Joe Heschmeyer examines the biblical evidence in support of confessing your sins to a priest.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. One of the most common questions I think we get as Catholics, and I’m sure this is true for our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters as well, is why do you confess your sins to a priest? Now, you’re going to get that sometimes from people who aren’t Christian at all, who just find the whole thing kind of weird, but then you’re also going to get it from non-Catholic Christians, nonorthodox Christians like Protestants, who find the whole thing unbiblical and weird. So what I want to do today is give a short answer to that explaining in two parts. Why do we do this? What’s the biblical foundation for this? And then maybe even go a little deeper and say, why does the Bible call us to do this? So to do that, I want to tackle it in two halves.

Number one, why confess your sins to another person at all? And then number two is going to be okay if you’re supposed to confess your sins to others. Why does it matter that you go to a priest? Let’s do the first of those first. Why confess your sins to another person? The easy answer is because survival says so, a good verse for you to know. The chapter in verse number four is James chapter five, verse 16, James five 16, which says therefore, and we’re going to get into that, therefore, therefore is a connector. It means what came before matters, and we’re going to get into what came before, but right now just know the verse, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. So we are supposed to confess our sins to other people. So if somebody says, this is so unbiblical of you going to a priest to confess your sins, I just confess my sins to God.

Well, they’re explicitly not following what the Bible says. They’re explicitly going astray. James five 16 says, confess your sins to one another and they’re just not doing it. So we can get into whether they should confess it to a layperson, family member, priest, et cetera. But the outset we should recognize, confess your sins to one another is baseline. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not going to anybody else for confession, you are not following what the New Testament says on this subject. And then there’s a flip side to that. Pray for one another that you may be healed. And James gives us an explanation for why he says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. And you can see that power of intercessory prayer all over the place. I always give the example of the end of the Book of Job Job’s.

Friends are punished by God and he tells them explicitly, the only way they will be forgiven is if Job intercedes for them. So one of the reasons we confess our sins to other people is because they might be in a better place spiritually to intercede. For us, by all means, go to God, confess your sins to God. James five 16 is not saying, confess your sins to one another and not to God. That part’s taken for granted. Confess your sins to God but also confess your sins to one another. One of the reasons he gives is that you might be healed, which means if you’re not doing that, you might not be getting healed of your sins. And so this is big. This isn’t just like you’re disobeying God, that would be bad enough, but that you’re disobeying God in such a way that you may not be forgiven of your sins.

This notion that we go to one another and we seek forgiveness and we give forgiveness is really important and we find it all over the place in the New Testament. Once you know where to look, for instance in Matthew six, we’re going to get back to this passage. Jesus says, after giving us the our Father, if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men your trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. So this idea that we need to actually forgive one another, the trespasses that each of us brings to the table matters. But notice in that this goes very neatly with the idea that we’re confessing our sins to one another. So if I’ve wronged you, I’m going to you and I’m seeking your forgiveness. And if you withhold it, God will withhold forgiveness from you and vice versa.

And so this is something that’s really important and really built in. Now you might say why, right? It’s one thing to say, the Bible says we need to confess our sins to one another. We need to forgive one another if we want to be forgiven, which is to say, if you want to be saved, right? You can’t be unforgiven and saved. And so your salvation is tied to the fact that you’re having your sins taken care of. Now, in one sense, of course, Jesus takes care of them on the cross, and yet we still find this language that we have a role to play in the healing of one another and withholding forgiveness in a way that can cause us to lose our own salvation. Because if the Father will not forgive our trespasses, we’re dead in our sin. I want to just make that clear at the outset.

The Bible says that if your theology doesn’t allow that, that’s a different thing. But the Bible says that then we might say, well, why? Now here I’m going to cite to a couple of saints. I realize if you’re not Catholic, you’re not going to be like, well, I believe it because the saints say so. That’s fine, but at least listen to what they say because I think they make a lot of sense. The first one I want to point to is St. John Paul ii, he has a document called reconciliation and penance, and I love the way he talks about this idea of social sin. He says, all sin in one sense is social. Even the most private personal sin you have is actually a sin that has rippled out and impacted in a negative way those around you and the whole church and the whole world.

