Vol: 6 Issue: 3
Baramhat 1728 / March 2012
The Sacrament of Repentance and Confession By: H.G. Bishop Mattaous Confess your sins and errors in detail, whether they are in your mind or on the paper, and be careful not to hide anything no matter how ugly or embarrassing it is, keeping in mind the advice of the apostle: " If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1Jn. 1: 9). Do not blame others or your circumstances and justify yourself of wrongdoing, remembering what the apostle said: "If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us" (1Jn. 1: 10).
The Holy Bible tells us this story: when the people of Israel entered Jericho, the Lord warned them and forbade them to take anything, but Achan, the son of Carmi, found some valuables and stole them. The anger of the Lord burned against the children of Israel and they were defeated by the small town of Ai. When Joshua asked the Lord about the reason for this unexpected defeat, the Lord said: "There is an accursed thing in your midst, O Israel; you cannot stand before your enemies until you take away the accursed thing from among you." (Jos. 7: 13). So Joshua fetched Achan son of Carmi and ordered him to confess to the Lord before him (Joshua) saying: "My son, I beg you, give glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession to Him, and tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from me" (Jos. 7: 19). And so Achan son of Carmi confessed before the Lord in the presence of Joshua son of Nun. Know that you are in the presence of the spiritual physician who will heal you of all your sins and weaknesses, recalling the apostle’s advice: "Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed." (Jm. 5: 16) We know that a sick person does not hide anything about his sickness from the doctor, no matter how secret, ugly, or shameful, so that the
doctor can know all what the patient is suffering from: the symptoms of his disease, its causes, and its complications. Thus, he can prescribe the appropriate medicine which will bring about his full recovery. Since spiritual diseases are harder to diagnose and discover and are more dangerous to the patient than physical diseases as they lead to eternal perdition, we have to help our father confessor discover and diagnose our diseases so that it is easier for him to know their causes and motives and to prescribe the effective medicine that will lead to a speedy recovery. Would that you remembered what the psalmist said: "I acknowledged my sin to You, and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and You forgave the iniquity of my sin." (Ps. 32: 5) Solomon said: "He who covers his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy." (Pr. 28: 13). The Lord encourages you to confess saying: "Put Me in remembrance; let us contend together; state your case that you may be acquitted" (Is. 43: 26). Repentance is a second baptism; its action is strong and its effect is great. Listen to what St. Athanasius, the Apostolic, says: "Just as the one who is baptized by a priest is enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit, so is the one who confesses his sins to the priest is granted forgiveness through the grace of Christ." My brother, the courageous fighter, after you are through with your confession, after you have addressed to the priest all the questions and the inquiries you have, after you have listened to his wise and fatherly answers to your questions and his useful replies to your inquiries, and learned from him the healing remedies for your ills, and after you have heard the practical and spiritual solutions to your problems, kneel with reverence in the spirit of prayer and supplication in front of the priest and accept the absolution from the mouth of God.
