The Second Repentance

Whatever our small ability has managed to suggest about laying hold of repentance once for all and holding on to it for good applies to everyone who has handed himself over to the Lord, since all alike are competing for salvation by earning God’s favor. But it presses hardest on the young beginners who are only now letting the teaching of God fall on their ears like dew — puppies still in their first days, their eyes not yet open, crawling about uncertainly. They say they renounce what they used to do and take up repentance, but they neglect to finish it. The very fact that desire is now supposed to be over with is what presses them to want something of their old life back — the way fruit already turning sour or bitter with age still keeps up some show of the sweetness it once had. [a]

On top of that, a presumptuous confidence in baptism brings in every kind of vicious delay and dodging where repentance is concerned. Sure of a pardon they take for granted, men steal the time in between and turn it into a furlough for sinning instead of a stretch for learning not to sin. And how inconsistent it is to expect pardon of sins to be granted for a repentance they have not carried out! That is holding your hand out for the goods without producing the price. Repentance is the price at which the Lord has decided to award pardon; he offers to buy us back out of punishment at that rate of exchange. Sellers examine the coin they are being paid in first, to see whether it has been clipped or shaved or faked. We may take it that the Lord does the same: when he is about to hand over goods as costly as eternal life, he first puts our repentance to the test.

“But let us put off actually repenting for now. It will be clear enough that we have reformed once we have been let off.”

Not at all. Our reform ought to show while pardon is still hanging in the balance and the penalty is still in prospect; while the penitent has not yet earned his release — so far as we can earn anything; while God is threatening, not while he is forgiving. What slave, once his standing has been changed by being given his freedom, brings up his old thefts and desertions against himself? What soldier, once discharged, makes amends for the marks he was branded with? A sinner has to mourn for himself before he receives pardon, because the time for repentance is the same as the time of danger and fear.

Not that I deny that God’s gift — the putting away of sins, I mean — is entirely sure for those who are on the point of going down into the water. What we have to work at is being granted that blessing at all. Who is going to grant you, a man of such faithless repentance, a single sprinkle of water of any kind? To slip in unnoticed, and to leave the minister put in charge of the business taken in by your assurances, is easy enough. But God keeps watch over his own treasure and does not let the unworthy steal a march on it. What does he actually say? “Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed.” Draw whatever darkness you like over the things you have done — “God is light.”

But some men think God is under an obligation to hand over what he has promised even to the unworthy, and so they turn his generosity into slavery. If it is out of necessity that God grants us the sign of death, then he grants it unwillingly — and who lets a gift be kept for good that he handed over unwillingly? Do not many afterward fall away? Is the gift not taken back from many? These, no doubt, are the very men who did steal a march on the treasure: they came to the faith that repentance brings, and then built themselves a house on sand, doomed to come down.

So let no one flatter himself on being enrolled in the recruits’ class of learners, as though that gave him a license to go on sinning even now. The moment you “know the Lord,” you ought to fear him; the moment you have laid eyes on him, you ought to hold him in awe. What difference does your knowing him make, while you go on living exactly as you did in the days when you did not know him? And what marks you off from a servant of God who has been brought all the way through? Is there one Christ for the baptized and another for the learners? Do they have a different hope, a different reward, a different dread of judgment, a different need of repentance?

That washing in baptism is a seal set on faith, and that faith is begun and commended by the faith that belongs to repentance. We are not washed in order to stop sinning; we are washed because we have stopped, since in heart we have been bathed already. For the first baptism a learner receives is fear, and fear unbroken. From then on, in proportion to your understanding of the Lord, faith is sound, the conscience having once for all taken repentance to itself.

Otherwise, if it is only after the water that we stop sinning, then we put innocence on out of necessity and not out of choice. Which man, then, is better? The one who is not allowed to be bad, or the one who has no taste for being bad? The one under orders not to commit a crime, or the one whose pleasure it is to be free of crime? On that reasoning, let us keep our hands off other people’s property only while the strength of the bars holds us back, and keep our eyes off the craving for sexual immorality only while the attendants set over us drag us away — if no one who has handed himself over to the Lord is to stop sinning until baptism binds him to it. But if anyone really holds that, I doubt whether, after baptism, he does not feel more sorrow at having stopped sinning than gladness at having got clear of it.