Now that sounds really kind of strange. How are we that tied up one with another? And we live in a society that tends to be very individualistic and doesn’t take seriously the way my actions might impact you and vice versa. But he makes the point that on the positive side, we can talk about the communion of saints. That if you think about your own spiritual life, think about the number of people who’ve helped you spiritually. Why do you have a Bible? Why do you know Christianity? Why do you have the gospel? Why were you formed in theology? What were the good examples of people who demonstrated the truth of the, that list goes on and on and frankly goes back 2000 years to a bunch of people you’ve never even heard of or met, whose names you won’t know this side of eternity, that all of their actions, actions you do not even know about, played an incredibly important role in your own faith journey.

Even actions from thousands of years before you were born if Abraham hadn’t said yes, if Mary hadn’t said yes, right? These kind of things are these incredibly important moments, and this is of course solidly biblical. It is usually described in the context of the mystery of the communion of the saints. So for instance, in Ephesians chapter four, St. Paul talks about the gifts God has given us. And he says that these are for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. So if you are doing the things you’re called to do, this is having this positive ripple effect outward where you are helping those around you. The gifts God has given you, in other words, are not just for you, the gifts God’s given you, whatever those are are for other people. And if you’re using them well, you are enriching the lives of other people.

But this means that if you’re not using them well as we’re going to see, you’re hurting other people, even if just in the way that you’re not giving them the gift, God intended them to receive through you, but often because you’re actually harming them more directly. This is one of the reasons why we’re going to have to go to one another and ask for forgiveness because in sin we haven’t just wronged God, we’ve also harmed one another. So I want to look at this particularly in light of the family connection because there’s a cool connection. John Paul ii, he’s quoting this line that I didn’t recognize at first, and he says, through the community of saints, it’s possible to say that every soul that rises above itself raises up the world. It’s a beautiful way of saying what Ephesians four is saying, like you’re building up the body of Christ when you’re cooperating with this working of grace.

But I wanted to know, well, where is that line coming from? And it’s quite exciting to me at least because it’s coming from Elizabeth Lase who is this French woman who was married to a really outspoken atheist doctor who was called an anti clericals. He hated priests, he hated the Catholic church, he hated Christianity, and he’s married to this very devout Catholic woman and she is just writing in her diary all of this stuff where she’s praying for him. She’s even prophesying that she thinks he’s going to convert and become a Catholic priest. And his name is Dr. Felix, later father Felix Lazu, because as you might have guessed through her selflessness, through her great Christian witness, he is eventually convicted. He does become Christian, he does become a Catholic priest. He writes the preface to the, he has her diary published and he writes in the preface of it, and one of the things he mentions that one day her youngest sister had a day book and asked her to write a motto in it.

So she thinks about it and she writes that line. And the translation we have here is every soul that uplifts itself uplifts the world. But it’s that idea that be who you are meant to be and the whole church and the whole world will be benefited through it. But this is also true in a more direct way, like those immediately around you. And we see this, for instance in one Corinthians chapter seven, that the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. That’s a fascinating kind of claim and is followed by another one. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they’re holy. So one Corinthians seven 14 has this fascinating kind of marital theology that St. Paul sort of tucks in a conversation about divorce. And then two verses later, he says, wife, how do you know whether you’ll save your husband?

Husband? How do you know whether you’ll save your wife? And I love that because that’s exactly what Elizabeth Lessor lived. She didn’t actually live to see her husband convert. It was after her death that he finds her diaries and all of the ways that she’s been praying and for him and suffering for him, and he ends up being pretty convicted by it is a great story. It’s a story for another day. But my point there is one of the reasons why we confess our sins to one another is we have these duties and obligations towards one another. Not just that we wrong one another, but also that we can pray and intercede for one another. And so we go to one another confess in our sins, both because I’ve hurt you and because I think you might have a spiritual power to help me because the prayer of a righteous man has great power in hiss effects.

James five 16, going back to St. John Paul ii, he says that there’s the inverse of the communion of saints, a sort of communion of sin whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin drags with itself the church and in some way the whole world. And we’ve seen this as well too. Think about the horrors of, if you want to say the abuse scandal in the Catholic church or fill in the blank, you can see how one person’s sins can ripple out in ways that wreck people for generations. That kind of awful power is also within us because of this human solidarity that John Paul II speaks of. And so he says, in other words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one that exclusively concerns the person committing it with greater or lesser violence with greater or lesser harm.