A Group of Boys from Archangel Michael Church Page 2
What stops us from Confession? By: Daniel Ayad One of the Youth Confession is one of the seven sacraments of the church. Despite Confession being a heavenly sacrament, there appears to be a number of people who object to the power of this sacrament and raise objections regarding the practice of this sacrament. The sacrament of confession could be summarised as “the Lord entering into man by His grace, vividly establishing communion with him, and allowing him to taste of all the sweetness of the Divine...” Despite Confession being a blessed transformation and a heavenly consolation, many people appear to be reluctant to participate in this sacrament. I’m sure many people could offer an opinion as to the reasons why people do not haste to partake in confession, (and we will number those reasons below) but undoubtedly those who do not haste to partake in confession do not see the healing power of this blessed mystery. The sacrament of Confession offers much spiritual healing, of which the most obvious is cleansing of the mind, body and spirit. When you confess you clean your soul and remove bodily dirtiness. Cleansing through confession is analogous to washing your hands in water. For example, every man, when he dirties his hands, washes them. No one says: “I will not wash my hands anymore, because I will get them dirty again!” But why is it then that many people say, “I will not go to confession, because I will sin again tomorrow!” It is clear that the enemy of our salvation is enticing us not to wash our souls, so that he can gain power over them. You cannot give in to these suggestions from the devil. You need to confess frequently, because frequent washing produces the taste of cleanliness in us. I mean, you wouldn’t leave your house unswept for a year, or leave your office desk uncleaned for a year (unless you have a negligent boss)! Now think about not having confession for not only a year, but for twenty, forty or sixty years..... Confession also provides the benefit of allowing any sin to be forgiven if a man repents sincerely. Some people object and say that there is no use in confession because they are too sinful; “God could never forgive my many sins”. However we believe that God is all powerful and can forgive all sins. He is the powerful Doctor who provides the medicine for forgiveness. God’s mercy is unlimited and confession is the suitable medicine. All sins can be forgiven by God, if man is willing to repent. Some people also object to confession as they do not believe they have any ‘special’ sins. They say that only the people who commit big sins like murder, stealing or rape should go to Confession. However, this belief is a great error. Sins that are hidden are Page 3
deadly, because they go unnoticed. The ‘small’ sins cause man to be complacent and not realise his dirtiness. He does not receive the cleaning power that Confession brings. Some people also refuse to confess saying that they will sin again, so what is the point in confessing? While it is true that you cannot avoid sinning as you are a mere human, you need to put up a fight to become clean. When you struggle you are victorious, but as soon as you give up you have already lost. No matter how many times you fall you must rise....even till death. Others refuse to confess to a priest, because they say that we only need to confess to God. In response, Confession is a sacrament and God has ordained the priest to administer the Holy Sacraments so that we can receive through them heavenly allsaving grace. Besides, Confession before a priest has an enormous instructive meaning. It humbles a person. It cures pride and instils in us shame and fear to protect us from future sins. I have no doubt that Confession is the way to become worthy in God’s eyes. If the confessor is sincere, deep, disgusted with his sins and desires to start a new life, the room of the heart is thoroughly cleansed from all the waste of the sins. Confession has countless benefits. It chases away demons and deadly parasites that lie in the heart. It opens the soul to taste the fragrant and fresh grace of God. It removes all confused thoughts and ideas, all chaotic feelings and restores positive desires of the heart. Confession ultimately allows a person to be fit to accept the most marvellous guest, Jesus Christ, and do not ever let an objection to Confession stop you from receiving Him.
A Deacon’s group from St Marcurius abou sefien Church
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Approaching Christ the Physician The True Meaning of Confession By: Kallistos Ware In the book by Tito Colliander, The Way of the Ascetics, a brief conversation is recorded between a monk and a layman. The layman asks the monk, “What do you do there in the monastery?” And the monk replies, “We fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again.” It’s not only in monasteries that we do that. In a fallen and sinful world, an all important aspect of our personhood is our need to be healed, to get up after we’ve fallen, our need to repent, to forgive, and to be forgiven. Are any among you sick? They should call for the presbyters of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up. If anyone has committed sins, they will be forgiven him. Therefore, confess your sins one to another and pray for one another so that you may be healed (James 5:16). What we notice in this passage is that St. James is speaking about healing in an allembracing sense of body and soul together. He talks about the sick person being healed through anointing with oil, but he also says that the sick person will be forgiven his sins. So, healing of body and soul go together. We are to see the human person, as we