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 great story in the Old Testament about King David. It would make a great 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. She is married. Because he is king and 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 in battle, 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 dine 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. Now David is getting desperate, 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, 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 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 for the meal, the rich man took the poor man’s lamb and had it killed instead.’ 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 also 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 be at 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 have come to see confession as a burden, or as something inflicted on us, a duty, an obligation; but this is to see it completely backwards. Confession is a gift of healing that God has given us, so that we can be free and live in peace, because that is what God wants for us. God challenges us to confess, so that we can be healed. It is for our benefit.
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’ (Mat 16:18ff.). And in St. John’s Gospel after the resurrection Jesus appears to the Apostles and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain are retained.’ (Jn 20:22). 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. There is no point in pointing out the sins of others if I am not willing to begin by acknowledging and confessing my own sins. That is the way to begin to improve life in our families, our workplaces and our world. We must begin with ourselves.
Why do I have to confess to a priest?
God in his wisdom, knows exactly what helps us most and He knows that we need to be held accountable. And so He gave us the priesthood, so that we can make ourselves accountable to one of his ministers and that also takes humility on our part. Who wants to acknowledge to another person that they have sinned? No one, because there is a certain humility needed. But God also knows that that is the only way we should come before him, in humility, acknowledging our own sinfulness. There is no other way we should come before God. And if you find yourself saying, ‘I don’t need to confess to a priest, I can tell God I am sorry myself,’ then you are telling God that you don’t need the gift that He gave us through the priesthood. ‘I don’t need your gift. I can do it my own way.’
In Matthew chapter 9, we have the account of a paralysed man being brought to Jesus on a stretcher, in the hope that Jesus would heal him. Jesus begins by saying, ‘My child, your sins are forgiven.’ And the Pharisees say, ‘Who is this man to say he can forgive sins?’ And I’m sure the onlookers could care less about the forgiveness of the man’s sins. They were hoping for his healing. But then Jesus goes on to say, ‘“But to show you that the Son of man has the power to forgive sins,” He said to the paralytic, “Get up. Take up your mat and go home.”’ And the man was healed.
Why did Jesus start by saying, “Your sins are forgiven”? because He is showing us that there is a direct connection between our begin healed and the forgiveness of our sins. We tend to focus only on the physical, but we are body and spirit. The two are intimately linked. What happens to one affects the other.
Receiving God’s grace through confession, heals us. One of the privileges of being a priest is to hear confession and to see the change that takes place in people when they confess, especially when they confess serious sins they have been carrying for a long time. You can see the change in their face. A burden is lifted from them. They become more at peace. That doesn’t happen when you tell God you are sorry by yourself. That happens when you confess to a priest and I know because I see it constantly and it is a beautiful thing to see.
So often I hear someone confessing a serious sin from their past, which they have been too ashamed to confess up to that point. When they confess it, they often cry and you can see the burden that has been lifted from them. That is the grace of confession, the healing that comes from confession. I’m sure they told God they were sorry for that sin hundreds of times, but it is not the same. They weren’t healed when they did, because they didn’t do it the way God asks us to. God wants to heal us, but we need to listen to what God tells us to do. In the letter of St. James (5:16) he says, ‘Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.’
You often hear me talk about apparitions, because they are important and heaven speaks to us through them. One of the things that is always said by Our Lady, is that we need to confess our sins to a priest; not by ourselves, but to a priest, because this is what brings healing and because this is what God asks us to do.
We have a psychological need to tell someone about our sins. When you listen to these chat shows on TV or the radio, when people tell the whole world about their infidelities, that is confession. Confessing our sins is part of what sets us free. When we confess to a priest in confession we also receive God’s grace, which you could call divine strength, because God wants to heal us. It is his gift to us. So if you can do one important thing this Lent, go to confession and don’t let the devil tell you that you don’t need to. Satan does not want you to confess, because he knows how powerful it is.
‘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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