And so it is fitting that learners should want baptism, but not snatch at it. The one who wants it honors it; the one who snatches at it treats it with contempt. In the one there is modesty, in the other arrogance; the first pays what it costs, the second takes no trouble over it; the first is eager to deserve it, the second promises it to himself as something owed; the first receives it, the second seizes it. Which of them would you judge worthier? Only the one who is more reformed. And who is more reformed? Only the one who is more afraid, and who for that very reason has done what true repentance requires — for he has been afraid to go on in sin, in case he should not deserve to receive baptism. But the man who snatches, having promised it to himself as his due and being safely sure of it, could not be afraid; and so he did not carry out repentance either, since he lacked the tool repentance works with, which is fear. Snatching belongs to irreverence. It puffs up the seeker and despises the Giver. And sometimes it deceives him, because it promises itself the gift before the gift is due; and by that the one who has the gift to give is offended every time.

Lord Christ, may your servants have the good of learning and hearing about the discipline of repentance only for as long as it also falls to them, while they are still learners, not to sin — that is, may they know nothing of repentance afterward, and have no need of it at all. It goes against the grain to add anything about a second hope, which in that case is the last one; by treating of a repentance still held in reserve as a remedy, we may look as though we were pointing out further room for sinning. God forbid that anyone should take our meaning that way — as if, because there is an opening for repenting, there were on that account an opening for sinning too, and as if heaven’s overflowing mercy amounted to a license for human recklessness. Let no one be less good because God is more so, repeating his sin as often as he is forgiven. Otherwise, be sure of it, he will come to the end of escaping before he comes to the end of sinning. We have escaped once. Let us commit ourselves to danger that far and no farther, even if it looks as though we might escape a second time. [k]

Men who have come through a shipwreck generally declare themselves divorced from ship and sea from then on, and by keeping the memory of the danger alive they honor the benefit God gave them, which is their rescue. I praise their fear; I love their reverence. They are unwilling to be a burden on God’s mercy a second time. They are afraid of looking as though they were trampling on the benefit they received. They take good care — good care, at any rate — not to make a second trial of what they have once learned to be afraid of. The limit they set to their own recklessness is the proof of their fear.

And a man’s fear is an honor paid to God. But that most stubborn enemy of ours never gives his malice a rest. He is at his most savage exactly when he can feel that a man is free of his hands; he blazes hottest just as he is being put out. He is bound to grieve and groan that, by the granting of pardon, so many works of death in a man have been thrown down and so many marks of the condemnation that used to be his own have been rubbed out. He grieves that this sinner, now Christ’s servant, is going to be his judge, and the judge of his angels.

So he watches him, attacks him, lays siege to him, hoping that somehow he can either strike his eyes with a craving of the flesh, or tangle his mind up in the attractions of the world, or overturn his faith by fear of the powers of this age, or twist him off the safe road by corrupt teachings handed on to him. He is never short of stumbling blocks or of temptations.

God foresaw these poisons of his. And so, although the gate of forgiveness has been shut and barred with the bolt of baptism, he has let it stand a little way open. In the entrance hall he has stationed a second repentance, to open to those who knock — but once only now, because this is already the second time, and never again, because the last time was wasted. Is even this once not enough? You have what by now you did not deserve, since you had lost what you had been given. If the Lord’s leniency grants you the means of restoring what you had lost, be grateful for a benefit renewed — enlarged, one might say. Restoring something is a greater thing than giving it, since having lost is more wretched than never having received at all.

Still, if anyone does run up the debt of a second repentance, his spirit is not to be cut down and undermined by despair on the spot. By all means let sinning again be a wretched business; but do not let repenting again be a wretched business. Let putting yourself in danger again be wretched, but not being set free again. Let no one be ashamed. Repeated sickness calls for repeated medicine. You will show the Lord your gratitude by not refusing what the Lord is offering you. You have given offense, but you can still be reconciled. There is One you can make it up to, and he is willing to let you.

If you doubt it, work out the meaning of “what the Spirit says to the churches.” He charges the Ephesians with love abandoned. He reproaches the people of Thyatira with sexual immorality and with eating what has been sacrificed to idols. He accuses the people of Sardis of works that are not filled out. He censures the people of Pergamum for teaching what is crooked. He takes the Laodiceans to task for trusting in their riches. And yet to every one of them he gives a general call to repentance — with threats attached, it is true; but he would not utter threats to the unrepentant if he did not forgive the repentant. [n]

The matter would be in doubt if he had not also shown elsewhere how lavish his mercy is. Does he not say, “The one who has fallen will rise again, and the one who has turned away will turn back”? He is the one who “would rather have mercy than sacrifices.” The heavens, and the angels who are there, are glad over one man’s repentance. You there, sinner — take heart! You can see where the joy is over your coming home.

And what do those parables of the Lord mean for us? A woman has lost a drachma; she looks for it and finds it and calls her women friends in to share her joy. Is that not a picture of a sinner restored? A single little ewe out of the shepherd’s flock strays off as well; and the flock was not dearer than the one. That one is hunted for in earnest, that one is wanted in place of all of them, and in the end she is found and carried home on the shepherd’s own shoulders, since straying had worn her out.

