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Today our talk
will be on the Sacrament of Confession. We will look at what is
confession, how confession was instituted and how it developed into the
Sacrament we now have. We will look at why we need to confess, how and how
often, where to go for confession and other areas concerning the
Sacrament.
We first see
the forgiveness of sins with Christ, who when a bedridden man was brought
to him to be cured he said: “Thy sins be forgiven thee”. In the story of
the man sick with the palsy we read: “And, behold,
they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus
seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer;
thy sins be forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within
themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said,
Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say, Thy
sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know
that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to
the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.
And he arose, and departed to his house”. (Matth. 9:1- 7) Here
Christ is telling the scribes that healing the body is nothing when
compared to the healing of the soul, but to show that he is the Messiah
and that he has the authority and power to forgive sins, he shows them in
a visible form they can understand by healing the physical ailment. They
cannot see the healing of the soul, but they can see the cured body.
The apostles were also given the power to cure bodily ailments; we read in
Matthew that Christ gave them “power against unclean
spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all
manner of disease”. (Matth. 10: 1) He then told them to
“go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils:
freely ye have received, freely give.” (Matth. 10: 8)
Thus
they had the power to cure the body, but as yet they did not have the
authority to forgive sins and cure the soul. This came later when after
Christ was resurrected from the dead, he instituted the Sacrament of
Confession by breathing on his apostles and saying
“Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted
unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained”. (John
20:22-23) Thus here we have Christ giving the authority and power
to his disciples to forgive or not to forgive sins. This was given to them
before the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, showing that it was
not part of the general gifts of the Holy Spirit that was given to all,
but a special gift for the select few. This authority was then passed on
to the bishops who are the ultimate spiritual fathers of a Church. Bishops
then pass on this authority to certain Priests whom they deem are
spiritually experienced to guide and advice the flock in spiritual
matters.
Now
for Christ to institute this Sacrament means that there is a need for
people to confess their sins, but also that they must confess them before
a priest. The bishops and priests are the only canonical and lawful
successors of the Apostles and only they have the power to grant
forgiveness and remission. St John Chrysostom writing on the glory of the
Priesthood says: “…how great is the honour which the
grace of the Spirit has bestowed on priests… for having their life in this
world, they have been entrusted with the stewardship of heavenly things,
and have received an authority which God has not given to angels or
archangels. For he did not say to the angels “What things soever ye shall
bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven; and what things soever ye
shall loose, shall be loosed.” Those who are lords on earth have indeed
the power to bind, but only men’s bodies, but the authority to bind that
we speak of touches the very soul and transcends the heavens. What priests
do on earth, God ratifies above. The Master confirms the decisions of his
slaves. Indeed he has given them nothing less than the whole authority of
heaven. For he says, “Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven, and
whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” What authority could be
greater than that? “The Father hath given all judgement unto the Son.” But
I see that the Son has placed it all in the hands of the priests. If a man
“cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven except he be born again of water
and the spirit,” and if he that eateth not the Lord’s flesh and drinketh
not his blood is cast out of everlasting life, and all these things can
happen through no other agency except through the sacred hands of the
priests’ how can anyone, without their help, escape the fire of Gehenna or
win his appointed crown? They are the ones - they and no others - who are
in charge of spiritual travail and responsible for the birth that comes
through baptism. Through them we put on Christ and are united with the Son
of God and become limbs obedient to that blessed Head. So they should
properly be not only more feared than rulers and kings, but more honoured
even than fathers. For our fathers begot us “of blood and the will of the
flesh”; but they are responsible for our birth from God, that blessed
second birth, our true emancipation, the adoption according to grace. The
priests of the Jews had authority to cure leprosy of the body, or rather,
not to cure it, but only to certify the cure… But our priests have
received authority not over leprosy of the body but over uncleanness of
the soul, and not just to certify its cure, but actually to cure it”.
Thus we should
not be as the Protestants who, like many other things, have abolished this
God instituted Sacrament and because they never confess their sins they
are completely ignorant of its significance. When they read the Bible,
they pass over and pay no attention to the words of our Lord with which he
established the Sacrament and gave to his disciples the authority to
forgive sins. They grant remission to themselves and their mentality,
being more easily acceptable in our modern world, has infected many
Orthodox who have also abolished this Sacrament of confession for
themselves and argue that they confess before the Icon of Christ or the
Virgin, or that they tell their sins directly to God in their prayers. But
Christ didn’t tell us to confess before his Icon neither did he tell us
that by confessing directly to him in our prayers we would receive
forgiveness of our sins. Neither the Icon nor our personal prayers can
give us absolution. Christ entrusted this authority to the clergy and
shepherds of his Church. Only the Priest can pronounce the prayer of
absolution.
