The Mystery of Repentance

Repentance is metanoia — not mere regret but a change of mind and a turning of the whole person back to God. The Fathers call it a “second baptism,” the baptism not of water but of tears, by which the grace of baptism, lost or wounded by sin committed afterward, is renewed. This file treats the meaning of metanoia, the theme of the second baptism, and the Scriptural roots of the Church’s power to bind and loose.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Metanoia: The Change of Mind

The Greek word the Gospels use for repentance is metanoia, literally a “change of mind” — but the Fathers understood it far more radically than a change of opinion or a passing remorse. Metanoia is the reorientation of the whole person: a turning away from sin and self and back toward God, a transformation of the mind, the heart, and the direction of the life. It is the first word of the Gospel — “Repent [metanoeite]: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17; cf. Mark 1:15) — and the burden of John the Baptist’s preaching before it (Matthew 3:2). Repentance is not, in the Orthodox understanding, a single act of contrition but a permanent disposition, the very form of the Christian life this side of the Kingdom: the saints repented most of all, not because they sinned most but because they saw most clearly the distance between themselves and the holiness of God (Ware, The Orthodox Way, SVS Press, 1995, on repentance as a continual turning; see Orthodoxy: Confession).

Because it is a change of the whole person, repentance is inseparable from joy and hope, not despair. The prodigal son, “coming to himself,” turns homeward and is met by the father who runs to embrace him (Luke 15:17–24) — the icon of all repentance. To repent is not to sink under the weight of one’s sins but to rise and return, trusting the mercy that waits. St. John Climacus places repentance near the beginning of the ascent precisely as this hopeful return: “Repentance is the renewal of baptism. Repentance is a contract with God for a second life” (John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 5, on repentance; trans. in the SVS/Paulist editions). The change of mind is the recovery of the true self God made and sin defaced.

The Second Baptism

The Church faced early a real question: baptism washes away all sin and is given once and unrepeatable, yet the baptized sin again. What of sins committed after baptism? The answer the tradition gave, from the earliest centuries, is that repentance is a second baptism — not a repeating of the one baptism, which cannot be repeated, but a renewal of its grace by another means. St. John of Damascus lists it among the modes of baptism: “repentance through tears” is a baptism, for “as by baptism we are renewed, so also by repentance” (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.9, on the several baptisms, including that of tears; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 9). The image is ancient and pervasive: where baptism is the washing of water, repentance is the washing of tears; where baptism drowns the old man once, repentance raises up again the baptized who has fallen back under sin’s power (John Climacus, Ladder, Step 5; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II, on confession as a renewal of baptismal grace).

This is the precise theological place of the mystery of repentance. Baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist give and sustain the new life; but that life can be wounded and even, in grave sin, lost. Repentance is the mystery of restoration — the physician’s mystery, in which what was broken is healed and the person is brought back into the full communion of the Church and the grace of his baptism (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). The “baptism of tears” is not a sentimental phrase but a description of the compunction (penthos) the Fathers prized: the gift of tears that softens the hardened heart and opens it again to grace (John Climacus, Ladder, Step 7, on mourning and the gift of tears).

The Power to Bind and Loose

The mystery rests on an explicit gift of the risen Christ to His Church. On the evening of the Resurrection He breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:22–23). Earlier He had given the power of binding and loosing — to Peter (Matthew 16:19) and to the disciples together (Matthew 18:18). The Orthodox Church understands the mystery of repentance as the exercise of this apostolic authority: the forgiveness of sins is the act of Christ Himself, given through the Church and ministered by the priest who has received, through ordination, a share in the apostolic power to loose (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II; see Confession and the Spiritual Father).

But the Orthodox tradition reads this power therapeutically rather than juridically. The priest looses not by passing a legal sentence of acquittal but by declaring and mediating the forgiveness of God to the one who has genuinely turned. The prayer of absolution in the Slavic and Greek rites makes the accent plain: in the common Greek form the priest prays, “May God who pardoned David through Nathan the prophet… forgive thee all things,” and in the Slavic form he says, “and I, His unworthy priest, through the power given unto me, forgive and absolve thee” — but the whole is set within the confession that it is God who forgives and the priest who witnesses and mediates (the prayers of absolution in the Orthodox rite of confession; discussed in Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). The forgiveness is real, effective, and God’s; the priest is its appointed minister.

Repentance as the Whole Christian Life

Finally, the Orthodox tradition resists confining repentance to the discrete act of confession. Confession is the sacramental focus and renewal of a repentance that is meant to be continual — the “bright sadness” that runs through the whole of the ascetic life, the daily return of one who knows himself a sinner loved by God (Ware, The Orthodox Way, on repentance as the abiding form of the Christian life). This is why the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner,” is the characteristic prayer of Orthodox spirituality: it is a prayer of unceasing repentance, keeping the heart in the compunction from which the mystery of confession draws its life (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The mystery of repentance and the whole spiritual life are thus of one substance: the sacrament gathers up and renews, before God and in the Church, the turning of heart that the Christian is called to live every day.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.9. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 9.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 5 and 7. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993; and The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995.
  • Scripture: Matthew 3:2, 4:17, 16:19, 18:18; Mark 1:15; Luke 15:17–24; John 20:22–23.