There’s a word for that – it’s called misophonia, the hatred of sound. I am told that it is a neurological disorder that triggers certain negative emotions such as anger or disgust.
One day John the Baptist came preaching what the Bible says was the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin. John pulled on punches. Snakes! Hypocrites!
Being called names like that doesn’t do much for one’s self-esteem. No doubt, for many it was like the sound of a jackhammer. Herod, for one, did not like his message.
And yet for others, they came to hear him share this gospel message because he shared the truth. He offered hope of a coming savior.
Truth is, we are all sinners. There’s an evil within each of us.
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish intellectual, and when one of these great Nazi fiends, Adolf Eichmann, went on trial for his war crimes, she wanted to see him up close. She wanted to see why he could be and what made him so evil.
She wrote about that experience, and she got blasted because she wrote an essay called “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
In that essay she said, “You know what? He looks ordinary. He looks just like us. He doesn’t look evil. Do you know what that means? He is just like us.”
Our response is one of horror. No he’s not. But the truth is as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said. He was at one time a prisoner in the Gulag in the former Soviet Union.
He said, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … a … small corner of evil.”
If we’re moralistic, like the Pharisees, we can say, “I’m okay. You’re not okay.” Or if we walk the relativistic grid, we’ll say, “God loves us all just as we are.”
We’re so much like the two boys in Lake Worth, Florida who drew suspensions for eating so much garlic that no one could stand to have them around.
When teachers and students complained about their odor, the boys simply laughed and went on eating garlic. When confronted by school officials, one of the boys protested that the smell couldn’t be all that bad. After all, he pointed out, “We were blowing in each other’s face, and we couldn’t sense a garlic smell.”
John encouraged us to own up to our sin and live a lifestyle of repentance.
And what is repentance? Repentance is literally turning. It’s turning your face towards Jesus and your back towards sin.
Repentance is the act of saying “no” in order that the “Yes” of God may be realized in our lives.
Country comedian Jerry Clower once told about a lady he knew down in Amite County, Mississippi. She lived near a construction site, and workers were putting a tar roof on the building near her house. This lady had sixteen children ”or “young ‘uns” as Jerry would call them. One day she lost one of her children.
She got to hunting him and discovered he had fallen into a fifty-gallon drum of black roofing tar at the construction site. She reached down, hauled him up, took a look at him and shoved him back down in that drum of tar. She said, “Boy, it’d be a lot easier to have another one than to clean you up.”
God must feel that way about some of us sometimes. It would be easier to have another one than to try to clean us up. God doesn’t’ give up on us. He cleans us up. He gives us what we need to make a new start. Because of Christ, we can be forgiven and step out in a new beginning.
Lent is upon us. We are now on a journey towards Holy Week. And, yes, Lent is a time of examination. Lent is a time of repentance. May it be a time for each of us to reconnect with God in new and fresh ways. May it be a time for us to recapture the beauty of God and the triumph we have in Jesus Christ.