How we confess
today is not how confession was made in the early Church. During the first
four centuries, confession was made openly before the entire congregation.
This doesn’t mean that everyone stood up and gave an account of all their
secret sins and innermost thoughts. It was a confession of the things that
had already become public knowledge like an act of adultery or murder that
came to light and scandalized the faithful or when someone apostatised
from the true Church by heresy and then coming to his senses wished to be
readmitted to the Church. Confession then was a solemn public act of
reconciliation, through which a sinner was readmitted into church
membership. This form of confession was probably founded from the Epistle
of St. James who says: “Therefore confess your sins
to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (5.16).
But even before this when St John baptized in the Jordan, people came and
confessed their sins, showing that confession was regarded as a form of
repentance and regeneration (Matthew 3.6; Mark 1.5; Acts 19.18).
After
the fourth century private confession was more widely practiced, but even
then it did not have the formal procedure it has now with absolution at
the end. Very few of the Church Fathers refer to prayers of absolution,
but this doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist in some form or other.
Certainly there were penances with penitent sinners having to abstain from
Holy Communion for a certain period of time according to the seriousness
of their sin. With the next few centuries and the Ecumenical Councils we
see that penances were severe with many of the serious or mortal sins
being punished with many years abstention from the Holy Mysteries. These
sentences of many years without Holy Communion were then reduced by St.
John the Faster who was Patriarch of Constantinople during the late 6th
and early 7th century. John the Faster left as a set of 35 canons mostly
dealing with sins of a sexual nature, which drastically reduced the
sentences of previous fathers, and which were adopted and put into
practice by the Church.
Many
considered his canons as being very lenient and accommodating, but careful
study of his canons shows that his remedies were in many places more
austere than others. With his first canon, which is in fact not a canon,
but an apology, he explains why he reduces the long sentences of other
Fathers. He says that: “since neither the great Father Basil nor the other
Fathers of the oldest times prescribed for penitents any satisfaction and
canon with fasting, or vigilance, of genuflection (prostration), but
canonized them solely with abstinence from divine Communion, for this
reason we have deemed it reasonable to reduce the years of penitence for
those who are genuinely repentant and willing to inflict hardship upon
their bodies by means of severities and to live from henceforth a virtuous
life contrary to the life they had before. If fact what he did was give
the penitent a choice, they could abstain from holy Communion for the
period stated by the Fathers or these years could be drastically reduced
if the penitent was willing to spend these years inflicting himself with
fasting and genuflections (prostrations) which could be anything from 50
to 300 a day. The time taken off was according to how much the person was
willing to do. If he promised to give up meat then a year was taken off,
if he promised to refrain from dairy products another year, fish another
year, olive oil another year, with prostrations another year and giving
alms according to the amount of wealth he had another year. So the years
were reduced, but other hardships were imposed which in many cases were
harder to observe than the previous canons, which only involved not
communing for a certain period.
I
will come back to penances shortly, but first want to finish with how the
Sacrament of Confession has come down to us in the present form we have.
The actual service found in the service books is probably from after the
10th century. It involves petitions and prayers before the confession and
prayers of absolution after. In practice, today we rarely say all the
petitions and prayers before the confession. The Priest will probably give
the opening blessing and then possibly a short prayer. He will then ask
the person to read a short petition whereby he tells God that he will
confess everything from his heart and reveal everything he has committed
and then beseeches God to forgive him and give him grace to not sin again.
Then either standing or sitting facing an Icon or the Gospel book with the
priest to his side, he will confess his sins and the Priest will if he
feels it necessary advice him on certain matters or even give him a
penance. After this he will ask him to kneel while he places over his head
the epitrakhelion and says the prayers of absolution.
What
has changed especially in our times are the penances, which have either
been dispensed with altogether of have been reduced to a fraction of what
are mentioned in the Canons. Also before, if a penance was given, then the
Priest didn’t say the prayer of absolution until the penance was
fulfilled, today we always say the prayer at the end of confession even if
the priest imposes a penance. To understand why the Church has changed so
drastically in the confessional room, we must first understand what the
canons are. Many people consider them infallible in the same way the
doctrines of the Church are. This is a gross misunderstanding: the canons,
even though they were produced by the same councils that gave us the
doctrines, are only rules for guidance. They guide and prevent men from
falling into error and heresy, and assist the penitent to re-find his way
back to God. We see that many canons were revised or updated from one
council to the next and that is because something that was valid in the
fourth century could not be applied in the same way in the eighth century.
