Dear sisters and brothers,
This past Sunday I talked about how our inherited paradigm of God’s “commands”, “sin”, and “righteousness” is a distorted caricature of reality that tends to keep us trapped in a fruitless cycle of of either ignoring or excusing our sin on the one hand, or on the other hand acknowledging our sin, but also reflexively heaping condemnation on ourselves for it.
Ironically (and tragically), this cycle is a result of how sin works in our lives: it replaces our vision of God with a projection of our own shame, so that, as theologian Herbert McCabe says, “we don’t see the real God at all; all we see is some kind of judge. God (the whole meaning and purpose and point of our existence) has become a condemnation of us. God has been turned into Satan, the accuser of man, the paymaster, the one who weighs our deeds and condemns us.”1
It’s psychologically impossible for us to expect mercy from a God we see as our accuser, and so it’s no wonder we either justify or condemn ourselves for our sin. The pathway out of this quandary begins in gaining a new imagination for who God is and how God is working in our lives and in the world. Jesus shows us a God who does not accuse or condemn us for our sin, but rather forgives our sin and heals us from its effects.
This is a process that we cannot do alone, but nevertheless requires our participation, and it can be difficult. Gregory of Nyssa depicts divine judgment as a painful but necessary purification in which each person is finally set free to respond fully to the love of God: “The divine judgment … does not primarily bring punishment on sinners… It operates only by separating good from evil and pulling the soul toward communion in blessedness. It is the tearing apart of what has grown together which brings pain to the one who is being pulled.”2
Because we can trust God to be full of compassion and mercy toward us, rather than justify our sin or condemn ourselves for our sin, the path of freedom is to learn to simply confess our sins. We learn to simply tell the truth about actions we have taken and attitudes we have harbored that oppose God’s desire for flourishing in our lives, ways we have denied God’s goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world. We turn away from the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and, as best we can, the evil done on our behalf… and we ask for (and expect to receive) forgiveness, restoration, and strength to change, so we can abide in God’s love and allow God’s love to flow through us to others.
So let’s continue to practice confession, beloved, both liturgically when we are together for worship, and with one another whenever we sin against each other. This is the way of peace and freedom.
Grace and peace,
Fr. Ben
- Faith Within Reason, 155-156. ↩︎
- On the Soul and Resurrection, 84. ↩︎
