December 1998 Issue

Strange. By modern standards, it does not add up. Here is the prophet, John, setting up his revival tent out in the country, far from the busy main streets of Jerusalem, away from the hot spots and population centers, in "the wilderness of Judea." The wilderness! Yet, the crowds come! The crowds search about and ask around, and then they head out into the wilderness to find John!

And they sit still and listen to his sermons. They are not warm and fuzzy, "audience-driven" sermons. They do not seem to build self-esteem or positive attitudes. They do not promise, "Trust God and everything will turn out all right." No, John's sermons are blunt and they cut to the quick. If it is true that when Jonathan Edwards used to preach his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," you could smell the brimstone and feel the heat from hell, then maybe there was a kinship between Jonathan and John. "The Reign of God is drawing near," John thundered to his wilderness congregation, "and all of you who want to join it must get ready. You have to get right with God. And how? I'll tell you how. You must repent! You must confess your sins and come clean with God!"

The odd thing is that they did. In wholesale numbers, people responded to the message. The people of Jerusalem, all of Judea, and all the region along the Jordan River, listened to the preacher, were convicted, and they repented, confessing their sins. John baptized them in the Jordan.

The two seasons of preparation in the Christian church calendar, Advent and Lent, both include the discipline of repentance. Today's preacher will have to ask what place this traditional work of penitence commands in today's congregations. The renowned psychologist, Karl Menninger, once shocked Christendom and much of secular culture by asking, in the title of his book, the blunt theological question, Whatever Became of Sin?.¹ He charged the church with allowing the classical disciplines of confession and repentance to drop from the repertory of the church's practical theology. Menninger probably would not be surprised to find a recent issue of Newsweek framing the same question now more than twenty years later: "What Ever Happened to Sin?"² Its author reaches a similar conclusion: "The urgent sense of personal sin has all but disappeared in the current upbeat style in American religion." It is true, isn't it? In today's church sin is likely to be, not the evil that destroys relationships between humans and between humans and God, but a person's lack of self-acceptance or loss of self-esteem. These days theology often fixes on the human self and its happiness, fulfillment, and contentment.

It must not be missed, though, that the prophetic appeal for repentance consists of more than liturgical hand-wringing or soul-bearing. Repentance of sin is the grief of recognized human guilt before God. It is the theological prerequisite for being open to the great blessings of the gospel. John's message is, "The Reign of God is on its way! Repent of your sin so that you will not miss it! Be ready to receive God's Reign when it arrives! Prepare to enter it and to come under its power!" Only those who perceive and get ready to enter God's coming Reign, who have come clean with God about their need for forgiveness and grace, who have shed the excess baggage of their claims to righteousness, are open to the gift of Jesus when he comes. In this text, the urgency and gravity of John's exhortation is the umbilical connection of repentance with the promised Advent of Jesus: "I baptize you with water, but the One who is to come will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

Repentance, then, is no mere exercise in humility, self-denigration, or any other self-oriented expression of mea culpa. Its focus is not on the individual or even the group or the nation. The focus of the human repentance that John exhorts is not humanward at all; it is heavenward, on the coming Reign of God, on the One we now know to be Jesus, and on the baptism he brings and the Spirit he gives. We Christians repent as preparation and expectation of Jesus' coming. Paradoxically, sorrow for sin opens us to the possibility of the rebirth of joy as Jesus comes again into our hearts and our history during the celebration of the Christmas season.

Paul B. Brown

1. Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973).
2. Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek (6 February 1995), p. 23.