Repentance Means Getting Rid of “I”

23 December 2025  Malachi 3:1-4, 23-24

The Last Tuesday in Advent

“For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap…” Malachi 3:2

Being a fuller was smelly, disgusting work. Fullers cleaned wool to make it pure white, or suitable for dyeing. The process of cleaning involved lye soap, the basic ingredients of which were relatively abundant, but the technique of making it was a real skill, and so reliable soap was not always easy to find. A cheaper, and more abundant substitute for lye soap was human urine, which was collected and aged until its decomposition created ammonia, which was a bleaching agent. Garments were put in vats filled with urine, and workers would walk upon them, shifting the fabric with their feet so that the urine soaked through as completely as possible, the ammonia releasing dirt and oils from the fabric.

Then the fabric was stretched out in the sun to bleach some more. Fullers had to work outside the city walls because the smell of decomposing urine was so vile, and “fullers’ fields” was a byword for the most unattractive real estate in the world.

True repentance is an “unselfing” so radical that the great paradox of the New Testament makes perfect sense: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Jesus will have every bit of our life, or none of it.

And that, according to the prophets, is what it is like to repent – walking around all day in vats of stinking piss, cleaning someone else’s clothes, outside the city walls because no one can stand to be around what you are doing. That is what it takes to “make an offering in righteousness” (Malachi 3:3).

George Frideric Handel, in his famous oratorio The Messiah, included an aria, “For He is Like a Refiner’s Fire,” always sung by a well-dressed alto in a very clean church. Handel left the bit about the fullers out. It’s rather hard to sing an aria about what fullers do.

The prophets didn’t mince words.

C.S. Lewis said that repentance is no picnic: “It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing a part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death…. Remember, this willing submission to humiliation is not something God demands from you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen” (Mere Christianity, pp. 54-55). True repentance is an “unselfing” so radical that the great paradox of the New Testament makes perfect sense: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Jesus will have every bit of our life, or none of it.

If it takes vats of urine to get that through our heads, then that’s what it takes.

On Judgment Day we will all stand before the Throne of Grace, and only the very foolish will dare to utter the word “I.” I believed, I followed, I trusted, I loved. Anything that starts with “I” is something we have held back for ourselves rather than let ourselves be filled with Him. “I” in the end is not something we give, but something we receive by letting go of self, and receiving Him.

That’s what the fuller’s vats are trying to teach you.