Confession and the Crucified

Making our Confession helps us to understand more clearly the meaning of the Crucifixion.  Some people want a kind of Christian religion in which the Crucifixion has no special meaning, or at any rate, no special meaning for them.  But if you take the Crucifixion and our need for forgiveness out of the Christian religion, you are left with an empty husk which has ceased to be the Christian religion.

But in the Sacrament of Reconciliation we kneel at the foot of the Cross, and tell all our sins, and receive God’s forgiveness and are brought face to face with our Crucified Saviour.  We look at the crucifix and see how it was for us, for us in particular, that “he hung and suffered there”. (7) And so we see what our sins cost him, and what our forgiveness cost him too – all the long drawn out agony of Good Friday.  And in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, as we look up at him on the Cross, we realise something of his unimaginable love for us.  And the amazing fact that he was crucified to win for us forgiveness shows, as nothing else can, how much we mean to him and how much our forgiveness means to him.

SUMMARY

1. Priests are given power by Our Lord to forgive sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and when we make a good Confession we know we are forgiven.  Besides forgiveness, we are also given grace to help us resist our temptations.  We have to confess every sin we can remember having committed.

2. Priests are bound by a solemn vow never to reveal anything told them in Confession, and they will never think the worse of anyone who makes his or her Confession.

3. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation we are helped to understand more clearly the inner meaning of Our Saviour’s Crucifixion – how he died that we might be forgiven and how much we mean to him.