The solution is so simple and yet it seems like a mountain that cannot be crossed. The solution is so basic that it almost seems absurd. And yet it is the solution, the only answer, and it's what St. Therese knew so well, as did St. Matthew:
"Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."
To turn.
“Unless you turn,” it reads. The word turn shattered my assumptions. I often would see a crazy Christian on the street corner yelling, "Repent!" and thought “What a nutcase.” The word “repent” has so many strange connotations for me of people who seemed a.) to be insane, and b.) to mismatch the message of Jesus as I understood it. But to turn - this sounded different. To turn my life, to turn my mind, to turn: wait…what does that mean? To turn means to re-orient the direction I was facing. That made more sense. Repent sounded like fear-based correction. "Repent and avoid the fires of hell!" In “Repent for the end is near!” I can hear that old-time Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God delivering hellfire and brimstone to a country church in the year 1741. You have to love a good Calvinist sermon for the fire it can light under people. But that never motivated me. You’d think it would. Fire hurts. The pain of burns is worse than anything I’ve experienced. But that message wasn’t really Good News to me. That sermon could never cause me to turn. I could not even hear that message. In fact, it drove me away, and so it was the opposite of persuasive, it was repulsive. Hellfire sermons are powerful to some people, but that’s not the honey that draws this fly into the Church door. No, that message was vinegar. Good behavior driven solely by fear seemed an absurd path to salvation, and once again, seems to make us more like dogs than humans with intellect and free will.
Comedians like George Carlin and the New Atheist writers latch onto that notion of "You will burn in hell for all eternity and your flesh will boil and melt and you will scream forever, but…remember, dear child, that God loves you." Modernity mocks this idea, and just as God has been reduced to an optional Santa Claus, the devil has been reduced to a Halloween costume or horned clown with a pitchfork, to the detriment of millions of people’s faiths.
By luck, I am just dumb enough to have hit bottom without having the terror of a fiery hell. By luck, I found hell. And only then did I return to the Gospels, but this time with proper guidance and a study Bible. Then I found something deeper than that old fear-based motivation of avoiding hell. To become fully awake, I was struck on the head repeatedly, as I had been dense to the meaning of "repent" for most of my life. It means to turn back to God. To turn away from sin. How does someone turn back to God? You just do. You turn your thoughts, your heart, and your mind.
It’s difficult to explain. You can’t turn until you are ready. You can try anytime you like. The old saying of “You can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink” works well here. You cannot turn until you are ready and listening. Turning does not work until your mind becomes open. Turning sounds so easy from people that have turned already, but for those not ready they will feel like their spine and neck are fused together. Ideally we could all just have Jesus stick his fingers in our ears and say “Be opened,” like he did to to the deaf mute dude in Decapolis. Barring that miracle, we can try to “Be open” by effort, by asking God for willingness to be willing. I have come to believe that this “openness” is the single and only question on the entrance exam to getting accepted into Christianity 101 and starting on the journey of faith.
There’s the Gospel story about the prostitute who is washing Jesus’ feet while he was at a dinner party with the Pharisees. This surely created a scene by her behavior and her very presence in the room. I suspect prostitutes and Pharisees didn’t ordinarily hang out, at least not publicly, if you know what I’m saying. The picture of this dinner party where a prostitute is on the floor washing one of the guests feet is, quite honestly, bizarre.
A word in this story jarred me, as so often one single word in the Gospel stories can do to people. Someone told me that once that “Books don’t change people, paragraphs do.” In this story, a single word changed me.
After Jesus briefly discusses the woman with his host, a Pharisee, Jesus goes on to tell the parable of “The Two Debtors.” One debtor owes 500 days of wages and one debtor owes 50 days of wages. The creditor, seeing that neither debtor can pay it back, forgives their debt. Jesus says, “Which of the debtors will love him more?” The host of the dinner, a Pharisee, says in reply, “The one, I suppose, whose larger debt was forgiven.” Jesus replies to him, “You have judged rightly.” (Luke 7:36-50)
Then a powerful word suddenly occurs in the next sentence, a life changing word.
“So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”
In this sentence the behavior of the woman is explained. There is a keyword in the middle of the sentence: hence. This is the turning point, the swivel on which the change is made. The turn happens on that hence.
She loves Jesus because she has been forgiven. She does not love him in order to obtain forgiveness. She is forgiven first. She realizes this forgiveness. Then she loves him. Forgiveness comes first, then the love. In fact, I’m not sure how it can be any other way.
The power of these little realizations repeatedly unlock the doors and windows to refresh my belief. I go from holding my breath to taking a deep inhalation of amazement. As usual, Bishop Robert Barron illuminates these things better to me:
It is most important to note that Jesus does not, strictly speaking, forgive her sins; rather, he notices that she has been forgiven. And the evidence for it is her self-forgetting love. She loves so passionately and so courageously…precisely because she has been so graciously and abundantly forgiven.
