Forgiveness and Confession

We’re continuing our study of grace, forgiveness, the law, obedience and the path to salvation. Last week we talked about grace and forgiveness. In what way are they related? In what way are they the same? In what way are they different? We touched on a related question, which we’re going to talk about today: Do we need confession, in order to be forgiven? Is confession a precondition, required for forgiveness?

I’ve lived my whole life worried about my sins. I feel bad that I’m a sinner. I want to confess my sins, I want my sins blotted out, I want to be forgiven. My problem is that I can’t even remember all of my sins at the end of the day. So I confess sins I remember and confess there are also sins I can’t remember and even sins I may not even realize I committed—I have to confess them all. I have to confess everything. I leave no stone unturned, no confession undone. I want to be sinless, in case I don’t wake up from my sleep in the morning.

But then I think about grace—unmerited favor, undeserved gift, unrequested goodness. Grace means that confession is not a condition of forgiveness, not a condition of righteousness. I’m beginning to wonder: Is confession necessary for Mankind, but unnecessary for God? If confession is essential to forgiveness, then almost by definition it can’t be grace, because grace is unconditional and unrelenting.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus heals people and forgives their sins—no confession needed, no laundry list of the bad things they did. He just blots out their sins and heals their illness, as in this story of the woman caught in adultery:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. And early in the morning He came again into the temple area, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began teaching them. Now the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in the act of adultery, and after placing her in the center of the courtyard, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” Now they were saying this to test Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. When they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Now when they heard this, they began leaving, one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman where she was, in the center of the courtyard. And straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on do not sin any longer.” (John 8:1-11)

For this woman there was no confession, no list of failures. There was simply a pardon: “I don’t condemn you,” and a gracious send off: “Go and sin no more”—go live a life of grace. It is widely believed, and is implied in the story, that what Jesus wrote in the dirt were the sins of the Pharisees. Dirt is where we come from, and dirt is where we will return to. Mankind is dirty. We are sinful products of the earth.

The writing down of sin is a familiar theme in the Bible. Are the sins those of the judgment of others? In a recent discussion we decided that legalism means using the law to judge others. In this story, Jesus illustrates an important point about legalism: If you wish to judge others, you are judged in the same way. If you wish to register the sins of others, your sins are registered in the same way. If you won’t forgive others, your sins are not forgiven either. If you will not extend grace to others—if you heard the grace—then by that action, you reject your own grace.

Recall that when the Prodigal Son made the decision to return to his father’s house, he rehearsed an elaborate confession:

 But when he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired laborers have more than enough bread, but I am dying here from hunger! I will set out and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired laborers.”’ So he set out and came to his father. But when he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, slaughter it, and let’s eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate. (Luke 15:17-24)

Hardly had he begun his well-practiced confession when he was rudely interrupted by grace. The robe, the ring, the sandals, are all symbols of grace that distinguish a son from a servant. The confession, so well-rehearsed in his mind, is swept aside. Grace has no time for confession or contrition. Grace is lavish and extravagant, boundless and eternal. Confession implies that somehow I am still in charge of the forgiveness I need, that somehow the forgiveness depends on what I do. What then does James mean when he says:

Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. (James 5:16)

Confession, it seems, is for us, not for God, who could not care less about our silly confessions. He’s so happy we’re home, he’s ready to party. Confession, which is the getting of things off your chest, is good for you and it’s good for your fellow man. But God’s grace doesn’t require or depend upon confession. We are told:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous, so that He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

It sounds like an invitation to confess in order that we might be forgiven. It might even be thought of as an imperative. The word confess in this passage comes from the Greek word homologeó (ὁμολογέω): to speak the same, to agree. It means more than simply to admit or to proclaim or to declare something. Instead it has a meaning that there are talking points of agreement, that we’re saying the same thing, that we’re on the same page.

When God says something, we can either agree or we can disagree with him. Therefore “agree” might be a better translation than “confess.” As used here, to confess is to align with what God is saying. It is to agree about something, to share God’s perspective on things, to do things God’s way. The opposite is to disagree with doing things God’s way. So to confess means to agree with God about how he sees us and what he says about us.

Our sinful nature tends to keep us from seeing ourselves as God sees us. As with the Prodigal Son, God sees us as his children, as part of the family, as objects of his grace. When, despite our sinfulness, we begin to see ourselves in the same way, when we say the same things about us that God says about us, then we are released from our sins and cleansed with righteousness—not as a condition, but as a result. Grace comes without precondition. It is the result of accepting God’s view of you and of me.

