REND
YOUR HEARTS NOT YOUR GARMENTS
LENTEN PASTORAL
By:
Most Rev Dr. V. A. Chikwe
Maria
Mater Ecclesiae Cathedral
Ahiara Diocese, Mbaise,
Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2006.
INTRODUCTION
1. “Rend your hearts, not your garments”!
This message of the prophet Joel forms the core of my
Lenten Pastoral Letter this year. It addresses the question
of Conflict Resolution in our diocese. As you all know,
I set it out as our priority for this year.
2.
I made this clear in my Address presented to the members
of Ahiara Diocesan Pastoral Council at its plenary session,
held at the diocesan Chancery office on November 19, 2005.
I was explicit thus: “There should be a committee
for conflict resolutions in every parish under the auspices
of Justice, Development, and Peace Committee (JDPC).”
3.
Since then I have come to the conclusion that for resolutions
of conflicts, renewal and purification of heart are necessary
fruits of sincere repentance.
4.
Sincere repentance involves overcoming attachment to evil
in all its ramifications as a prerequisite for resolving
other types of conflicts. Pope Benedict XVI has told us
that because of attachment to evil, International Convention
has not “prevented the kind of thinking that leads
to genocide, the violence that perpetrates genocide, the
injustices that make it possible or the interests that
allow genocide to be sustained over time.” The Holy
Father was speaking on the subject on the subject of “Remembering
and renewing” in the light of “Preventing
a repeat of the Shoah” –the Holocoust.
PART I
CONCLICT RESOLUTION AND INTERIOR RENEWAL
5. For long, we in Ahiara diocese have embarked on experimental
conflict resolutions. The results we have recorded in
this enterprise have encouraged me to make it a diocese-wide
project. For example some age-long intra-family feuds
have ended. Many inter-family disputes over land and property
have been settled. A lot of village disagreements have
been resolved and whole towns have been reconciled. All
this worked not because of laws and legislations, but
because of sincere interior renewal on all sides.
6.
I think the Prophet Joel realized the importance of sincere
interior renewal when he urged the people to rend their
hearts and not their garments. By the time of the prophet
Joel rending of garments had become a mere cultural activity.
So he called Israel back to its religious import.
7.
Repentance, renewal and conversion had become so familiar
a call in the OT that they made little or no religious
impact on people. So Joel went further to appeal to the
inner being of the human person. He wanted them to realize
that conventional practices that had lost their religious
import could no longer lead to spiritual upliftment and
renewal of the heart necessary for human conversion.
8.
It is important, in this regard, to make a little remark
on the significance of rending one’s garment in
the Jewish religious thought.
9.
First, to rend one’s garment shows a great anger
over a point at issue. And it means that one is decidedly
enraged and resolved to make amend. Secondly it shows
that the person in question is in the position to take
the adequate steps to effect the necessary action and
to punish in relation to the offence committed.
10.
One can deduce from the above that from rending one’s
garments to rending one’s heart, Prophet Joel is
therefore calling on us to take the necessary actions
to make amends for our sinful deeds.
11.
Rending of hearts means that one has come to the point
of taking the necessary decision and action to turn away
from sinful ways and to return to the way of grace and
life, the way of the Lord.
12.
The import of the Jewish anthropology is enlightening
in reference to rending one’s heart. For the Hebrew,
the soul the mind, and the heart, together, act for the
righteous deeds acceptable to the Lord.
13.
The heart, as the affective agent in the human person,
is the seat of the human will that is ultimately responsible
for the actions one eventually performs. It is in the
heart of man that both virtuous and vicious actions are
desired.
14.
The time of Lent offers us the opportunity to use our
acts of penance, pious activities like the Stations of
the Cross, alms giving, fasting, etc as helps to ask the
Lord to grant us hearts renewed and to recreate in us
his own spirit.
PART
II
HEART
RENDING IN THE LIGHT OF LENT
15.
The prophet Joel was emphatic. “Yet even now, says
the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting,
and weeping, and mourning; Rend your hearts, not your
garments, and return to the Lord your God.” (Jl.
2: 12)
16.
Rending of the heart leads to a “return to the Lord
your God.” And tearing, that is rending one’s
garment was a Jewish religio-cultural practice of showing
contempt for blasphemy uttered against God. In Matthew
26: 65, for example, the high priest tore his garments
at hearing Jesus admit that he is “the Messiah,
the Son of God.” (Mtt. 26: 64) That admission according
to the Jewish Law was a blasphemy that merited death.