It is decidedly not the case, Jesus implies, that love precedes divine forgiveness as a sort of prerequisite; on the contrary, forgiveness precedes love as the condition for its possibility. It is not the case that one’s moral life must be upright in order to win divine favor; rather, the sheer gift of God’s favor tends to produce an upright moral life, a life of love.(For more on this dinner party see pages 347-349 in the WOF Bible, the best $30 I have ever spent.)
Realizing that forgiveness is real and present for us, for all of us, results in the un-fusing of the neck and spine which allows us to turn, which then, afterward, results in the joy. With this combination, we can then annoy the world by running around telling everyone about the Good News of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins.
That “hence” is the Good News. You are flawed yet forgiven, hence, happiness. Simple words.
Forgiveness, hence, joy.
That is sum of it all right there in three words. Notice the sentence is not “Fear, hence, joy.” No, it must be “Forgiveness, hence, joy.” This turning, however, does not happen without the right order of events. Maybe the sinful woman and I are just the fortunate ones, as we owed 500 days of wages that we could never pay back and somehow stumbling along in the dark, we suddenly understood that forgiveness is possible, hence, great love was found.
This is the same as the parable the man who finds the treasure in the field and sells all he owns to buy the field.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Mt 13:44-46)
The treasure in the field is forgiveness. Then “out of joy” he sells all that he has. Notice the placement of that qualifying phrase “out of joy.” The treasure is forgiveness, hence, in his joy he sells everything for it. He trips over this treasure called forgiveness, and only then is he joyful. He’s not joyful and then trips over the treasure of forgiveness.
The woman washing Jesus’ feet at the Pharisee’s dinner party has that joy. Why does she have it? She has found the treasure. What is the treasure? Forgiveness. She knows forgiveness is possible, hence…hence…hence, she is joyful. Forgiveness, hence the turn. Forgiveness, hence, joy.
Why didn't anyone tell me about this? How did I miss this?
To turn means to have an interior conversion, to be open. To turn does not mean throwing myself on the ground in fear. Love is a far stronger pull than fear. Observe a child that gets screamed at for doing anything incorrectly, versus a child that is taught and coached to do things correctly. Which approach do you think a child will respond to better in the long run? Screaming and fear, or teaching and love?
Just as a better understanding on how I should be reading the Bible awakened me, so did this idea of turning back to God. Suddenly the lunatic shouting on the street corner made sense, but I wanted to go and correct his sign. I want to stop my car, get out, and ask him, "Hey buddy, can I change the wording on your cardboard sign? I just need to change repent to be turn."
Repent means to turn. But what motivation is there to turn? Oh right, forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness, the treasure, the pearl, the whole reason for the Incarnated God of Christianity in the person of Jesus. Redemption, wow, what a concept. Oh right, that small detail of dying for our sins, of taking our sins upon himself, of entering into our suffering and not flinching so that he could defeat death and thereby set us free. Right, just that part, that minor detail.
I know the answer to some of life’s great questions, the hardest questions. When I look at the story of Peter walking on water, I can see it all there.Why Did Peter Sink? Because he took his eyes off God. What does Peter do? He cries out to Jesus for help. Why did Peter fail? Because he’s a flawed human being. Why does Peter cry out? Because he has faith. Why does Jesus save him? Because Peter is forgiven. Hence, Peter is back in the boat, with the treasure of all treasures, the forgiveness of Jesus. Once forgiven, hence, Peter is later witnessing to all, sampling Psalms like a rap artist, preaching “you will fill me with joy in your presence.” (Acts 2:28)
We can only enter this game of belief and faith if we turn back to God like children. Sometimes it takes a near drowning to make that turn, to cry out, to reach for the hand of God. Fairly often people just trip over the treasure, like the man in the parable, walking in the field. Surely it can happen by effort, but more often we seem to find it by accident or by bad choices. Faith certainly does not come by knowledge. It certainly does not come to he or she who has the most money. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will get nothing for their knowledge and wealth, not an ounce of faith comes from those things. The poor have more potential than wealthy people. Likewise, doctors and professors get no more ability to communicate and pray to God than someone in prison, or someone in poverty, or someone with no education. The rich and educated may even receive less ability for faith, often because their own success, deserved or not, make them blind and deaf instead of open.
Rather, it’s the person that comes back like a child, that turns back, who will find the hints about the next world. He who orients himself toward God can regain the innocence that was lost. Turning back like a child creates understanding, and no, it will not restore all that was lost, and you won't be suddenly given all you pray for, but you are given more than that. Jesus never said suffering will go away. God is not a winning lottery ticket. We were given Jesus and his example. He did not watch our suffering from afar, but entered into the suffering with us. His mother suffered, his apostles suffered. They suffered more than us, and yet they had joy. That's the gift. That’s what we are supposed to imitate. Consider how crazy this line from Acts of the Apostles sounds. Paul is in prison, in chains, with his fellow believers, after being beaten and bound hand and foot. And what is Paul and his pal doing? Here’s what they are doing: "About midnight...Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened." (Acts 16:25) They are singing songs like they were at a nightclub. This is the baffling joy that drives non-Christians crazy.
