In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
For the fourth time I endeavour to speak on Confession.
And what I want to touch upon is the mystery of forgiveness. When we
come to Confession, as I have said before, we come into the presence of
God. But God is not a judge; God is our Saviour. God is our Friend, the
one who has loved us in such a way that He has given His life that we
may believe in His love, and given His life to save us from
condemnation. And it is to Him, as to a Friend, and to a Saviour, that
we come.
We confess to Him, we open our hearts to Him. We tell
Him, as I tried to explain on other occasions, all that separates us
from Him; not lists of formal sins but what we feel in our hearts is our
unfaithfulness; what we feel in our hearts separates us, because in
spite of the words of love and of veneration which we pronounce, we act
in a way that nails Him to the cross again.
We lie; and we create a world in which only death can
triumph. We reject our neighbour and we close our own way into the
Kingdom of God, because unless we can say, «Our Father» and not «My
Father», there is no place for us in His Kingdom.
And so we ask the Lord for forgiveness - but not a
formal word that will say, «You have been unworthy of My friendship, but
I'm great-hearted and I forgive». No, that is not the point. It's not
that kind of forgiveness which we must seek. It's a true reconciliation,
in which we pour out our heart to God, the truth that there is to be
said, in which we tell Him all the ways in which we have been unfaithful
to Him - not only directly, but being unfaithful to our neighbour, to
our friends, to our relatives, to anyone around us. The way, also, in
which we have treated the world He has created with contempt and
indifference - a world which He has so loved as to call it into
existence.
And when we have said that, we must ask Him, as I have
said a minute before, for reconciliation. «Let us be friends again,
Lord. I know I have not changed yet. It is only Your friendship -
unshakeable, faithful, that can prompt me to become different. If You
reject me, if You turn away from me, I have no reason to change. I am
damned, I am damned in this world, whatever happens in the future
world.» The only reason why I can change is that the Lord said, «In
spite of all, I remain your friend. In spite of all, I love you with all
My life and all My death. Can you in response to this love show a little
faithfulness? I don't expect from you a total, immediate change. But
change step by step. Hold on to Me. I will support you, I'll help you,
I'll protect you, I'll guide you, I'll give you strength - but do
change. And when you receive forgiveness in My name from the priest,
don't imagine that the past does not exist. The past will have gone only
when you have become so alien to this past that it is no longer yours.»
It may sound very strange. But we all live a complex
life. I remember an old woman who came and said to me that she does not
know how to live. She spends her whole nights seeing in her dreams and
in her memories all the evil she has done. She went to the doctor, who
gave her pills, and it was only worse because from her memories it
became hallucinations. What can she do?
And I said to her, «Remember, God grants us not only
once to live through our life but to live and relive our lives time and
again until all the evil of it is expurgated. When evil stands up from
the past before you, ask yourself: now, with the experience of life I
have acquired, now, would I be the person I was then? Would I say these
murderous words, would I do such and such action which was evil? And if
you can say sincerely: oh no, with what I have learnt from life, now,
placed in the same situation, I would never, never do the same - then
you can say, 'Lord, forgive me this particular moment of my past', and
know that you are free. If you can say that with all your heart, with
all sincerity, with all the truth there is in you, then it will not come
back to you».
And so it happened to this old woman. And so it should
happen to each of us. We can not in a moment be free of our past. We
must renounce the evil there is in it. We must turn to Christ our God
and promise to struggle for faithfulness, ask for His help, and then,
step by step free ourselves of the past. It does not mean that we are
not forgiven, because forgiven means accepted in love, accepted with
tenderness by someone who will never forget our weakness, never forget
what has gone wrong with us, because to forget means that he will expose
us to the same temptation without protection.
I remember a woman who was a drunkard, who was treated
for a long time in hospital, who came back home healed. And to feast her
return the family put a bottle of wine on the table; and it was the end;
because they thought she was healed, but they did not realise that there
was still frailty in her.
And so it is with us when we receive forgiveness from
God. Yes, our estrangement from Him is gone. Yes, there is nothing that
separates us from Him as far as love is concerned - His love - and as
far as our longing - our longing - is concerned. But we must struggle
and change and become new, new creatures, with His help. Forgiveness
does not erase the past. It heals it in co-operation between God and us.
Let us therefore come to Confession in this spirit. Let
us confess ourselves daily to God, sincerely; open our hearts, make our
peace with Him, enter into reconciliation; and know that reconciliation
means that we have undertaken to be faithful to Him; and fight, and
fight ourselves, and fight evil, and fight for the people around us,
whom we wound, and for God, Whom we crucify.
Let us reflect on this. And then, when we come to
Confession, the prayer of Absolution will have a true and real meaning:
the re-establishment of a friendship that cannot be broken on God's
part, but was broken on ours and is now restored in intention. And this
intention must be determination; and determination must be action, and
new life in us. Amen.