With the Fall of Wo/Man, one of the first things lost was Adam and Eve’s accurate assessment of themselves. “I was afraid,” Adam said, “because I was naked.” God called their self-assessment into question: “Who told you you were naked?” Here God was calling Adam and Eve and all Wo/Mankind to see themselves as God sees them—as sons and daughters and not as servants. The opening of their eyes from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ironically blinded them (us) to their (our) true condition.

Confession brings us back into line with how God sees us. It gives us eyes to see ourselves as God sees us. Doing things God’s way is obedience. Seeing things God’s way is confession. We must see that we are sinners in need of grace and we must equally see that we are reconciled by grace to righteousness. This is a explained nicely by Paul:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we celebrate in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:1-2)

We are called to recognize our fallen condition and to know that through grace we have hope and assurance of righteousness. And—as we’ve discussed often—we are called to pass it on. Forgiveness, to be effective, must be passed on. To be forgiven, we must forgive others. As we learned last week, forgiveness is, after all, for our sake. It is useless without reciprocity, without giving it to others.

The judgment, then, is about what we do with grace, with goodness. It is not about how bad we’ve been. But forgiveness is about bad things—why would we forgive goodness? Forgiveness pardons bad behavior. Forgiveness only traffics in the bad, in evil. Grace, on the other hand, enumerates goodness. It is the source of all goodness. Is it easier to pardon bad things than it is to foster goodness? For Mankind, is it easier to forgive than to give grace? Is it easier to extend forgiveness or is it easier to extend grace?

Forgiveness has a legal forensic aspect to it, an aspect of cause and effect. Grace, on the other hand, is unconditional. That’s hard for us. It’s unnatural. It is not cause and effect. Last week, Bryan mentioned that is difficult to display God’s character in our lives, that we are not perfect, not law abiding, not unconditional. If the judgment is about what we do with grace, about what we do with goodness, what can we expect? What can God expect from us? What should the end product of grace actually be?

What do you do with grace? What do I do with grace? What do we do with forgiveness? What do we do with confession? What do we do with obedience? What do we do with hope? Which of these tools do you carry in your toolbox? All of them? Does everyone have grace to give? Do we all have forgiveness to give? Do we all have confession to give? Do we all have the ability to agree with God? Do we all have obedience? Do we all have hope? For some, can the toolbox be absolutely, utterly, empty?

Donald: I don’t know if it’s a matter of sin, or a matter of disagreement about behavior. Sin is murder and so on. But at a different level, this world is so divided that when somebody doesn’t necessarily sin against me but disagrees with me, and their behaviors and their thought process is so different from mine, I don’t know what to do. Do I ask them for forgiveness, for kindness and generosity?

It is somewhat remarkable to see generosity and kindness these days, because we are against each other. It seems, more than we’re in agreement with each other. Maybe I’m thinking of it at too light a level. What is sin? What are the things I have to ask forgiveness for? If I’ve wronged you, then that’s a sin, I guess.

C-J: I think that confession and forgiveness require a foundation of understanding and discernment of cause and effect. I personally believe that guilt and shame are wasted emotions and that we should seek wisdom with understanding. Whenever I deal with people who are broken, they’re stuck with guilt and shame. It’s not just being cheated; it’s so internalized as “Nobody loves me, because I’m not worthy of love, I’ve done all these horrible things”. I think that’s very unproductive.

This week, I had a hearing exam. I expected to go into the booth and raise my hand if I heard the tones. But the audiologist was quite remarkable in asking me about how I live, how much time I spend with others, how I process information, and what brought me to the clinic—was it because I couldn’t hear what other people were telling me and they were tired of hearing me say “I can’t hear you”?

During this process, we went back to how I learn, etc., and what I’m aware of when things are not coming together for me. I always thought people wore hearing aids to amplify sound, like turning up the remote on the TV. But he explained to me that today’s hearing aids can do amazing things such as cancelling out background noise and making up for where you have tonal deficits—amplifying those tones but not the tones you already hear well.

We finally got to talking about how my brain processes information in the auditory realm. Auditory processing is incredibly important—and I think it’s that way with us spiritually: How we hear ourselves, what we hear other people say. I have deficits and no matter how hard I want to bridge that, I cannot change the way my brain works. I think that’s why God’s grace is so important.

