Every time I
celebrate the mass there is one line more than any other that seems
to stay in my mind. It is the last line of the prayer the
priest says over the chalice at the consecration: ‘This is the
chalice of my blood. It will be shed for you and for many so
that sins may be forgiven.’ That phrase ‘so that sins
may be forgiven’ is really what the whole mass is about, and indeed
what the whole of Jesus life was about: ‘so that sins may be
forgiven.’
Jesus came
among us so that our sins could be taken away, so that we could be
healed. That fact alone should give us great courage because it
means that God is totally for us, even when we have fallen into sin.
The Lord is not interested in our sin, He is interested in us.
He wants us to be healed, to be at peace, to be happy and to reach
our full potential. ‘I want you to be happy, always happy in
the Lord’ (Phil 4:4). And that is also why He challenges us
to repent and to keep coming back to God, no matter what happens,
because God knows much better than we do that sin is the one thing
that can block us from God and God is ultimately our happiness.
If we lose God we will also lose our happiness, because nothing else
can fulfil us.
There is a
powerful story in the Old Testament about King David. It has
all the ingredients of a good movie. David—who is now a very
powerful king with everything he could ask for—is walking one day
on the roof of his house and he sees a beautiful woman in a nearby
garden taking a bath. He asks who she is and he is told that
she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. But
because he is king and he is used to getting his own way, he has her
brought to him and he sleeps with her. Some time later she
sends a message to him to tell him that she is pregnant. Now he
is afraid because he knows he is going to be found out. So he
sends for her husband Uriah, who is away at war fighting for him.
When Uriah comes David asks him how the war is going, how the morale
is among the men, etc. Later he invites him to dinner with him
and then he sends him away and says ‘Go home to your wife and
tomorrow I’ll let you return to the battle.’ But Uriah
doesn’t go to his house. Perhaps he is suspicious.
Instead he sleeps at the door of the palace with the servants.
The next day
when David finds out that he didn’t go home to his wife he invites
him again to come and eat with him. This time he gets Uriah
drunk and then tells him to go home to his wife, but again Uriah
sleeps at the gate of the palace. So the following day David
sends Uriah back to the battle with a letter to his senior officer
telling him to place Uriah in the thick of the battle and then to
pull back so that he is killed. So Uriah goes back to the war
carrying his own death warrant and he is killed.
So we have
lust, adultery, lies, betrayal and murder; quite a list of evil, all
committed by the so-called ‘great’ King David. But because
God loves David He doesn’t let him away with it and so he sends the
prophet Nathan along to David, who tells him the following story: Nathan says
to David, ‘There was once a rich man who lived in a city. He
had all he wanted: huge farms, many servants etc. There was
also a poor man in the same city who had just one little lamb.
And he loved the lamb like one of his own children. One day a
stranger came to the rich man, but instead of taking one of his own
flock, the rich man took the poor man’s lamb and had him killed for
the meal.’ When David heard this he jumped up in a rage and
said, ‘As the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die.’
And Nathan says to David: ‘You are the man.’
Now David is
considered one of the greatest kings of ancient Israel and the reason
is because of what he does next. When David hears the Prophet
Nathan’s accusation he says, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’
David was powerful enough to be able to do anything he wanted, but
when God challenges him he is big enough to confess that he has done
wrong and he repents of the sin.
It is because
God loves us that He challenges us to acknowledge our wrongdoing and
repent of it, so that we can remain close to him. The Lord
doesn’t want our downfall. On the contrary, the Lord wants us
to be able to live in peace, which is why He offers us the
extraordinary gift of his mercy and forgiveness through confession.
And we can have this gift as often as we ask for it, but we must ask
for it. Sadly many of us have come to see confession as a kind
of burden, or as something inflicted on us. But this is to see
it completely backwards. Confession is an extraordinary gift
that God has given us, so that we can be free and live in peace,
because that is what God wants for us.
The greatest
healing ministry of the Church is the forgiveness of sins. ‘You
are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church... Whoever’s sins
you forgive they are forgiven; whoever’s sins you retain, they are
retained.’ And now the Lord continues to offer us that
forgiveness through the priesthood which is a wonderful thing because
it is a very concrete way of knowing, through another human being,
that our sins are completely forgiven. We need that
concreteness and God knows that.
As we watch
the chaos of our own society around us and the evil that seems to
continue to grow, the best way we can begin to bring about change is
by repenting ourselves. We ask God’s forgiveness for our own
sins. That is the way to get ready for the coming of Jesus.
That is the way to begin to improve life in our families, our
workplaces and our world. We must begin with ourselves.
‘This is the chalice of my blood…It will be poured out for you and for many, so that sins may be forgiven.’
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