From the book All ‘All Things New’ by Fiona and Terryl Givens:
As noted in the previous chapter, justice works in our favor. It is a our guarantee that we will be “raised to happiness according to our desires for happiness” (Alma 41:5). The problem, of course, is that our desires are sometimes muddled, confused, misdirected. Our entire relationship with God will change when we are able to recognize that repentance is not the discipline meted out to us when we get it wrong; repentance is the lifelong venture of accepting Christ’s willingness to help us shape our heart in his image. It is a positive engagement with the learning process, not recurrent periods in the penalty box. In the scriptures, one episode more than any other may illustrate how Jesus taught the principle. In the Gospel of John the story unfolds of a woman caught in adultery. The crowd gathers, intent on executing “justice.” Christ, with one simple gesture, repudiates their retributive justice and teaches the meaning of repentance: “Neither do I condemn thee.” Jesus continues, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). That is repentance: continuation of the journey, picking ourselves up and moving forward, energized and renewed by the certainty of God’s abiding love and encouragement. As a student remarked of this episode, “Christ shows no interest in official church discipline or forgiving the woman for her past. Rather, he desires change and conversion for the woman.”1
The entire great plan is predicated on our Heavenly Parents’ confidence that through our mortal experiences we will learn to choose more wisely and that our desires, our yearnings, out affections will become more and more centered on the Good, the True, the Beautiful. In other words, under the tutelage of divinity, we are encouraged to persevere in the often painful path home. The constant ministrations (“I will never leave thee nor forsake thee” [Heb. 13:5]) of the Divine Family strengthen our knees and lift our hands when they hang down. Hence the constant refrain that weaves through scripture as its most common theme: “repent”; that is, “reeducate” or “reset your heart.”
We discussed previously that sin is not first and foremost an offense against a sovereign God; it is a tragic misstep, an action contrary to the nature of happiness, resulting in pain, suffering, alienation—that is bitterness. We also discussed previously that justice is not God’s demand for satisfaction of a law violated; it is a law of restoration, of like for like, of consequence fitted to desire. Repentance may require restitution where possible; repairing what harm we can is a sign of our genuine remorse and empathy. Repentance, however, is not penance (self-punishment), though it regrettably still carries those connotations. The indelible association of repentance with penance is rooted in a historic mistranslation. In the fourth century, Jerome produced a Latin translation of the Bible that would serve as the standard Christian text for more than a thousand years. A scholar of the Reformation explains what happened when Jerome came to the moment in Matthew 3:2 “where John the Baptist is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness: “metanoeite.” Jerome translated this as poenitentiam agite, ‘do pennance,’ and the medieval Church had pointed to this translation of the Baptist’s cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance.”2
Penance has the same root as penal or penalty-the Latin peonalis, which means “pertaining to punishment.” Underlying this sacrament of penance, then, is the rationale that sin is primarily an offense committed against God and that a penalty must be paid to “obtain pardon” for the offense.3 In the words of another expositor of the doctrine, absolution “tak[es] away the individual’s sin and makes him guiltless before God.”4 How dreadful that an invitation to change one’s heart became instead a demand for punishment. In the sixteenth century, the progressive Catholic theologian Erasmus pointed out that what “John had told his listeners to do was to come to their senses, or repent, and Erasmus re-translated the command into Latin as a resipiscite [repent in English].” In other words, with this one biblical revision, Erasmus shifted the emphasis from punishment for the past to transformation going forward. What difference one word makes for good or Ill.5 ~Fiona and Terryl Given, All Things New, (Faith Matters Publishing, Meridian, ID 83642) p. 119-21
