On Confession – Why Do I Have To Confess My Sins To A Priest?
People often ask, ‘why should I go to a priest for confession?’ ‘Why couldn’t I just confess directly to God? Well here’s a quick answer to those questions. It is because we’re not angels. What do I mean by this? If we were angels, pure spirits, then we could have a direct kind of spiritual contact with God. But the reality is we’re embodied creatures and that’s why the sacramental life of the church is a very embodied experience, and is very important to our spiritual well being. The Church uses bread and wine, water, oil, hands and voices to communicate God’s graces because we’re not angels. We exist precisely in embodied states and so we need the experience of sacraments; we need that physical communication to allow the power of the sacrament of Confession to impact upon us.
Think about this – in all the sacraments, the priest is acting in the person of Jesus Christ. The priest is there as ‘another Christ’. When Jesus forgave sins, he didn’t do it though in some angelic way; he did it with his voice and with his hands and with his personal presence. And so the priest, in all the sacraments including confession of course, is acting in Persona Christi and the very person of Christ; and we who are embodied people, I think need that very real and physical encounter with Jesus Christ through the mediation of the priest, to receive the full power of what Christ is about.
Think for a second of the power of the priest’s words at Mass. The priest again operating in Persona Christi and every person Christ says “this is my body”, “this is my blood”, and those words affect the change in the elements on the altar. The power of Christ’s word it affects what it says. Well the same thing is true now for the sacrament of confession, when Christ says ‘my son, your sins are forgiven.’ It’s Christ’s word his voice that mediates the forgiveness of sins. The same thing now is true in all the sacraments. The priest operating in the very person of Christ, speaks the words, and by the power of those words, Christ’s forgiveness is mediated. I think it’s very important now in the economy of salvation, that we recognize the importance of the body of the spoken word as the sacramental mediation of Christ.
