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First Sunday of Lent
25 February 2007
Dear Fellow Lenten Wayfarers,
Last year at St Mary’s during Lent we had a total of seven scheduled hours for confessions and Father Bart and I logged in many unscheduled confessions, especially with RCIA candidates coming to see us before their reception into the Church. This year we have forty-four scheduled hours for confessions and I am sure that your parish priests will spend much more time than that in the confessional.
Some of those hours are reserved for special groups of penitents: our second graders making their First Confession, our RCIA candidates being restored to baptismal innocence before they are admitted to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, our school children and the youth group. But many of those hours are open to anyone who wishes to come. Every Wednesday at 5pm during Holy Hour, every Friday at 6pm during Stations, every Saturday at 3.30 pm are just a few of the times that those doors will be open. So, don’t make any excuses for not having opportunities to go to confession!
But why do I have to confess my sins to a priest? Can’t I just go directly to God? After Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene in the first apparition of the Resurrection, he appears to the eleven in the Upper Room where they are hiding and the first thing the Risen Christ says, John 20.21-23, Peace be with you. The account continues, and he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” The very first thing Jesus does after rising from the dead and winning the victory for us over sin and death is hand over that power to the apostles. The Spirit makes a being come alive by God breathing life into it; just as the breath
of God in the earth made Adam. Jesus gives the apostles His power to breathe life into souls dead by sin. But Jesus then ascended into heaven; His Church was left to preach the Good News that we can be freed from sin and death and live in Christ, be alive for ever in Christ. But man is a physical being; he needs sensible, tangible proofs of divine love, so that
power of binding and losing given by Christ to the apostles and to their successors in the Church is experienced in the lives of Christians in a very real way by the sacrament of reconciliation, or penance, in which sins committed after baptism are remitted and souls are restored to grace.
Why tell God that you can go directly to Him to have your sins forgiven when he is giving you the way he wants to forgive your sins?
See you (or hear you, at least) in confession!
Father Christopher