In his Angelus address of 1 March 1998, Pope John Paul II said: “Lent is the ‘favourable’ season for a deep examination of one’s own life in the light of God’s Word.” Taking this profound message to heart, I could see its relevance concerning the powerful liturgical readings of the Fifth Sunday of Lent.
The first reading, taken from the prophet Ezekiel, speaks about the vision of the dry bones in the valley. The dry bones represent God’s people who were in exile. The latter meant death and destruction for them. Due to their unfaithfulness, they brought upon themselves the curse of being separated from the One and true God who gave them life and a purpose to live. Their entombment in idolatry caused them to sink and be ravaged by their evil ways. Stubbornness filled their “eyes with rivers of tears” (Lam 3, 48). Sin became their bread and butter.
The Gospel reading presented to us the sure hope of resurrection. In resurrecting his friend Lazarus from the dead Jesus solemnly affirmed: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn 11, 25-26). But believing in Jesus is made possible if one is bold enough to “take away the stone” (Jn 11, 39). That is, if s/he makes herself/himself open to God’s powerful intervention.
A compelling way of making this happening is by fruitfully receiving the Sacrament of Confession. Lent is an exceptional season in which God’s Word is experienced as being particularly “enfleshed sacramentally”. In a moving pastoral letter entitled “Reconciliation and the Beauty of God” for 2005-2006, the Archbishop of Chieti-Vasto and a member of the International Theological Commission, Mgr Bruno Forte, illustrates how through the Sacrament of Reconciliation God opens our graves that we constantly erect by our pride and set us free for a new life in the Holy Spirit.
Sin is a closed love (amor curvus), as the mediaeval theologians would say. It is a “love that falls back on itself… ingratitude of the one who responds to love with indifference and rejection. This rejection has consequences not only on the one who lives it, but also on the whole of society, to the point of producing conditionings and interlacements of egoisms and violence that become authentic ‘structures of sin’ (think of social injustices, of the inequality between rich and poor countries, of the scandal of hunger in the world…)” (§ 1). God’s forgiveness becomes the taking away of the stone, which is burying and deteriorating the human person’s dignity of being the beloved child of God. The Sacrament of Reconciliation profitably affects this long-awaited opening of our graves of sin. It imparts that inner and everlasting peace for which our hearts desperately crave. In Archbishop Forte’s words, “to ask for forgiveness with conviction, to receive it with gratitude and to give it with generosity is a source of inestimable peace: Because of this, it is right and beautiful to go to Confession” (§ 2).
But, you may ask me: ‘Why father should I confess my sins to a priest like you and not have a direct recourse to God?’ The reason is a twofold one. First, through the Incarnation of his Son, God the Father made us understand that his forgiveness can be seen, touched and heard. “In sending his Son with our flesh, he shows he wants to encounter us through a direct contact that passes through the signs and language of our human condition. Just as He came out of Himself for love of us and has come to ‘touch us’ with his flesh, we are also called to come out of ourselves for love of Him and to go with humility and faith to him who can give us pardon in his name with word and gesture. Only the absolution of sins that the priest gives in the sacrament can communicate the interior certainty of having been truly forgiven and received by the Father who is in Heaven, because Christ has entrusted to the ministry of the Church the power to bind and to loose, to exclude and admit in the Covenant community (cf. Matthew 18:17)” (§ 3).
Second, traditional Catholic sacramentology rightly teaches that it was Christ himself who instituted the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The Johannine Gospel says that when Jesus rose from the dead he appeared to his Apostles and commissioned them to forgive sins in his name. “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, 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.’” (Jn 20, 21-23). Thus, as Archbishop Forte correctly observes, “to go to Confession to a priest is very different from doing so in the secret of one’s heart, exposed to so many uncertainties and ambiguities that fill life and history. You will never know absolutely if what has touched you is the grace of God or your emotion, if you have forgiven yourself or if He has forgiven you in the way He chose. Absolved by the one the Lord has chosen and sent as minister of forgiveness, you will be able to experience the freedom that only God gives and understand why going to Confession is a source of peace” (§ 3).
The famous 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, brilliantly recapitulated the magnificent vitality of God’s Word in the following testimony: “By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.” Thanks be to God that such vitality is always and ever more available to us each and every time we fruitfully receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Let God open your grave and raise you from your grave of sin through your sincere and frequent reception of the Sacrament of God’s mercy!
Mario Attard OFM Cap