We are now in the 21st century and if we had [as we should] an Ecumenical
council today, the majority of the canons [for Christian guidance] would
definitely be updated or thrown out of the window.
Let us take as
an example the sin of voluntary abortion. An early canon condemns the
sinner to exclusion from the Holy Mysteries until the time of her death.
Another canon excludes a murderer for 25 years, but must spend those years
repenting and fasting from the morning until evening and then eat only
Xerophagia, in other words only bread and water.
The 20th canon of Ancyra [314], excludes the sinner for seven years.
The 91st canon of the 6th Ecumenical Council [692] condemns the sinner as
a murderer, so the exclusion from the Mysteries is again the life
sentence.
The 2nd of Basil excludes the sinner for ten years.
The 21st canon of John the Faster for 5 or even 3 years.
As already said, the canons of John the Faster are in general very lenient
compared to other canons.
Why do we have
such vast differences from one canon to the next?
Precisely because the canons are not the Christian Faith, they are not
punishments that condemn sinners to a lifetime outside of the Church, but
are to be used to guide the people to lead a righteous life pleasing to
God, thus helping them find their way to their salvation. We can liken the
road from earth to heaven as a very long motorway. On our journey, we
might be tired or need to refuel our vehicle, so for a while we come off
the motorway to find a suitable motel or fuelling station. Having come off
the motorway we become sidetracked from various things and cannot find our
way back to the motorway. We need assistance and this is where we need the
canons, because the canons are like road signs that direct us in which way
to follow, thus helping us return to the motorway.
When Jesus was
asked “which is the great commandment in the law?” He replied:
“Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and
great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.” (Matthew 23: 37-40) Love therefore is above all the
canons and can replace them whenever it is deemed a canon would do more
harm than good.
Today if a
woman comes to confess than she had a voluntary abortion, we would not
exclude her from Communion for 3 years because instead of helping her
return to the Church if would in fact drive her away. The Priest would
judge or rather discern if she truly repented for her actions, taking into
account when she committed the crime. If it was many years passed and her
conscience has all that time been punishing her, if also she regularly
attends the Church services and tries to live according to the teachings
of the Church, then what would be the use of an added penance. On the
other hand if the crime was recent then she will need time to reflect on
what she has done and the priest might tell her not to commune for 3 to 6
months or even a year and also maybe to keep the fasts, which is her duty
anyway, and maybe to read daily from Holy Scripture.
Christ is
love, the Church is love, and we also must be love. The Church and her
Priests must at all time show love and compassion for the people. We are
not Judges of the people. We leave that to God and God alone. In the days
when the Canons were written, everyone that went to church, and remained
in the main part of the church until the end, had to receive Holy
Communion. So someone who didn’t commune stood apart from the rest which
must have been a humiliating experience. Today people rarely attend church
let alone have regular communion. To tell someone that they cannot receive
communion for one, two or three years would not really help them repent,
but would rather keep them away from church for that period of time, so
more harm is done than good.
One other
thing that has changed over the years is how often people come for
confession and why they come. Unless someone has fallen into a grave sin
that would bar him from Holy Communion, one, two, or three times a year at
the most is sufficient for most people. A daily, weekly or monthly
confession is not in the tradition of the Orthodox Church as a whole, but
only the practice of monasteries. Monks see their spiritual fathers on a
regular base, some daily, for spiritual guidance, and as an act of
obedience, but not necessarily always for confession. He will seek his
advice on prayer and other matters at the same time the spiritual father
can keep a check on his charge to see if his advice has been beneficial.
In recent
years we have seen this monastic type of relationship between spiritual
fathers and spiritual children spreading among lay people. They use the
Sacrament of Confession not so much as to confess but as an excuse to talk
with their spiritual father and ask his advice on almost everything they
do. If they cannot get to see him then they will phone him with all sorts
of questions and follow his every direction with blind obedience. This is
very wrong because, for the spiritual father to guide and advice them
correctly, he would have to be living with them and see how they actually
live. Many couples with already large families ask their spiritual father
for his blessing to have another child. What so they expect him to say? Of
course he will give his blessing and probably tell them that children are
gifts from God; go forth and multiply. What the priest cannot see is the
already difficult life the couple have with so many children and the added
burden another baby will place on the family as a whole. Such decisions
are not the priest’s responsibility but only the couple’s. If the baby
proves to be too much for them to handle they cannot come back to the
priest and say “but you told us to have another child”. Others again use
spiritual fathers as marriage guidance councillors. Every time there is a
small problem at home they seek out his advice on how to cope with the
situation. Now this is not a bad thing as long as both parties seek advice
together. The Priest cannot advice properly if he doesn’t hear both sides.
