“SOME of the scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ He said to them in reply, ‘An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet…’” (Mt 12, 38-39)
If there is no faith, if we resist the need for conversion, we will never see the things of God and the rich reality of the truly spiritual and supernatural world, no matter how much we spin our human powers to capture this reality.
We need penance and conversion to get in touch with the things of God. And we have to realize that such need is constant. We have to understand that repentance for our sins and conversion are a continuing affair for all of us in this life. We can never say, if we have to follow by what our Christian faith tells us, that we are good enough as to need conversion no more.
We are all sinners, St. John said. And even the just man, as the Bible said, falls seven times in a day.
Besides, it is this sense of continuing conversion that would really ensure us that whatever we do, whatever would happen to us, including our failures and defeats, would redound to what is truly good for the parties concerned and for everybody else in general.
That’s because conversion brings us and everything that we have done in life to a reconciliation with God, from whom we come and to whom we go.
In one of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ to his apostles, that time when it was said that Christ “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,” our Lord told them clearly:
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Lk 24, 46-47)
Yes, repentance for the forgiveness of sins has to be preached far and wide and constantly. These words show how much Christ is bent in saving us, in bringing us to our true dignity of a functioning child of God. This is his will for us. We just have to learn to correspond to that will, which is actually for our own true good.
We need to develop the virtue of penance. Precisely, the virtue of penance starts when we acknowledge our sinful condition. We should be humble enough to accept this reality.
But the virtue of penance goes farther than that. It grows when we put up the necessary defenses against these enemies of our soul and wage a lifelong ascetical struggle. Yes, our life will be and should be a life of warfare, a war of peace and love that will also give us certain consolations in spite of the tension.
And for this penance to be a true virtue, it has to include an indomitable hope that can survive even in the worst of scenarios. In fact, this hope gets stronger the uglier also the warfare gets.
It’s a hope based on God’s never-sparing mercy. Some relevant words of St. Paul: “I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil 1,6) It would be good if these Pauline assurance forms the deep attitude we should have toward our fragile human condition.
That way, we get to see the things of God more clearly!/PN
