The Christian Sacrament of Confession

In our modern culture, there is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding the Christian Sacrament of Confession. Many people have difficulty going to a priest and telling him what they have done wrong. They believe that the priest is standing in the position of God and it is not his place to judge them. Of course, when we read the New Testament, we know that judgment belongs to God alone. Likewise, Jesus Christ himself exhorted us to not judge one another "lest we be judged." Because there is confusion and, frequently, a hostile attitude toward confession in the Christian tradition, it is important to take a quick look at the history of the sacrament.

As many people know, one of the aims of the Christian life is to live without sin. We are called to be free from sin so that we can live a life of service to God. This is the hallmark of freedom within Christianity. Our modern culture frequently interprets this as a form of slavery. There is a tendency to simply ignore that there is such a thing as sin. We simply often don't see certain acts as being sin any longer. However, when we understand sin as being anything that is short of the ideal, we know that sin actually limits our freedom. Some might say "I am free to do whatever I want." The question remains, is that really freedom? When we do whatever we want, we tend to become slaves to our desires and appetites, which over time, become vices, leading us to anything but freedom. We become alcoholics, morbidly obese, incapable of maintaining a relationship based in love and mutual respect, chain smokers, chained to our desks. It is important to remember that anything short of the ideal is sin. Sin is not the monstrous word that modern society has created, either making us feel extremely guilty or causing us to ignore sin's existence all together. It simply means "to miss the mark." So, anything short of the mark is sin.

Because sin was seen as anything that was done that separated a person from God's ideal for his or her life, it was important in early Christianity to unburden oneself from sin. In the early period of the church, Christians had the idea that they were living in the last days, the end times. They were certain of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. The early Christians also had a deep understanding of community. Anything that a person did that was short of the ideal had a negative effect on the whole group. This affected the entire community's ability to be prepared for Christ's coming. They had an intense belief that the whole Church had to be presented spotless before Jesus Christ. As a result, the Church practiced confession. However, confession was not like what we know it as today, where one goes privately to a priest. Confession was done publicly, in front of the entire church. A believer would go up in front of the whole church and say what he or she had done.

This frequently caused scandal to the other believers and so, over time, there would be an appointed moment in the service when everyone together would state aloud their sins. Again, this caused scandal as people could still listen in to each other. However, sin being like a form of spiritual plaque, the church recognized the importance of people being able to unburden themselves from their wrongdoing by expressing it verbally. Therefore, instead of occurring before the whole body of believers, confession began to take place privately, with the priest. The priest stood in the position of the other believers, as a representative of the church, not in the place of God or Jesus Christ. It was not his power to forgive sins. The sacrament of confession takes place as a form of spiritual counseling in which a person can seek forgiveness and hopefully, the wise guidance of an experienced priest, who is charged to keep the confession private and personal, and not to judge the person confessing.