Jeremiah 14: 7-10, 19-22 (links validated 9/17/25a)

Almost thirty years ago, I saw a movie that has stayed with me ever since. The Mission, directed in 1986 by Roland Joffe, isn’t exactly the kind of film that an eleven year-old would normally be drawn to, and I’m sure there was much in this narrative about Jesuits in 18th-century South America that I didn’t fully grasp when I first watched it. But because film can be such a powerful visual medium, there were scenes that left an indelible impression on me, so that I find myself going back to them even now, decades later. One such moment occurs when Mendoza, the murderous slave trader who is seeking to change his life, comes to the end of a journey. He has made his way upriver to the Jesuit outpost where the missionary priests are ministering to the Guarani tribe. In the past, he might have traveled this arduous route in order to kidnap and sell the people who lived there. Now, he has another purpose—penance. As he stumbles over boulders and climbs up cliffs, he drags behind him a bundle containing his armor and sword—the tools of his trade—as a symbol of the pain he had caused through a lifetime of greed and a career of brutalizing the vulnerable. When he makes his final ascent and enters the Guarani village, there is a moment of palpable tension, as the tribespeople decide whether they should cut the throat of their enemy. When one of them uses his knife instead to cut away Mendoza’s burden, sending his armor crashing into the river below, the scene is swallowed up in a moment of exhilarating joy. The tribe, along with the missionary Father Gabriel, break into delighted laughter. Mendoza weeps loudly, smiling in dumbfounded relief as the tears flow down his muddy cheeks. In that moment, as well as any artist possibly could, Joffe captures the beautiful reality of repentance. Without the kind of serious acknowledgment of sin that repentance requires, it is hard to imagine how Mendoza would have experienced that moment of liberating grace. Every step he had taken, dragging that burden behind him, had prepared him to receive forgiveness, from both God and from the Guaranis, with a humble and grateful heart...