Already three weeks before Great Lent begins, a call to repentance sounds, both in the Sunday Gospel readings and in the texts of the Divine Services. We encounter the examples of Zacchaeus and the publican, men who came to recognize the utter baseness of their lives. We hear of the father who joyously forgives and receives the prodigal son, returned from a distant land to his father’s home. During these days, in the church we hear the prayer which begins with the words “Open unto me the doors of repentance, O Giver of Life…” What are these doors? Why, in the sermon which begins with the words “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand…” (Matthew 4:17), does Christ specifically choose to begin with a call to repentance?
The Greek word metanoia, rendered in Church Slavonic and Russian as pokayanie and in English as “repentance,” literally means “change of mind.” Its sense lies in the fact that our mind and our will move along a faithless, ruinous path toward a false goal, and that we should change their direction and move along the correct, saving path.
No less profound are the Russian words pokayanie or raskayanie. Like the word okayanstvo [being cursed], these concepts are linked to the name of the murderer Cain, of whom we read near the beginning of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. Not only did he, like his parents Adam and Eve, disobey the will of God and violate His injunction, but he fell even farther, defiling both his conscience and the earth itself by shedding the blood of his brother Abel. Thus, repentance, pokayanie, means one’s personal rejection of the example of Cain, one’s removal of the mark of Cain from one’s heart.
Repentance begins with a clear recognition of the chasm which we, of our own will, have established between our conscience and the perfect radiant truth of God. Until we have come to that recognition, it is possible to utterly fail to recognize our sinfulness, and to be completely imprisoned by it. In this state, man’s soul is as if wrapped in a deep sleep, like unto death; if the soul does not awaken from this bondage, it becomes actual spiritual death. In his pagan blindness, and not wanting to recognize sin in himself, man hates even the very idea of sin and, when he hears the term, is filled with irritation. There is no escape, however, from the evil and untruth which lie within us. We can force ourselves to forget them for a time, but sooner or later our conscience reminds us of them, and the unhealed wound of the spirit leads to new, ever-heavier forms of spiritual illness.
Healing begins when within our darkened soul there begins to burn a light, a light through which man both simultaneously sees himself before the judgment of God’s truth and feels the mercy of God directed to all of us. God sees us through our conscience and bears witness to Himself through the voice of our conscience. The Apostle Paul states that this enormous gift, this capacity to hear the voice of the conscience, is given to each person, not only to the Christian, but also to the pagans. When man ceases to be complacent, that complacency is replaced with shame, embarrassment, and even fear at what has been revealed to him about himself. All experienced teachers of spiritual life talk about this first step as a dangerous one, the hour before the dawn. In it a person may encounter feelings of deep despair, loss of faith in man’s capacity to correct himself and become different from what he had been. Awareness of one’s own sin, without acting upon that awareness, is not yet repentance. In His call to repentance, Christ also indicates the goal to which we are called, and because of which we have been called to move forward, “for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” In the Gospel according to Mark, we find this same call, expressed in different terms: “Repent and believe on the Gospel.”
Man can truly repent, change, and receive liberation from the burden of sin, if he hears the Word of God, and sees before him the image of incarnate truth and perfect love which was revealed to us in Christ. One cannot help but love that image. It proclaims to the soul of men that will to rebirth which is the true repentance, liberation from the mark of Cain. That is the emanation of the glorious energy of the soul for which no obstacle is insurmountable.
Archpriest Victor Potapov
February, 2000