falling up
on the sacramental nature of repentance
The story of Alice in Wonderland begins with her pursuit of the White Rabbit. He’s late and keeps pulling out his pocket watch, and she becomes so curious that she can’t help but chase after him. Why can the rabbit talk? What is he late for? How did he learn to tell time?
Eventually, Alice follows him until he disappears into a rabbit hole. She has to know where this story goes, and so she squeezes after him… and immediately begins falling, falling, falling, further than any rabbit has any business digging a hole into the earth.
Here’s Alice, falling down, down, down, with no idea what will happen when she reaches the bottom—or if she ever will. And then all of a sudden, it happens. She stops. She’s been falling so long, she stopped paying attention. But something strange has happened: she has fallen so far and for so long, that, when she lands, she realizes she’s upside down. Gravity has reversed. She was falling feet first. But when she lands, she has to turn herself upside down in order to get right side up.
Alice fell down. And she felt herself going down the whole time. It wasn’t until she had ceased to fall that she came to understand that she was no longer falling down. She was, in fact, falling up.
It’s like east and west—if you travel east around the globe for long enough, you eventually have gone so far east that you are further west of your point of departure than you are east of it. You’ve only been going one direction the whole time, but continuing that way leads you to find yourself, not further from where you started, but closer. Alice fell down so long that eventually she stopped falling down and began falling up.
the key to the message of Jesus
St. Matthew summarizes the sum total of Jesus’s preaching in the brief sentence: “‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (Mt. 4:17).
“Repent” is an unfamiliar word in our world, and it’s carrying a lot of weight in that executive summary of the message of Jesus. What was Christ calling His hearers to do? What message was this that turned the world upside down and led a Galilean peasant to a vast following, a death by capital punishment, and then an even greater following numbering in the billions across millennia?
He was inviting His listeners to “pull an Alice.”
He was inviting everyone who listened to lower themselves, humble themselves, admit their imperfections, misconceptions, faults and failures without qualification, reservation or equivocation. He was inviting the whole world, the entire cosmos within earshot of the Word Made Flesh to fall down in meekness before Him.
Because he knew that, if we who are broken by sin would fall down and seek His forgiveness and healing, then he would introduce a sublime reversal. He would take our falling down and transform it into falling up.
This is what the world did not understand about God the Son. He came in humility and weakness, let Himself fall in submission to the Father from heaven to earth to take on our humanity and live among us.
But He didn’t stop there. He let Himself fall further, taking on the form of a servant and becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross! The Almighty became powerless! The Everlasting entered Time! The Holy and Infinite took on our limits and let Himself be spoiled by our greed, hatred, violence and lust. In obedience to the Father’s will, He emptied Himself of Himself, falling to the deepest depths of humility, descending to the uttermost parts of Hell itself.
What came of that in His life? What resulted from the High and Lofty One lowering Himself to the depths of our weakness, brokenness, depravity and sin?
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:9-11)
Christ Jesus, the God-Man, the Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity, the Prince of Peace let Himself fall so far and so deep into the brokenness of humankind, that eventually He stopped falling altogether. Or rather, the fall was flipped upside down and inside out. Instead of being left broken and buried in the grave, the Father lifted Him up to the highest of heights. Instead of being brought down into nothingness, Christ demonstrated that, in His ways, in His Kingdom, falling down is really falling up.
repentance is sacramental
Of course, a fall wouldn’t be a fall if it didn’t feel like falling. Repentance is a kind of death. Admitting you’re wrong, asking God’s forgiveness for all the ways you know you aren’t who you ought to be (and all the ways you DON’T know you’ve failed too!), kills your pride. It kills your sense of rightness. It annihilates the ego and destroys our determination to prove ourselves. It empties us of power, takes down our defenses, and throws us utterly on the mercy of God.
Repentance is sacramental because it brings us into union with the God-Man who fell from heaven to earth, from earth to hell, and came out on the other side of death to a new life that can never be destroyed. Repentance is sacramental because it unites us to God in Christ.
No one WANTS to repent. It’s this message that led to Jesus’s murder!
The rich and famous, the powerful and successful want nothing to do with falling in any direction. If I am strong and capable, I don’t want to fall at ALL. I want to go under my own power. Walk, run, climb, drive, I want nothing to do with the passenger’s seat. Put me behind the wheel. Let me pick the path, the direction, and the destination, thank you very much.
But Jesus taught that that approach to life, self, and God is spiritual death. We live on a dying world, a fading star that will burn out one day, and the only way off is to let go. To give up. To deny our dreams and desires, plans and possibilities, and let ourselves fall in humility and submission to God and his will.
He called us to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And he showed the way to that kingdom—that in letting go of our pride and control, in humbling ourselves and falling down into the Father’s will and ways, we would, in fact, not be falling down at all, but falling up.
What are you holding on to today? What do you want control of? What are you unwilling to give up, unwilling to let go of? What in this world would keep you from God? What in the depths of your heart or the things on this earth would stop you from rising up, lighter than a feather, lighter than air, into the joy, delight, peace and freedom of heaven itself?
The answer in the Kingdom of Heaven is not, “do more, try harder.” The answer, Jesus said, is to come to him. Empty ourselves of all that we think we have and acknowledge our need and poverty before him. To fall down in humility and faith at his feet. Because every time we fall down in him, he promises that he will lift us up.