Broken Cycles: Christ’s Repentance and the Comfort of the Cross
February 22, 2023 | Zeki Tan (PM ‘25)
image description: a painting of people reaching towards an overhead circle where the wing of a dove can be seen
Psalm 51:3 I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Psalm 51:9 Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
My recitation of the Daily Office, which is the liturgy of morning and evening prayer in the Anglican Church, invariably begins with these two verses of repentance: a confession of sins and shortcomings, and a plea for forgiveness from God. Repentance occupies a central place in all levels of Christian life, from the Pope’s worldwide exhortations to the private prayers of individuals in their homes, but it is especially important during Lent: a time when Christians commemorate the one whose act of sacrifice justified humans before God and surpassed any human act of penance—Jesus Christ.
As a Christian, I cannot avoid viewing the process of repentance in cyclical terms. Every day the same prayers and petitions to God are uttered; every week the call to repent is hammered home in the minister’s sermon; and every year ashes are scattered on the foreheads of the faithful to remind them of their mortality and future judgment. As I recite the same verses over and over again, day after day, I find myself at times questioning the efficacy of my entreaties to God. There are many sins I continue to commit regularly, some on a daily basis. Even after repeated prayers, the sin continues to rear its ugly head, sometimes with greater intensity than before. Or perhaps I am delivered from a recurring sin, only for me to fall into a different kind of sin. I’m sure that this struggle with habitual sin is familiar to many, including non-Christians, and many seek assistance from a higher power like I do. We are left wondering if repentance is not supposed to give way to something better.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his seminal work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, popularized the concept of eternal recurrence: the idea that we experience the same events over and over again, ad infinitum. He asked readers to consider if one day we were told that we are forever made to live out the same hope and despair, the same intimacy and loneliness, and everything else joyous and painful in our present life. [1] As we go through the Lent rituals once again this year, I hope we take the time to consider our own lives in light of Nietzsche’s thought experiment. Must we stare into the horror of eternal recurrence and resign ourselves to such a fate? Must we, like Sisyphus, be condemned to the futility of rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity, never being able to push it to the top? Must we be trapped in an indefinite cycle of sacrifice and repentance, asking God’s forgiveness every day for a sin committed and then committing the same sin soon after? Nietzsche’s thought experiment is terrifying and repugnant at first glance. Yet it also speaks truth to a large part of our reality. Viewed from one angle, the normal course of events in our universe really does follow an infinite loop from which no one, by sheer willpower, can break out of. At the same time, however, the more I discover the truth in Nietzsche’s incisive observation of the universe, I also discover within me a powerful hunger for someone or something from outside space and time to break this cycle.
This is perhaps why, in the face of absurdity, I and many others continue to commemorate Lent. Not because Jesus’ death and resurrection are logical or that they make sense, but because our only hope in this life is that those events are true, and that we, too, will be resurrected and made new someday. “God is dead… and we have killed him.” Nietzsche is right. We have. Our sins put us in the company of those who mocked and scorned Him as he hung dying on the Cross. Each sin we commit is a wound piercing the heart of God. But that same God is also described in the Gospels as the God “not of the dead, but of the living.” (Mark 12:27) God died, but He overcame death. The seemingly eternal cycle of repentance and sin has been broken with a single, extraordinary act of forgiveness, one that Jacques Derrida says has “interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.” That is the radical testimony of the Gospel. The hope of eternal life through Christ Jesus is why we continue to repent and seek forgiveness against a broken, aching world that wants us to cease trying. I pray that you would discover that comforting hope, too, as you reflect on this Lent season.
This piece is a part of a series for Lent 2023. Read more at https://www.yalelogos.com/lent2023