17.
But when Joel called people to rend their hearts he wanted
them to move from mere empty and external manifestations
of piety to interior and purified action of sincerity,
similar to those of David in Psalm. 51 which led him to
return to the Lord.
18. King David had a sinful encounter with Bath-Sheba
the wife of Uria. (2 Sam. II; 12). He also had a heart-rending
encounter with the prophet Nathan which led to his repentance.
(2Sam.12). The Miserere –Psalm 51, speaks of a turn
about from sin to repentance, a return to the Lord. And,
from the Miserere, we learn how King David rent his heart
and not his garment when the prophet Nathan told him his
crime to his face with the words: “You are the man!”
2Sam. 12: 7).
19.
Repenting of his sin, therefore, King David, like all
sinners, first tried a defense. “True, I was born
guilty”, he admitted; “a sinner, even as my
mother conceived me”, he did not forget. Yet he
prayed for interior renewal because he realized that that
sinful life must be overcome and prayed: “Still,
you insist on sincerity of heart; in my inmost being teach
me wisdom” (Ps. 51:8).
20.
King David was taught the wisdom to resolve personal conflicts
through abandoning self-justification which often blocks
the admission of guilt and prevents quick return to the
Lord.
PART III
METANOIA –TRUNING FROM EVIL AND RETURNING TO THE
LORD
21.
Metanoia, repentance, in the sense of turning back from
evil and returning to the Lord is necessary for conflict
resolution. Today it has become fashionable to speak of,
and, to embark on “Conflict Resolution”. Centers
for conflict resolutions are becoming global phenomenon.
And more often than not some of them have become centers
for recycling the very problems that lead to modernization
of conflicts. And those centers give those problems new
cosmetic and disguised faces. The architects of those
human problems are far from repenting, or ncheghari, as
we say it in Igbo.
22.
Ncheghari literally means thinking over the reasons for
one’s actions and behaviour. It is such an exercise
that at the end of it one recognizes one’s faults
and, therefore, turns around from whatever leads to those
faults and he returns to the Lord.
23.
“Repentance”, therefore in the light of ncheghari
may not represent only regret or remorse over a past thought
or action. But in its fullest sense ncheghari is a term
for a complete change of orientation involving a judgement
upon the past and a deliberate redirection for the future
Repentance from the Hebrew word Sub means to “return,
turn back”. From the Greek word metanoeo, it means
to have a change of heart, to repent. From its noun we
have metanoia –“repentance”.
24.
In both the Hebrew and the Greek meanings, repentance
is the subjective human experience involved in conversion
the same as in the Igbo understanding of ncheghari that
leads to a return to the right path.
PART IV
REPENTANCE AND PERSONAL RESPONSE TO GOD’S MERCY
25. The prophet Joel did not forget to remind us of the
goodness of our God. “For gracious and merciful
is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, relenting in punishment”
(Jl. 2:13). And his prophetic call for repentance –ncheghari
was a summons for a complete turnabout that was to arise
from the heart, the seat of the will (Joel 2: 12 –
13). This call for conversion stressed the basic question
of human existence, and the human’s standing before
God. It summoned people to a relationship in which God
exercised sovereignty over all of life. Although through
the prophets, at different periods, God called Israel
as a nation to repentance. But the prophets (particularly
Jeremiah and Ezekiel) urged individuals to turn from ungodly
living to a life of obedience and trust in Yahweh (Jer.
4: 1; 26:3; 36:3; Ezek. 18:21 – 28; Hos. 6: 1 –
6).
26.
But God’s call to a whole people to repentance was
not limited to Israel. In the light of true conversion,
the call and mission of Jonah come to mind. First, Jonah
was sent to Nineveh, the Capital and symbol of the Assyrian
hatred for Israel. Jonah could not abandon his own hatred
for Assyria and therefore fled from the mission so that
Assyria could be destroyed. But he could not effectively
escape from the Lord. He was eventually delivered by a
fish on the shores of Nineveh. His second mission demanded
that he preach. The people of Nineveh heard and repented.
The conversion of Jonah himself shows the unlimited mercy
of God at the disposal of all.
27.