I can’t possibly remember all my missteps. I think that God doesn’t want us to live in shame. He’s come to liberate us with love, to transform us, which is what I hear Donald saying. It is the grace of the Holy Spirit resident within us that brings us to an awareness of the gaps in our processing. It’s like there’s an intervention in those gaps, and that’s when we become productive—when we understand what grace is, when we understand the benefit of forgiveness, when we understand why people go off the rails.

We all say, about different things, “I don’t get it! Why can’t we just all get along?” There are gaps, but amplifying the gaps isn’t the issue. It is learning how to communicate despite our deficit, how to work around it. That can only be done, in my opinion, when the Holy Spirit is operational. There’s nothing I can do about it.

Bryan: I have a lot easier time talking about faith than about forgiveness and grace. It’s not as simple for me as as faith, not as concrete. Is forgiveness how grace is made manifest? If so, forgiveness is given and received, but it seems like it’s not easy to receive or to accept forgiveness.

Are we supposed to be preoccupied with our sins, including sins we don’t even know we committed, just to be safe, to be sure we’ve covered everything? Is that important? Are we supposed to be preoccupied with that? If we’re living in a state of forgiveness, a state of grace, is that even necessary?

So I’m having a little difficulty in really understanding what the two terms mean and how they’re connected. Forgiveness, to me, is not an easy thing either to give or to receive, yet it seems to me that if grace is the outpouring of forgiveness then it should come fairly easily.

C-J: I don’t think we can do it unless we do have wisdom and discernment. I’m not really sure where the order is there—you don’t get wisdom until you have discernment with understanding. To whom much is given much is required. I know how sick I was spiritually, how broken. And when God extended that grace to me and healed me, it became very easy for me to forgive, to forbear from saying “I can’t believe you just said that to me!” and saying instead: “I respect your risk in being authentic with me and caring enough about yourself that you responded even if it was in a way I consider inappropriate and unwarranted. Tell me more about what’s happening with you.”

It’s an incredible opportunity to grow individually and for the other person to learn that he or she has value. The minute I say “Thank you,” the minute I say “Tell me what’s going on,” It changes the dynamic.

Don: There seem to be two parts here. One is Brian’s point about asking forgiveness for something specific (somebody did something, somebody said something, somebody in some way directly violated me and my personhood and should either be forgiven or should ask for forgiveness); the other is Donald’s point on a different dimension about people who disagree with us. Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid, and you can’t fix stupid. Can you give grace to stupidity? Do you need to give grace to stupidity? That’s a different dimension of living with grace.

Donald: I understand the big sins. Most of us don’t steal or kill. We might misepresent things from time to time, but in general the big sins don’t affect my day to day life. My concern is about my generosity, my kindness toward someone I disagree with. Is that a responsibility? Should I be able to get over that or should I just shut that person out and surround myself with people who agree with me?

I have been described as a peacemaker. I can understand how I got that label. I can think very specifically of very close friends with whom certain topics are off limits. But some people just feel they have to talk about everything. When you talk about everything, you’re taking a huge risk. You end up trying to convince the other person that you’re right and she’s wrong. Let’s not go there. Let’s just see the best in each other.

At the end of the day, when I reflect upon how it went, if I said something to somebody that was probably misunderstood and hurtful, is that a sin? Or was it just a disagreement with somebody?

David: I’ve long been fascinated by Islam’s approach to kindness and generosity, wrapped up in the concept and practice of hospitality. Muslims have an obligation, if a stranger shows up, to show hospitality—kindness and generosity. Invite the stranger in, give him (I suppose it could not apply to a woman in a Moslem country) a meal and shelter as necessary and send him on his way. There are no conditions about what sort of man the stranger may be, or what he may have done to Moslems.

I’ve read a couple of wonderful books by British men who hiked through Afghanistan (before the current troubles), stopping in villages and being looked after by the villagers. It’s a wonderful thing. Forgiveness doesn’t enter into it, though presumably those villagers would have known that these Englishmen were infidels, so were enemies in a sense. But that didn’t make a difference.

All they’re doing is basically honoring the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To me true Christianity, represented by the words and actions of Jesus Christ, also promotes hospitality and the golden rule; but unfortunately institutional Christianity doesn’t seem to promote and practice it quite as conscientiously as Islam.

