Many people I come across live with the fear that maybe God won’t forgive them, or hasn’t forgiven them, for past sins. If God has forgiven me, why do the memories of past sins keep coming to the surface? I think a helpful analogy is this: if you can picture your soul. When we sin, it’s as if we wound our soul. When we are forgiven the wound is healed, but a scar remains. Those scars come back to us as memories. We remember the sin and wonder if God has really forgiven. There is a prayer that I often pray after Communion. People always ask for it.
In the comfort of your love, I pour out to you my Savior,
The memories that haunt me, the anxieties that perplex me,
The fears that stifle me…
Another concern that goes with that question is whether I am now less acceptable to God. I have often heard people say, “I am a disappointment to God.” We are never a disappointment to God for something we have done. God knows what we are going to do before we do it. What matters most is that we come back and ask for forgiveness. The only way we can be a disappointment to God is if we reject him forever. That is not what God wants for any of us.
There is a great story in the Old Testament about King David. David was considered one of the greatest kings of ancient Israel. He conquered all around him and gave the appropriate honour to God, but that is not just why he was considered great. One day, when he was at the height of his power, David was taking a walk on the roof of his palace when he noticed a beautiful woman taking a bath in a nearby garden. He enquired who she was and his officials told him “She is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” David already had many wives, but he decided that even though she was the wife of another, he wanted her. So he ordered her to be brought to him and he slept with her.
Some time later she sent him a note to say that she was expecting. Now David realised that he would be found out. So he had her husband Uriah sent for. Uriah was away fighting for David at the time. When Uriah returned, David asked him how the battle was going, etc. Then he had Uriah dine with him and told him to go home and rest that night and that he would send him back to the battle the next day. But it says that Uriah did not go to his wife, but slept at the door of the palace. Maybe he smelt a rat.
The next day, realising that Uriah had not spent the night with his wife, David invited him to have dinner with him in the evening and made sure that he had plenty to drink. Again he told him to go and spent the night in his house and that he could return to battle the next day. But it says that even though he had plenty to drink, he did not spend the night with his wife.
The following day, having realised that he did not go home, King David wrote a letter to Uriah’s commanding officer and asked Uriah to take it with him, back to the battle. In the letter King David told his commanding officer to place Uriah at the worst of the fighting and then to pull back, so that Uriah would be killed. So Uriah took the letter—his own death warrant—and returned to the battle and was killed. King David then took Bathsheba as his own wife.
So now you have lust, jealousy, adultery, deceit and murder, by the so-called great King David. So why is he called a great king? Because God loves David He is not going to let David get away with this, so he sends the prophet Nathan to David who tells him a story. Nathan says, “There was once a very rich man in a town who had all the sheep, cattle and wealth he could want. There was also a poor man who had just one little lamb, and he loved the lamb as one of his own family. One day a visitor came to the rich man, but rather than taking one of his own animals, he took the poor man’s lamb and killed it for a meal.” Then it says that when King David heard this he sprang to his feet and said, whoever has done this deserves to die for such a crime. And then the prophet Nathan says, “You are the man.”
Now here is the thing. What makes David such a great king is what happened next. When Nathan points the finger at David and says, ‘You are the man,’ instead of having Nathan killed for accusing him as many other kings might have done, David says, ‘I have sinned against the Lord,’ and he repents. That is why David was considered a great king. He was big enough to repent and acknowledge that he had done wrong.
What God did to David after this is also interesting. We might imagine that God would have David struck down, or removed as King, but no. David is punished, and the child that Bathsheba conceives dies. Then David takes Bathsheba as his wife, but then Bathsheba has another child by David and that turns out to be Solomon, the king who brings a reign of peace to Israel and also builds the temple.
So, God is saying a lot to us through this story. First, the importance of acknowledging our own wrongdoing. Secondly, that even when we have done wrong God can and will still work through us, bringing good even out of the worst mistakes we make. The important thing is that we do acknowledge our sins.
God confronts us when we sin because He loves us. He knows that sin hurts us and so God asks us to confess, so that we may be healed.
Moses was called to lead the people of Israel out of slavery. But when Moses was a young man, he saw one of his own people fighting with an Egyptian and he killed the Egyptian. The next day he realized he had been seen and so he fled the country. About 60 or so years later, God called Moses to lead the people of Israel from Egypt. Moses sin was not an obstacle to God.
Jesus freed Mary Magdalene from seven spirits and she had a bad reputation to begin with. And yet Jesus granted her the grace of being the first person to see Jesus after the resurrection. What a privilege! She is called the Apostle to the Apostles, because she then went to the Apostles to tell them what she had seen, although they did not believe her.
St. Peter denied Jesus three times and yet after he repented, God made him the first pope and leader of the Church.
What do these things tell us? Not only does God forgive us when we repent of sins, but God can still use us in amazing ways. Our sins are not an obstacle to God. The important thing is that we do repent of them.
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