There
are even times when priests are the root of the problems between couples.
The woman might come for confession and the priest tells her not to have
intercourse with her husband on Saturday evenings or Sundays, on evenings
before a feast, on Wednesdays and Fridays and during all the fasts, and
many other days. She then goes home and refuses to allow her husband his
marital rights saying that her spiritual father forbade her to give
herself to him on that day. The husband who is not a regular Church goer
goes storming to find the priest and warns him to stay out of his bedroom
or else. You find this funny, but it has actually happened on more than
one occasion, and deservedly so, because the priest didn’t understand what
St. Paul meant when he said: “Do not refuse one another except perhaps by
agreement for a season, that you devote yourselves to prayer, but then
come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of control. I say
this as a concession and not as a commandment”. (1 Corinthians 7:5-6)
This can be
taken as a warning when seeking out a Spiritual Father. We use the name
Spiritual father rather liberally but not every priest who has the
blessing to hear confessions is also a spiritual father. If we want more
than a father confessor we should look for someone with whom we feel
comfortable with and in whom we can trust to open our innermost self to
without feeling embarrassed or feel that he will judge or lose his good
opinion of us. When we find such as a spiritual father we should not
change him for another when we fall into the same sin because we feel
ashamed to face him again or because we didn’t like what he prescribed for
us. We should obey his every direction in the same way we go to a doctor
for a certain bodily ailment and receive the proper medication that will
make us better. The Church is a hospital for sick souls, Christ is the
Head Physician and the Priests are his many doctors specialized in many
fields of spiritual ailments. But just as there are good knowledgeable and
experienced doctor and others not so experienced, so too are there good
experienced priests and others inexperienced.
A
spiritual doctor like a physician must have many years of studying,
training and experience, not necessarily a university graduate, but a
graduate of the spiritual university, knowledgeable through his own
spiritual struggles in how to subdue the passions and overcome
temptations. One doctor might prescribe one medicine for an ailment and
another might give you something else or another might rely only on
homeopathic medicines. It doesn’t matter what each gives as long as the
end result is the same. This is true of priests. Not every priest gives
the same advice, one will tell you to fast another to read, another to
make prostrations, and another will keep silent. There is no fixed rule
for which medicine to give. Each person is an individual with different
needs. If the spiritual doctor has known you for some time then he will
probably know from the beginning what would help you, but if your first
meeting is during the confession, he will prescribe a general medicine
like paracetamol, until he gets the results from your analysis. This is
the meaning of penances. They are not penalties imposed on someone because
they transgressed the divine law. They are medicinal to help the sinner
attain a better and deeper realization of the enormity of their sin and to
imbue in them a longing for virtue.
So now lets
come to the question of why we confess.
In the sacrament of Baptism we receive either as children or adults, we
are mystically, and truly joined to Christ and to His Living Body - the
Church - through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit working in the
baptismal waters. In Christ’s own words ‘…unless one is born of water and
the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.’ (John 3:5) With the
Sacrament of Baptism we are cleansed from all sins and are spiritually
reborn for righteous living. However, we still have the predisposition
towards sin, which is interwoven with our free will. As time passes, we
fall into sin due to careless ways of living, inexperience, and different
temptations. We become spiritually sick as it were, but also our sins make
a barrier between us and God, they restrict us from progressing
spiritually and to re-establish our relationship with God and eternal
life: we must cleanse ourselves of these barriers. If we think of the Holy
Spirit as a fragrant perfume we would not put this very special and
valuable perfume in a dirty bottle. We would wash the bottle clean making
sure to remove every speck of dirt from it before putting in this valuable
perfume. The bottle to put the Holy Spirit is the vessel of our body. If
it has accumulated all sorts of dirt through the many sins that we have
committed we should not expect the Holy Spirit to come and abide in us
unless we first cleanse it from all impurities and every bad odour.
The sacrament
of Confession works like a second baptism helping us to cleanse ourselves
from the sins that have accumulated since our baptism and it allows the
healing power of God to restore the broken relationship between us and Him
caused by our sin. In the Sacrament of Confession the penitent Christian,
in the presence of the spiritual confessor, opens to God his darkened and
sick heart and allows the heavenly light to enter, cleanse and heal it. In
Confession, as in Baptism, a rebirth takes place and this is why after
Confession we feel cleansed and renewed, as a newly baptized infant. We
obtain new strength to battle the evil within us and to restart a
righteous life.
