In today’s Gospel, Jesus Christ gives the twelve disciples “authority over unclean spirits.” With this authority, “they went off and preached repentance.” We may wonder why they preached a message of repentance. Are there not other, more important, subjects that they could have proclaimed to the people?
In our contemporary period, we frequently associate repentance with negativity. We think of repentance in terms of a rejection of appealing things. Thus, we ought to repent from all of the sinful pleasures that the world, the flesh, and the devil offer to us. These pleasures are appealing. But God forbids them. Thus, repentance is rooted in the condemnation of certain types of behavior. The rejection of the forbidden things we crave. This is how we commonly understand what repentance means.
The true nature of repentance, however, is not negative. Indeed, it is utterly positive. The essence of repentance is not the sin from which we turn, but rather the loving Savior to whom we turn. Those who repent, certainly, reject the empty promises of the world, the flesh, and the devil. But, even more profoundly, they embrace Jesus. They find salvation in Our Lord.
Thus, the disciples were preaching the good news of Jesus when they preached repentance. And this is why repentance is truly good news: Jesus Christ—both who he is in himself, and what he does in us!—liberates us for true happiness. Salvation.
The world, the flesh, and the devil cannot provide anything of lasting satisfaction or value. Jesus gives us something much better than the empty show of these things. Jesus gives us Jesus himself.
It is easy in our modern time to miss the extent of the complete transformation that Our Lord effects in the lives of those whom he loves. To be a follower of Christ is to be his friend. Jesus gives himself completely to his friends. He makes them whole, new, and fulfilled—in him.
Jesus changes the whole of the human person—he transforms us at our very core. Because of Jesus, God gives us a share in his own divine life (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in nos. 1995–1996). There is no part of the human person that remains unaffected by their friendship of Jesus. Jesus loves us in a holistic, complete way. And he transforms us—wholly and completely—by his love. The Church explains: “Healing the wounds of sin, the Holy Spirit renews us interiorly through a spiritual transformation. He enlightens and strengthens us to live as ‘children of light’ through ‘all that is good and right and true’” (Catechism no. 1695).
This is why, even today, the message of repentance is still important. The world, the flesh, and the devil continue their attempts to allure and to ensnare people. Nonetheless, Jesus remains the object of true repentance and of saving conversion. When we come to Jesus, we discover the wisest and best friend who satisfies the deepest longings of our heart.
And this is why Jesus has given us the Church—firmly established upon the preaching of the Apostles. Only in the Church do we find the salvation and the joy for which we search, because only in the seven sacraments of the Church do we find Jesus—the Savior whom all repentant sinners embrace with joy.
