We hear the voice of Jesus in today’s gospel: “If you do not repent….” And a second time: “If you do not repent….” (Lk 13:1-9). If you do not turn from that negative mind-set….If you do not set aside your hopeless attitude, or your know-it-all attitude, or your fears that paralyze you…If you do not repent, if you do not turn from this you will continue to be stuck where God’s ways are refused, not welcomed, not heard, not seen. Do we dare to die, to surrender to any negative pattern that keeps us stuck, removed from life’s promptings or from receiving the love and transformation that can change us now. In the sacred space of silence, a change will happen as we encounter the “I am who am”. In the first reading this is the name God gives to Moses when he asks God: ‘When I go to the people and say to them the God of your ancestors has sent me, and they ask me “What is his name? What shall I tell them?” (Ex 3:13-15). God tells Moses to say, “I am sent me”. God’s enigmatic title of “I am who am”, according to Fr. John Donahue, “carries the nuance of self-communication and abiding presence” (Hearing the Word of God, p.46). God is giving the Divine self to us daily. This is what we encounter in the act of repentance. The root meaning of repentance is ‘return’. Fr. Donahue adds: “Repentance, or a turning away from one path to another, is not so much finding God but being found by God” (p.46).
Life is presented to us daily…the life of God embodied in Jesus…For us do we have a sense of the ‘Other’…the One who is greater than I, the One who indeed cries out daily to us, “I am who am”, God is the “I am” at the center of our lives. With Jesus calling us to ‘repentance’, do we ever question how we are perceiving a person or situation? Do we ever ask ourselves: am I seeing truthfully, am I seeing like Jesus, am I seeing out of the gospel perspective? Do I recognize when I am seeing in a selfish way, where I am at the center and not God? As we turn away from an old pattern, we will discover that God is there bestowing grace on this change of heart. Rowan Williams in his new book, Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious writes: “Faith makes possible realism and perspective…seeing more fully.” It begins with “seeing that we are not seeing everything.” ‘If you do not repent’: ‘Seeing that we are not seeing’: this repentant movement brings an opening into the ways of God, which are not my ways! This simple repentant movement of turning from what is not God and towards Divine life is the living of our faith.
‘Unless you repent’. Edith Stein writes: “What we can and must do is open ourselves to grace; that means to renounce our own will completely and to give it captive to the divine will, to lay our whole soul, ready for reception and formation, into God’s hands” (Essential Writings, p.64). This is repentance: dying to ‘me-centeredness’ and becoming captive to the Divine will, becoming ‘Other centered’ where we are shaped, formed into our True self, a process that is never ending.
Sr. Kathy DeVico, Abbess
Chapter Talk – Third Sunday of Lent – March 23, 2025, cycle-C
