In the Name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit.
Continuing my short sermons on Confession, I would like
to say that in the first place Confession is an encounter and a
reconciliation. It is our encounter with Christ Whose love to us has no
limits, Who loves us with all His life and all His death, Who never
turns away from us, but from Whom we sometimes, perhaps even often, walk
away. It is an encounter that can be pure joy when during a lapse of
time nothing separated us from Christ, when our friendship was pure, was
whole, when our friendship wasn’t broken by any unfaithfulness. Then we
can come to Christ joyfully, happily. We can come to Confession and say,
‘Lord! Thank You for your friendship. Thank You for your love, thank You
for all that You are. Thank You that you allow me to come near you;
thank You for everything. O, my Joy! O, my Happiness! Accept me and
bless me to commune to Your Holy Mysteries. That is: to unite to You
even more perfectly, for my joy to be perfect.’
It may happen. Perhaps it doesn’t happen often. But
sometimes such an encounter can fill all our life, be an inspiration for
all our life, and give us the strength and power to live.
But more often we come to Christ after some kind of
separation. Sometimes the separation was not a cruel one; not inimical;
sometimes the separation was because we have forgotten Him, life has
submerged us, we didn’t have time to remember Him. There was so much in
life. And all of a sudden we remember that apart from all that was our
inspiration, our joy for some time, there is Christ, there is such a
friend Who never forgets us, from Whom we walked away and Who is now
alone. Then we must hurry to Him and say, ‘Lord, forgive - I was
submerged by life, I was carried away by this, by that and something
else. Accept me back. You know that this enthusiasm is superficial but
that the true thing is our friendship.’ But before we can say that, we
must ask ourselves a question: is it true that my friendship with Christ
is deep enough so that my temporary forgetfulness cannot overshadow,
even less destroy it?
But it happens that we have sinned before God. We have
sinned by unfaithfulness not in something small but in something very
deep. It can be a moment that has separated us in a very deep manner.
You remember what happened when Christ was facing the Sanhedrin. A
servant came to Peter and said, ‘But this one also was with Him!’ And
Peter became afraid. He was frightened by what they would do to him
because of the fact that he was with Christ; and he began to swear that,
‘No, I do not know this man!’ He could no longer stay in this yard and
see through the window Christ undergoing judgement. And at that moment
Christ turned His head and looked at Peter. The All-Knowing Son of God
didn’t hear with His ears those words but they hit Him in His soul: one
of His nearest disciples had declared that he didn’t know Him, didn’t
want to know Him, that he preferred life, that he preferred tranquility.
This look hit Peter in his soul in such a manner that he began to weep
and went out.
It was just one moment of radical, frightful
unfaithfulness. And later on, when Mary Magdalene met the Saviour in the
garden after His resurrection, He instructed her, ‘Go to My disciples
and Peter and tell them that I am risen,’ - because Peter couldn’t any
more consider himself as one of the disciples, he was a traitor. He had
renounced Christ, and that is why Christ mentioned him especially for
him to know that he was not rejected, that the disciples fled away in
fear, but without renouncing, and he fled away and renounced; but the
love of Christ held him firmly. He can meet Him face to face. Oh, he can
fall down at His feet, he can ask for forgiveness, but he knows that he
is loved as he was loved in the most faithful times.
And there are also times when we come to Confession - I
use this word reluctantly, as a matter of routine - because we want to
renew the closeness that so to speak has been shaken. At those moments
we must come to Christ knowing that we are loved by all His life and all
His death, that we are loved forever, to the depths of our hearts; and
that we can come, but in order to become friends anew we must open our
souls, tell Him everything for Him to know from us what is wrong with
us, what is the infringement of our friendship. And here we should not
have recourse to lists of sins, we should not search even in the Holy
Scriptures for the sins we might have committed; but we should ask
ourselves a question: in what have I personally sinned before God, in
what have I personally revealed myself unfaithful?
And to do this there is a simple means. First of all,
look at one’s conscience. What have I preferred to Christ? I will not
give you lists, but every one of us can say: yes, to my closeness with
Christ I have preferred this or that - shame! But apart from that, we
can ask ourselves: what am I constantly, invariably? To do this we can
take and read the Holy Gospel and mark in it not the passages that
accuse us, but things about which we can say as the disciples said,
going with Christ to Emmaeus: didn’t our hearts burn within us when He
was talking to us on the road?
So, look in the Gospel for the passages that made your
heart burn, even for a moment, passages that touched you in the depths
of your soul, passages which made you feel that you and Christ, you and
Christ, are sharing the same feelings, the same thoughts, that you are
one - yes, we are one with Him, that there are passages of which we can
say that His thoughts are our thoughts, His feelings our feelings, that
we are one with Him, one with Him at that moment. And when of a sudden
we discover that we have transgressed this moment, trampled it under our
feet, turned away from it, that we were at one with him and turned away
- it means that we renounced the little perhaps, but the most holy that
is in us. In a sense it is of no importance that we have transgressed
some rules, but here we have transgressed in a most frightful way our
unity with the Beloved and the One Who loves us. And we should re-read
these passages, check ourselves against them; not seeking in what way we
are guilty, but in what way we have lost our faithfulness, our
friendship, our love in what exists already; because on the part of
Christ it is inalienable, it is we who have renounced it.
So, that is what we should bring to Confession. And it
can be something quite frightful, like the renouncing of Him.
So when we prepare for Confession, let us ask ourselves
a question: here is the encounter with our closest friend, the beloved
one, with the One with Whom we want to be at one, inseparable, forever,
completely, in our depths. And we have transgressed this friendship of
ours where it already existed as is witnessed by our heart, our memory,
our mind, when we remember those passages that made our heart burn, our
mind become clear, our will move towards good, our body grow quiet,
forgetful that it is flesh and become body, a sacred thing, sacred
because through Baptism it has united with the humanity of Christ,
through Chrismation it has become a vessel of the Holy Spirit, through
our Communion it has become the Body of Christ, however incipiently.
That is what we should bring to Confession. May God give
us to come that way, and then we will be able to repent, we will be able
to regret not that there is in some list a sin that we have touched in
passing, but that something has been broken in my friendship, in my
unity with Christ, my Saviour, Friend, Beloved. Amen.