Every sin has repercussions on the entire ecclesial body that is the church and the whole human family. So even if you think you’re alone in your room, if you think nobody knows about your sin, it can still do real damage. One, because you’re not becoming the saint God meant you to be. And two, because there’s other ways that it distorts maybe the way you think about other people. If you’re falling into sins of lust, it’s going to change how you interact with people of the opposite sex or fill in the blank, right? There’s no sin that is purely private. It impacts all those other things that kind of ripple out whether you see it or not. And we see the big ripple effects. We’ve experienced them. But notice in both the cases of the ugly stuff like the priestly abuse scandal, many of those priests were long dead by the time we found out the horrors of what they had done and all the suffering that didn’t cause the ripple effects from that, they didn’t see those ugly ripple effects.

On the positive side, the holy ripple effects Elizabeth Lasser and her husband, she didn’t see those until after she died. And so you may not see the ripple effects of your actions, but we should know that both your good and bad actions ripple outwards. So one of the reasons we confess to one another and we seek forgiveness from one another is because our actions hurt one another when we sin. And I think this is worth thinking about, particularly in the context of the family. So even though I’m going to focus on why go to a priest, we shouldn’t only go to a priest, and that’s something I think Catholics need to hear. You should also be confessing your sins to those you have harmed and to those who you think are in a good position to pray for you, that’s important to have. Now, the catechism of the Catholic church has some beautiful stuff on how to live as a Christian family, and there’s great advice that I rarely hear people talk about that I want to talk about.

So we’re going to talk about a couple of those pieces of advice. Number one, in paragraph 2223, the passage reads in part, parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children by knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them. Okay, so think about that. You have a grave responsibility to give a good example to your kids if you’ve got kids, and that’s a heavy burden and you’re going to fall short. And God knows that the Catholic church knows that. Everybody knows that. You know that, right? What are you going to do when that happens? One thing you could do is pretend like you didn’t make a mistake because you’re afraid if you confess your mistake to your children that they’re not going to respect you as their parent. But here’s what’s really going to happen.

If you don’t confess your sin, if you pretend you didn’t make a mistake that you did make and that they probably know you made, you’re going to look like a hypocrite. They’re going to receive the lesson. When I sin, I should cover up my sin and not confess it to other people. And you’re going to give them a spiritually distorted kind of message just by being too proud to admit your fault to your kids. On the other hand, by knowing how to acknowledge your own feelings to your children, you are now in a better position to guide and correct them because now, if you correct them, they know you are not Mr. Or Miss Perfect, and they’re the screw ups. No, it’s like one broken person showing another person like, yeah, look, I have struggled with this. I’ve made this mistake. Now I see you making this mistake.

We don’t want to go down that path. You’re in a position where you can give an authentic fatherly or motherly bit of counsel. Now, there’s a flip side to that. Some of you listening aren’t parents. Maybe you still live with your parents and you’re saying, I can’t wait for my dad to hear this. Well, good news, a couple paragraphs later, you’re on the hook as well. And paragraph 22, 27, children in turn contribute to the holiness, the growth and holiness of their parents. And as a parent, I can say that’s true. I am sometimes convicted by even my 4-year-old will say, you seem like you’re in a bad mood today. She’ll call me out on stuff and it’s good because I may not be aware of it, but you contributed to the holiness of your parents in any number of ways. I give that one because this one near and dear to my heart, each and everyone should be generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices and neglect.

There’s a decent chance your parents have let you down. My wife’s a therapist. She hears all the time about people whose parents didn’t love them in the way they needed to be loved. You can hold onto that resentment or you can forgive them. The catechism says, mutual affection suggests this. The charity of Christ demands it. So we go to one another, we ask for forgiveness, and we also have a duty to forgive one another. That’s the first thing. Why do we confess our sins to one another? Because there’s this social dimension. But the second is why then confess to a priest, maybe you say, okay, I get it. I need to go to the person I’ve wronged to confess. Why in the world do I go to Father Smith? I didn’t do anything to him. Well, I mean obviously in one sense my ripple effects might’ve hurt him.