Anonymous: Maybe confession is something to be done person-to-person, not person-to-God, because if grace is covering all our sins and not even responding in any negative way to it, then maybe we need to forgive one another and not expect God to forgive us. I find it, in my own life, much easier to forgive someone else than to forgive myself for any unintentional wrongdoing or hurt that I caused. I think about my behavior and my words, and am quick to find something wrong in what I said or did, and I judge myself for that. It’s hard to forgive myself.

If I go back to a person I think I wronged, they might say “No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Perhaps they don’t want to judge me. I can believe them, and lie to myself; or I can believe myself and make them liars. I can’t find a way out of this dilemma.

Reinhard: I’ve heard of people and families forgiving criminals who hurt them. In our Christian life we try to apply the common adage “Forgive and forget.”

The woman caught in adultery never asked for forgiveness and never confessed what she did. Jesus never used the word forgiveness. God knows us deeply. When we feel guilty and sorry, God knows. God is the ultimate judge.

Donald: In my multiple trips to the Maasai I learned very quickly that their greatest gift is hospitality. They are wonderful people, while we still have to figure out who we are before we can reach their level. There’s nothing more rewarding than coming away from a conversation that just has depth. But it’s also wearing, because of the effort needed to understand.

What does it mean to say: “I wronged you”? Does it mean I didn’t respect you? Every human being deserves respect. But we are all different. I may wrong you with my words, I can abuse you with my language. The opposite of that is kindness and generosity. But I think very often we don’t go deep into the pool so we don’t have to say “I wronged you.” You haven’t gotten me worked up. But I recognize that you see it one way, I see it another way, and let’s leave it at that. Is that superficial? At the end of the day, did I wrong somebody? What does that actually mean?

C-J: You self-protected. That’s not a judgment, it’s simply a label. You just want to survive. There’s nothing wrong with that and you certainly haven’t done any harm. I think most people are self-protective. Why put yourself out there if you don’t have to? If you’re around people who are supportive and like-minded, life’s a lot easier. If you live in the small rural community where you grew up, you’re already invested—conversations are understood, they’re pleasant. There’s nothing wrong with that. People long for it. I would love to have a few days of it! But it’s rare.

Parents want to protect their children from harm, and later explain to them what causes harm and how to have discernment so as to be able to remove themselves from potential harm. No way would I get on a plane and go to a rural tribal area of Afghanistan as a missionary, and yet people from the church I used to attend did that just yesterday. For Christian missionary women to go alone into a Muslim nation takes a tremendous commitment to what they believe God has asked them to do. I would not do it. I wouldn’t expect to come back.

Anonymous: Whenever I say or do something that causes somebody to feel depressed or to feel bad, to feel sad, it is always unintentional. I would never intend to hurt someone, emotionally or physically. But I worry that maybe, unintentionally, I do so.

Donald: I hardly know what wrongdoing is any more, though I know it when I’ve done it.

Don: I was interested in the concept that we commonly believe that to be forgiven, we must confess. But the subject of grace has resulted in a more difficult discussion than I had anticipated. I did not anticipate the emotional content of grace that we’ve seen, even from our stories in the Bible. I was interested particularly in the idea that we live in a state of grace. What does that do for us? (As a matter of fact, next week we’re going to talk about the relationship between grace and freewill. This has been a subject of great interest among theologians since the since the beginning of Christianity. Augustine has written extensively about grace and free will, as have Abilard and other theologians of the Middle Ages.) It’s a subject of of great interest, and it has much to do with our view of the atonement.

Hopefully, as we continue to put little pieces of this Rubik’s Cube of grace together, we will develop a new appreciation of what grace really is. It’s transformational, I think, if we give it the opportunity.

Susan: You don’t have to beg for forgiveness. I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think forgiveness is part of mental health that God wants for us, just like he wants optimum physical health for us. In loving him and in forgiving yourself or forgiving someone else, you gain the ability to heal mentally. So I don’t think it’s God that we have to beg for forgiveness. He’s offering that as a healing for hurt people and hurt minds—that’s where I see forgiveness going. Grace is given. It’s given before we ask, it’s given after we ask. It’s always there. It is nothing we have to beg for from God. It’s part of his character. It’s just there. Forgiveness is for us here on Earth living in sin for mental healing—that’s where I see it.