In the NT, the call to a whole people to repentance is
explicit beginning with the preaching of John the Baptist,
who called Israel to repentance. The motivation for repentance
spoken of by John was the imminent arrival of the kingdom
of God (Matt. 3:2). This call to repentance was reissued
in the proclamation of Jesus (Mt. 4:17) which became with
him a call to discipleship. The same call could be expressed
in other terms, such as the command to become like little
children (18:3) or the call to renounce all that one has
(Lk 14:33).
28.
The missionary preaching of the early Church restated
the call of all peoples to repentance (e.g.) Acts 3:19;
26:20). Such repentance not only brought one into faith,
but was also demonstrated outwardly in baptism (Acts 2:38).
29.
In the NT, especially in the light of individual/personal
correspondence to the will of God, Christ’s example
during his passion is instructive. This is in the light
of conversion as self purification.
30.
St Paul confessed: “For I do not do the good I want,
but I do the evil I do not want (Rom7:19) Reflecting on
the Law and Sin he exposed the human tragedy. But when
he viewed this tragedy in the light of our salvation he
understood the tension each Christian must overcome through
being freed from the impositions of the Law. He concluded
that “now there is no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1)
31.
In missionary preaching to Gentiles repentance was understood
as a change of lordship that could be depicted as a reorientation
from darkness to light (26:18). Evidence for such a theme
of repentance in Paul’s missionary preaching is
found at 1 Thess. 1:9, where he writes that the Thessalonians
“turned to God from idols.”
PART V
METANOIA
AS TRUE CONVERSION
32. Metanoia as true spiritual conversion is necessary
for conflict resolution. Let us for a moment recall the
Jewish anthropology of the human person. In that anthropology,
the spirit is and symbolizes the totality of the human
person. And the purification of the human person begins
with the purification of his spirit –soul and mind.
The Jewish Law prescribes that one loves the Lord with
ones whole, heart, mind, soul and with ones whole being.
Deuteronomy records the Great Commandment thus: “Hear,
O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore,
you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
(Deut. 6: 4-5). The Gospel of Luke reproduces this in
the parable of the Good Samaritan. And Jesus in Mark 7
demands the purification of the human heart. He recognized
the human heart as the seat of the will where good and
evil deeds have their origin.
33.
Pope Benedict’s first New Year Message: “Truth,
Peace,” focused among other things on conflict resolution.
And, according to him, “In truth, peace …
expresses the conviction that wherever and whenever men
and women are enlightened by the splendour of truth, they
naturally set out on the path of peace.” The Holy
Father referred to The Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium
et Spes, where it stated that mankind will not succeed
in “building a truly more human world for everyone,
everywhere on earth, unless all people are renewed in
spirit and converted to the truth of peace”.
34.
The Pope further urged us to “realize that peace
cannot be reduced to the simple absence of armed conflict,
but needs to be understood as ‘the fruit of an order
which has been planted in human society by its divine
Founder’, an order ‘which must be brought
about by humanity in its thirst for ever more perfect
justice’. As the result of an order planned and
willed by the love of God, peace has an intrinsic and
invincible truths of its own, and corresponds ‘to
an irrepressible yearning and hope dwelling within us’”.
The Holy Father continued. “Peace is an irrepressible
yearning present in the heart of each person, regardless
of his or her particular cultural identity. Consequently,
everyone should feel committed to the service of this
great good, and should strive to prevent any form of untruth
from poisoning relationships. All people are members of
one and the same family.”
35.
Living happily in this one and same family demands that
conflicts be removed as a necessary condition for happy
family life. One must not forget that repentance had become
so much an empty conventional expression that the “20th
century witnessed genocides, atrocities, mass killings
and ethnic cleansing which deplorably were not confined
to just one continent.” The Jewish Holocaust was
a 20th century event.
36. As I have said above, the time of Lent offers us the
opportunity to use our acts of penance, pious activities,
alms giving, etc, as helps to ask the Lord to grant us
renewed hearts.
37.
Our Lenten campaign – the collections we make every
Friday of Lent for the poor, the Good Friday collection
for the Holy Land, should not be seen as a formality but
as alms giving that purifies the soul and as an act of
charity as the Lord commanded us.
38.
I earnestly appeal to you all, my dear people of Ahiara
diocese, with the words of the prophet Joel to rend your
hearts not your garments so as to be truly reconciled
to the Lord and neighbour, to be truly penitent and to
be sincerely converted to the Lord our God.
Most
Rev. Dr. V.A. Chikwe
Bishop of Ahiara.
Given
at:
Maria Mater Ecclesiae Cathedral
Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2006.