Who knows? But why go to him? Well, remember how earlier I said in James five 16, there’s this word, therefore, and therefore is a connector pointing back to something that happened before. Well, let’s look at what that passage says in context. It starts in verse 14, and it talks about the healing of the sick. It says, is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders, the Greek word. There’s like the presbyters of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name with the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Now, that’s going to be an important line. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven because notice it’s taking for granted that Christians can still sin.

That should be obvious. But sometimes people act like, well, we’ve been forgiven in Christ, therefore we don’t have to worry about all this stuff about going to confess our sins and being forgiven. No, not according to the Bible. James five is very clear that you go and you’re going to notice the presbyters here. Now, presbyter eventually gets shortened in English to priests, but the presbyters, those are the priests. And so why do we go to them? Well, one reason is right here in James five, we’re told these are the people to seek out. We’re not told yet why, but this is something that, okay, this is our first clue.

And then it says, okay, if he has committed sins, he’ll be forgiven, therefore confess your sins to one another. So notice that confessing your sins to one another is coming right in this passage of seeking out the priest, seeking out the presbyter and having him pray for you and heal you. That when he’s talking about this, we don’t want to separate verse 16 from everything that came before it because that therefore is a connector. It makes sense that even though James five 16 doesn’t only mean confessor sin to a priest, it certainly has in view that priests are some of the people you’re confessing to. This is also, of course, very much the Jewish practice. Now, one of you asked me to mention this detail, so I’m only too happy to do that. Peter c crt, the philosopher writes, why must we confess to a priest and not just to God?

And he points out, well throughout scripture, God’s forgiveness is always mediated. In the Old Testament, it was mediated by the high priest and the scapegoat and the Hebrew feast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And of course you can see that all over the Old Testament. This is something that’s easy to kind of miss, but think about the way the Old Testament is set up. This isn’t going to be Yom Kippur, this is going to be Leviticus four, but it shows this Old Testament practice. And so this is under the Mosaic law. If one of the ordinary people, one of the common people sinned unwittingly and they realize they’d done something they weren’t supposed to do, and they’re guilty when the sin which he has made is made known to him, he shall bring for his law for in a goat, a female without blemish for his sin, which he has committed.

And he shall lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and kill the sin offering in the place of burnt offering. But where is he bringing that? Well, he’s bringing it to the priest, which means people were going to the priest to have their sins confess, even if it was just confessing, I sinned and here’s my sin offering. There was some sense that you were going to the priest and the priest was offering sacrifice to aid in your forgiveness. Now, the question then becomes, well, okay, but Jesus is both our sacrifice and our great high priest. So is there any role for this now? And the biblical answer to this, the biblical answer is yes. How do we know that? So the first verse I want you to know to just have in your back pocket was James five 16. The second one is John 20.

Really it’s 20 to 23. But if you got to just get one verse, just John 2023, this is on Easter, and Jesus appears through the disciples and says, peace be with you as the Father has sent me. Even. So I send you notice, he’s been given authority by the Father. He’s now giving authority to the apostles. And when he says this, he then breathes on them. This is, think about the importance of that God literally breathes life into Adam. So here is God the Son, breathing on the apostles and saying, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they’re retained. Okay, so why do I go to anybody else to confess my sins? Well, partly because I’ve wronged them and because in sin, I’ve hurt the human family. I’ve heard members of the church, I’ve heard members of my family, and I need to acknowledge that and own that.

But why do I go to the priest? Well, not just for those reasons, but also because the priest unlike me and you, unless you’re a priest, the priest unlike me, and you has the ability to forgive sins because this is a power that Jesus gives here to the apostles. Notice he doesn’t give it to everybody. He doesn’t say gather the 500 who see him after his resurrection, and he doesn’t breathe on all of them. He’s breathing here on the 12, actually 10 of the 12, because Judas and Thomas are not there for different reasons. But notice this is something he’s giving to his church leaders, if you want to call it that clergy, if you want to call it that. The elders, the presbyter, St. Peter refers to himself as an elder. And so there’s clearly this sense that the church leadership has been given a special authority to forgive sins through the ministry of Christ and this gift of the Holy Spirit, they have a gift of the Holy Spirit.

You and I have not been given. So I was curious, well, what would someone who isn’t Catholic have to say about this? So I wanted to, I dunno, take a look and see what would be a good sort of response to this. And so th... Read more on Catholic.com