already said, in holistic terms. An undivided unity: the body is not healed apart from the soul, nor the soul apart from the body. The two are interdependent. St. James speaks at one and the same time of the sick person being raised from his bed physically healed, and he speaks of the forgiveness of his sins through confession. He speaks of spiritual healing. I find this to be a key that opens a very important door, a vital clue — the anointing of the sick and confession are essentially connected as two indivisible aspects of a single mystery of healing and forgiveness. Each has its own specific function — they do not replace one another, but together they form a true union. So, perhaps the most helpful way to look at the sacrament of confession is to see it as a sacrament of healing. Now, sacramental confession as we know it today in the Orthodox Church represents a convergence of two things which originally were, perhaps, distinct. First of all, there is the administration of penance. This is particularly connected with John, chapter 20, verses 22 through 23. There, the risen Christ breathes on His disciples, confers on them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and, He says, “whosoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven; whosoever sins you retain, they are retained.” Page 5
There, the risen Christ gives to His disciples the power of binding and loosing sins — a juridical power. This task of binding and loosing was transmitted from the apostles to their successors, the bishops. In the early church, the administration of penance was something public; it didn’t involve the private giving of counsel or advice. It was something exceptional. You hoped, by God’s mercy, that you wouldn’t have to be involved in penance. Indeed, the penances that were imposed were by our standards extremely severe. Then there is another source of the sacrament of confession as we know it today. This is the practice of spiritual counsel, first found especially in the Egyptian monasticism of the fourth century, though no doubt the practice of using spiritual counsel goes right back to apostolic times. But we don’t know very much about it until the emergence of monasticism. In the desert of Egypt, as we have learned from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers an important part was played by the disclosure of thoughts. The disciple would go perhaps daily to his spiritual elder, and open his heart to him. Now this is something clearly different from the system of public penance. First of all, it is regular, not exceptional. In many monastic centers, this happens daily. Secondly, it is private, not public. It’s carried out under conditions of confidentiality. It doesn’t directly involve the church hierarchy. The spiritual father — in a monastic context, the elder — may in fact be a layman, not a priest. Anthony of Egypt was never a priest but he formed in many ways the prototype of the monastic spiritual father. Athanasius calls him “a physician given by God to all of Egypt”. In this practice of spiritual counsel, the scope is far wider than in the formal penance of the Church. What you disclose to your elder is not just your sins, but your thoughts. You don’t just speak of what you’ve done wrong, you share with him your inner state, your whole situation. The hope is that by revealing your thoughts to your elder, you will in fact avoid falling into sin. In other words, penance is retrospective, picking up the pieces after the breakage; but, through the use of spiritual counsel, you hope to avoid the breakage itself. The underlying principle behind this monastic disclosure of thoughts is very clear; it is described in this way in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: If impure thoughts trouble you, do not hide them, but tell them at once to your spiritual father and condemn them. The more a person conceals his thoughts, the more they multiply and gain strength. But an evil thought, when revealed, is immediately destroyed. If you hide things, they have great power over you, but if you could only speak of them before God, in the presence of another, then they will often wither away, and lose their power. The process of bringing into the open what is hidden is decisive behind spiritual counsel. That, of course, is also the principle in modern psychotherapy, but the
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desert fathers thought of it before Freud and Jung. Now, in our view of confession today, where do we put the primary emphasis? Do we put it mainly on the aspect of penance, or on the aspect of spiritual counsel? Do we think of confession primarily in juridical terms, as coming to Christ as the Judge? Do we think of it, on the other hand, more in therapeutic terms, as coming to Christ as the Good Physician, the Doctor? Do we see sin primarily as the breaking of the Law, in medieval terms, or do we see sin more as the symptom of inner illness? We shouldn’t feel we’ve got to think of confession either in legalistic terms or in terms of healing, but we should combine the two. Even so I have to say that I myself find the therapeutic model much more helpful — to see confession above all as a sacrament of healing, to think of it as coming to Christ the Doctor. The priest is not the doctor, he is the medical assistant. If you’re given a penance — that’s not a punishment, it’s a tonic to help you recover afterwards, to get better.
t e g o t get r o F t Do No ur copy of s su yo e J d e if i c u r C the nt e l s i h T
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Top: Boys from St Anthony’s church and Achangel Michael Church
Right: Group from St Mark’s Church
A group from St Abraam Church
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