But just like
having Holy Communion, we must prepare ourselves for the Sacrament of
Confession. From a few days beforehand we should spend some time alone in
prayer and self-examination collecting our thoughts and thoroughly examine
our conscience. We must ask God to reveal to us those things in our life
which have become a barrier to our relationship with Him. How did we
offend him and how did we offend our neighbour? Try to remember all the
sinful events and their details. If it is our first confession it is a
good idea to look over our whole life so far and note down on a piece of
paper those major incidents for which over the years we have felt guilty
or which in some way still occupy our conscience. Then we should look over
our more recent life - the last few months, weeks and days – more closely.
Writing down our thoughts is a good way to remember our sins and we can
bring this paper with us when we go to confession, but we should write
things down in such a way that only we would understand what they mean
just in case we lose the paper and it is found by others.
In
general we confess those sins we remember, which are the grave sins and
the very recent. As time passes we tend to forget the majority of our sins
because they are the same sins that we have been doing for years and have
become a habit, but with regular confession and with a sincere Christian
way of life, as we scrape away the sins that are on the surface, the Holy
Spirit works within us and slowly brings to the surface other sins we have
forgotten. There are pamphlets that help you remember, which ask you a
thousand and one questions like have you done this or have you done that
etc. Personally I am against these lists of sins as they tend to make the
Sacrament very mechanical. To give you an idea of these lists listen to
the following: Have you attended Church services regularly? When in
Church, have you been inattentive, laughed or talked unnecessarily? Have
you used the name of the Lord in swearing or in a joking way? Have you
sworn or murmured against God? Have you been ashamed to make the sign of
the Cross in front of others? Have you attended parties, movies, etc.
during the hours of Church services? Have you failed to keep the fast or
other rules of the Church? Have you believed in astrology, superstitions,
fortune-tellers or the like? Have you strayed from the teachings of the
Church by unbelief or indifference to the Faith? Have you? Have you? Have
you? This is no way to confess even though there are many who say that
these lists help in preparation. There are other lists than certain Priest
use and ask the penitent during confession if they have committed this or
that. Again I am against the priest asking questions: that is not his job:
he is there to listen and if need be then advice and say the prayer of
absolution.
During
confession we should confess clearly so that the priest understands the
sin, but without mentioning others and without going into too many
details. Giving a long detailed account of a sin is like trying to justify
ourselves for what we did and very often it involves mentioning and
blaming others for our weakness. God already know the details and the
priest is not there as a judge, but as a physician. If someone is admitted
into hospital after a car crash, the doctor needs to see the injuries, he
doesn’t need to be told that you were at a party and got drunk, then
driving home with your friend you got into a fight and one thing lead to
another and before you realized you went straight into the lamppost. Also
when confessing sins of a sexual nature, the priest doesn’t want to hear
the details of these acts. Priests are also human with passions: too many
details can make images in our minds. As a rule what goes on in a married
couple’s bedroom is a private thing, and as the prayer during the service
of Marriage says: “The marriage bed is undefiled”. There are of course
times when married couples need to open this door if it involves unnatural
behaviour, but this if possible should be done in a very discreet way. The
experienced priest will understand. If the priest tries to enter this
bedroom by asking questions and details then get up and walk out because
he has no right to be there.
I think we
have said enough on confession for today. There are still a great many
things we can say on the subject and repentance as a whole, but these can
be said at a later talk. What I would like to finish with today is
something that Christ said, which when I first read it, I didn’t
understand what he was talking about. The quote from Christ is
“Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are in
the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver you to the judge,
and the judge deliver you to the officer, and you be cast into prison.
Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou
hast paid the uttermost farthing.” (Matth. 5: 25-26) It always
puzzled me and I couldn’t find a suitable explanation in the many
interpretations available, until one day, many years ago, I found in the
writings of one of desert fathers this explanation: “The adversary or
the enemy in question is none other than our conscience which really is
our friend but we don’t treat it as such. Our conscience reminds us with
guilt when we have done something wrong, but we don’t listen to it and
ignore what it is telling us until it is buried deep down and out of mind.
Thus we treat our conscience as though he were our enemy. Christ says
agree with your adversary in other words make friends and listen to your
conscience which you have made your enemy while you are in the way - while
we are still in this life otherwise when we die our conscience will
deliver us to the judge- meaning that our conscience will accuse us before
Christ the judge, we will not be able to hide all the wrong things we have
done because they are all recorded in our conscience. On hearing our
conscience, Christ will then deliver us to the officer meaning the angel
who will cast us into prison or hell.” Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt
by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
That I think needs no explanation.
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