Read the following passage by Robert Capon and enjoy especially the last paragraph.
Parables "are far from being exhortations to repentance. They are emphatically not stories designed to convince us that if we will wind ourselves up to some acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us; rather they are parables about God's determination to move before we do…. It is precisely the lost (and thus the dead) who come to the party…. God alone gives life, and he gives it freely and fully on no conditions whatsoever. These stories, therefore, are parables of grace and grace only. There is in them not one single note of earning or merit, not one breath about rewarding the rewardable, correcting the correctible, or improving the improvable. There is only the gracious, saving determination of the shepherd, the woman, the king, and the father – all surrogates for God – to raise the dead.
That, I think, puts repentance – and confession, and contrition, and absolution, and all their ancillary subjects – in a different light. Confession, for example, turns out to be something other than we thought. It is not the admission of a mistake which, thank God and our better nature, we have finally recognized and corrected. Rather it is the admission that we are dead in our sins– that we have no power of ourselves either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving. It is the recognition that our whole life is finally and forever out of our hands and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious other.
And to take the other side of the coin, absolution too becomes another matter. It is neither a response to a suitably worthy the confession, nor the acceptance of a reasonable apology. Absolvere in Latin means not only to loosen, to free, to equip; it also means to dispose of, to complete, to finish. When God pardons, therefore, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one. He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus's death. He forgets our sins and the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus' expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus's resurrection, He puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home."
Capon, Robert Farrar. Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, 187f.
Grace=Peace,
Jeremy