What is confession?
Confession has two parts:
- First, a person admits his or her sin
- Second, a person receives absolution or forgiveness from the confessor, as if from God, without doubting it, but believing firmly that his or her sins are forgiven by God in Heaven through it.
Prayer
Father, forgive us our sins as we try to forgive those who have sinned against us. And help us speak our sins to another trusted person, in order that the Good News of Christ might take on flesh and reality in us. Amen.
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What!? we exclaim. Surely I can go to God in prayer at any time and confess my sins. I don’t need to sit down with another person and tell them my sins. I don’t need an intermediary. Christ took care of that long ago.
Yes, but why do you protest so much? Could there be pride and ego involved? We try to save face, pretend that why, sure, we are sinners, we really aren’t that bad! No, but if we’re pretty much OK, then what’s the problem with telling another human being the exact nature of our wrongdoing—even our secret thoughts, desires, and habits?
My testimony: having confessed my sins to another human being many times, I can say this: it is wonderfully liberating. It is the good news announced and received in the flesh! Once another person on earth knows our story, we are free from having the burden of thinking we have to keep secrets because if the whole truth were ever known, we’d be rejected. Having truly confessed, I am free to live as the fractured but forgiven human being I am, no illusions, no pretense.
Confession is then the way the good news of forgiveness offered to us in Christ takes on flesh: the flesh of the other ordinary human being, who, having heard our dreary, sinful story, announces in a very human voice the complete forgiveness of all of our sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—to which God’s people gladly exclaim: Amen!!