Many Christian communities observe the forty-day Season of Lent, modelled on the long period Jesus spent alone in the desert overcoming the devil's temptations before embarking on his public ministry. In the first week of Lent this year Fr Ian explores the particular value of the Old Testament in understanding the Christian virtue of penance.
The gospels present Peter as an impulsive and emotional character, some of the time at least, but I think it would be true to say that, no matter what sort of temperament each of us has, Peter’s reaction to his encounter with Jesus is an example that all Christians should follow. Saint Luke probably meant us to interpret the incident this way.
When we’ve discovered God and turned to God in a decisive experience of conversion we start to grow in our acquaintance with all God’s divine qualities and perfections, the different facets of his holiness. We also become aware that God calls us to reflect these qualities in our own character and conduct. But, in an experience similar to that of Peter, we soon realise how far we fall short of this calling.
It dawns on us that many of our past actions were selfish and sinful: harmful to others and offensive to God; lacking in love. We realise that we have weaknesses, disordered emotions and instincts, and imperfections of moral character, which continue to lead us to commit similar actions in the present. In other words, when we genuinely turn to God we begin to acquire the virtue of penance, the Christian penitential disposition.
This isn’t a single isolated attack of bad conscience or remorse for one particular act, or even a series of such reactions. Penitence in the Christian sense is more of a constant, underlying, habitual attitude. It’s a revulsion from sinful inclinations, a sense of the need to atone for actions that have offended God, and a determination to change in order to unite ourselves more completely with him.
And, because this disposition is constant and habitual, the Catholic spiritual tradition describes it as a virtue, that’s to say, a good habit, a facet of personal moral character. In our weak and fallen condition it’s an essential element in our relationship with God and our Christian spiritual life.
The virtue of penance in Sacred Scripture
The Bible, God’s revealed word to us, places the virtue of penance within the mystery of human sin and divine forgiveness. When we use the word ‘mystery’ in this context we mean that our proneness to evil on the one hand, and God’s desire to show mercy and rescue us from our predicament on the other, are realities which we can never fully grasp by our limited human reasoning.
God’s revelation contained in Sacred Scripture teaches us that sinful thoughts and actions are not simply violations of some man-made code of ethics, which an atheist or secular humanist might accept. The same is true of the guilt and shame that conscientious individuals typically feel when they’ve done something wrong, whether they’re religious-minded or not.
Scripture informs us, rather, that the real significance of our moral wrongdoing lies in the offence or insult offered to God and the rupture it creates in our personal relationship with God.
This is the specific meaning of sin, as opposed to a purely human understanding of morally wrong behaviour. We’ve been made to love God, to live in a relationship of devotion and loyalty to him and obedience to his commandments. But when we sin we repudiate that devotion and loyalty and we fail in commitment and love. It’s then that we need to turn back to God and re-establish our friendship with him with a disposition of penitence.
The Old Testament
By the time the authors of the Old Testament came to record their experiences of God in writing they had already been formed by centuries of the living, and still-evolving, faith of Israel. So it’s not surprising that several distinctive themes run through the whole Old Testament story and the spirituality of the Old Covenant. Here are three aspects of that spirituality which are relevant to the Christian penitential attitude:
1. God’s nature, namely his ‘steadfast love’, his ‘loving kindness’ and enduring faithfulness, summed up in the Hebrew word hesed. The God who first revealed himself to Abraham was a very different person from the idols and false gods of Israel’s pagan neighbours.
2. The covenant initiated by God on Mount Sinai. God established the covenant after liberating the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt under Moses’ leadership and gave them the tablets of the law - the Ten Commandments - as the foundation of their new relationship: ‘Now, therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exod 19:5-6).
3. The frequent infidelities of the Chosen People, often choosing to worship other gods and to violate the moral commandments given to them by God. The authors of the Old Testament were well acquainted with the frailty of human nature, the inclination to reject God and his precepts, to devote their energies to created things rather than the creator - and, therefore, the constant need for penance. Many of the best-known passages of the Old Testament illustrate these core convictions of the sacred writers:
(a) Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the story of mankind’s primordial rebellion against God. God punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from the Garden of Eden but accompanied his punishment with a promise of future salvation and reconciliation (Gen 3:15; 23-24).
(b) The incident of the golden calf, following God’s liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. This illustrated the tendency of fallen humanity to worship material realities rather than their ultimate creator and possessor: the essence of idolatry. Moses interceded for the perpetrators and averted God’s anger but the punishment imposed was harsh. The golden calf was ground to powder and mixed with water, and the people were forced to drink it; three thousand men were executed (Exod 32:20; 28).
(c) King David’s fall from grace. David, a revered but flawed figure, committed adultery with Bathsheba and engineered the death of her husband Uriah. He repented sincerely but God announced his severe penance through the prophet Nathan: the death of his and Bathsheba’s baby son. Later, the birth of a second son, Solomon, indicated David’s reconciliation with God (2 Samuel 12:1-25).
(d) In many places the Psalms and the rest of the Old Testament wisdom literature eloquently describe the penitential attitude appropriate to our relationship with God. Psalm 51 (50) - the Miserere in Catholic tradition - is a typical example:
Have mercy on me, O God,blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my
iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
(e) Finally, we have the Old Testament prophets’ accusations, heartfelt appeals for repentance and assurances of God’s patience and forgiveness.
The preaching of the prophets expresses a crucial strand in Jewish spirituality before the appearance of Jesus. We can take these words of the prophet Joel, which are read at Mass every year on Ash Wednesday, as a summary of the whole prophetic message of the Old Testament:
‘“Yet even now,” says the LORD,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with
mourning;
and rend your hearts and not your
garments.”
Return to the LORD, your God,
For he is gracious and merciful,
Slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
And repents of evil’.
(Joel 2: 12-13.)
None of these revelations of the Old Covenant period - God's steadfast love, the inclination of our fallen human nature to rebellion and idolatry, and the need, therefore, to return to God 'with fasting, weeping and mourning', were absent from Jesus' preaching of the Gospel, as I will try to explore in the second part of this article.
Next: the Virtue of Penance in Jesus’ proclamation of God’s Kingdom.
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