And I will not pass over in silence that most gentle father, who calls his runaway son home and gladly takes him back, repentant after his hunger, kills the best of his fattened calves, and dresses his own joy up with a banquet. Why not? He had found the son he had lost; he felt him all the dearer for having gained him back. Who are we to understand that father to be? God, of course. No one else is so truly a Father; no one else is so rich in a father’s love. He will take you back, then, his own son, even if you have squandered what you had from him, even if you come home with nothing on you — simply because you have come home. And he will have more joy over your homecoming than over the other son’s steadiness. But only if you repent from the heart: if you set your own hunger beside the plenty your Father’s hired men have; if you leave the pigs behind, that unclean herd; if you go looking for your Father again, offended though he is, and say, “I have sinned, and I am not worthy to be called yours any longer.” Confession of sins lightens them as much as covering them up makes them heavier, since confession is prompted by wanting to make amends, and covering up by stubbornness.

The narrower the room this second and only remaining repentance has to work in, the harder its testing. So it must not be shown in the conscience alone; it has to be carried out in an act as well. That act is usually spoken of, and commonly named, by a Greek word: exomologesis. By it we confess our sins to the Lord — not as though he did not know them, but because confession is where making amends is settled, out of confession repentance is born, and by repentance God is appeased. [t]

And so exomologesis is a discipline for laying a man flat and bringing him low. It prescribes a way of carrying himself that is calculated to move mercy. In the matter of dress and food, it orders him to lie in sackcloth and ashes, to cover his body in filth, to lay his spirit low with grief, to trade hard usage for the sins he has committed; to know no food or drink but the plainest — not for the stomach’s sake, of course, but the soul’s; and for the most part to feed his prayers on fasting, to groan, to weep and cry out to the Lord your God; to fall at the feet of the elders and kneel to those who are dear to God; to charge all the brothers with acting as ambassadors, carrying his plea for pardon before God.

Everything exomologesis does is done to lift repentance higher: to honor God by its fear of the danger it has run into; to stand in the place of God’s anger by passing sentence on the sinner itself; and, by a putting to death in this life, to — I will not say frustrate, but — wipe out punishments that last forever. And so, while it abases a man, it raises him; while it covers him in squalor, it makes him cleaner; while it accuses, it excuses; while it condemns, it acquits. The less quarter you give yourself, the more — believe me — God will give you.

Yet most men either dodge this work, since it puts them on public view, or else put it off from one day to the next. They have more of an eye, I suppose, to their shame than to their salvation — like men who have caught some disease in the more private parts of the body and keep out of the doctor’s sight, and so die of their own embarrassment. It is unbearable to a man’s shame, of course, to make it up to a Lord he has offended! To be restored to a salvation he had thrown away! Truly you are honorable in your shame: you carry an open face for sinning and a downcast one for begging pardon. I give shame no room at all when I stand to gain by its loss — when shame itself, in some son, urges the man on, saying: [x]

“Take no notice of me. Better that I should be lost for your sake than you for mine.”

At any rate, if there is ever a time when shame is in real danger, it is when a man is a target for jeering in front of people who insult him, where one man raises himself up on his neighbor’s ruin and there is a scramble upward over the fallen. But among brothers and fellow servants, where hope and fear and joy and grief and suffering are held in common, because there is one Spirit from one Lord and Father — why do you take these brothers to be anything other than yourself? Why run from the people who share your own mishaps, as though they were the sort who would cheer at them?

The body cannot feel glad at the trouble of any one of its parts. It has to grieve along with it, with one mind, and work for its cure. Where there are two, there is the church; and the church is Christ. So when you throw yourself at your brothers’ knees, you are handling Christ, you are pleading with Christ. In the same way, when they shed tears over you, it is Christ who is suffering, Christ who is asking the Father for mercy. And what a son asks is always easily got.

Grand indeed is the reward that shame promises us for hiding our fault! Tell me: if we do keep something back from people’s knowledge, are we going to keep it back from God as well? Are men’s judgment and God’s knowledge to be put on a level like that? Is it better to be condemned in secret than let off in public?

“But it is a miserable business, coming to exomologesis like this.”

Yes — because evil does bring you to misery. But where repentance is to be made, the misery stops, because it turns into something that heals. It is a miserable thing to be cut, and burned with the iron, and racked with the sting of some powder; and still, the things that heal by unpleasant means excuse their own offensiveness by the good the cure does, and make present harm bearable for the sake of the advantage that is to come of it.