images and phrases of thousands of cumulative “sin and Savior” sermons heard since childhood.

The subject was repentance.

It’s an uncommon word, really, and not at all a popular one. Repentance simply means to recognize the wrong in something you’ve done and to be truly sorry about it—so sorry, in fact, that you deliberately change your ways or habits to avoid doing it again.

Saying, “I repent” recognizes that the solution for sin is not my intent to do better, but the ever-fresh supply of forgiveness and grace available to me in Christ Jesus. The ashes, the sorrow, are on me. But the forgiveness and the grace that my cross-shaped Lenten smudge signifies are utterly, completely on him.

Years ago, the pastor of my parents’ church sat in our suburban living room and explained to me God’s plan for saving repentant sinners. I got it, but I was only eight. When he asked if I had any questions, I had just one. I wanted to know if Jesus’ sacrifice on my behalf was good for every sin I’d committed up to now and every one I’d commit in the days to come. (Even then I realized I had far more potential as a sinner than I did history.) He assured me that it was so. I told him I was in.

Each time an ash-covered thumb brushes down then across my forehead in two quick strokes, I say in my heart, “I repent.” I expect I’ll be confessing it until the day that I die, followed by a deep sigh of thankfulness and an unbidden surge of joy.

I could keep trying, of course, to justify my sins to God and to camouflage them from others. But if I succeeded (which I wouldn’t), it would mean no gain for me. Because repentance is the very invitation he is waiting for. By the power of the Cross, Wednesday’s ashes become Thursday’s grace when I say the words “I repent” and mean them.

He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.

Psalm 103:12