SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE ~ CONFESSION AND FORGIVENESS

Our topic this morning as we go through the spiritual displines for Lent is a combination of confession and forgiveness. I've combined those two because they go together. They work together, they're part of one process. There are lots of different directions that I could go with this, and I struggled for a long time this week trying to figure out what to say and what not to say, because there's enough on this topic to fill volumes. I'm going to focus on the human aspect of how we interact in confession and forgiveness with each other. It all ultimately relates to and comes from our confession and forgiveness with and from God, but our human relationships are the place that we practice that, and the place where we can have a flesh-and-blood human being to work this process out with. Then the harder process of going through that with an unseen God becomes easier. That's what all our human relationships are about in whatever we do. It's a way of practicing and training and working out our relationship with God, even as we work it out with one another. So primarily I want to talk about confession and forgiveness and how that relates, and how we relate, to one another.

First, I just want to do some definition, because there are manyf ways that we use those words. If you remember, in the Lord's Prayer we say, depending on your tradition, "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," "forgive us our traspasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." The word in the Greek is closest to "debts." The closest meaning is that of a debt owed, a financial or other obligation. In that context, to confess is to acknowledge a debt that you owe to someone else. You come to acknowledge that debt with the purpose either of making restitution if you're able to, or to seek forgiveness and mercy saying "it's a debt that I can't pay." We saw a number of weeks ago how, when Jesus went to Zaccheus' house, Zaccheus' response was to give away half of what he owned to the poor and then to take the other half to use to make restitution to those he had defrauded in his tax collecting business. This is part of what confession and repentance is about. For Zaccheus to say "I'm sorry I defrauded you," and not to make up the difference which he had the monetary means to do might have been confession -- yes, I acknowledge the debt -- but it wouldn't have been repentance which includes making restitution when possible.

In the book of Matthew we see a situation where a man could not make restitution. He had borrowed money and he was not able to repay it. So he goes back to the man that he borrowed money from and all he can say is, "Please have mercy." He can't pay the money back. "I will keep trying to earn the money and to pay it back, but please give me more time, please have mercy. I can't pay it." And that too is confession and repentance. Both this man and Zaccheus were sorry for what they had done. One had the means to offer some kind of restitution, the other did not. But the confession part is to acknowledge, "I've taken something that I can't repay." Now sometimes that's a financial thing, or has to do with possessions. Sometimes it's more like honor, respect, love, physical health -- that's what lawsuits against hospitals are often about -- loss of life, other kinds of things that we knowingly or unknowingly take away from someone, and we owe something. In a very technical sense we would owe the restitution of whatever that was.

But sometimes we can't do that. Words are said and they can't be taken back, deeds are done and we can't go back to the past and relive them and do them over. So we end up in a position like the second man who had a debt that he was not able to pay and we have to say, "Yes, this was taken from you and I'm sorry. I wish that I could go back and undo it somehow but the situation is such that there's no way I can pay for what was done. Will you forgive me?" That is what confession is about.

In that context, forgiveness means to either acknowledge that the debt has been paid in full by whatever restitution you're able to make, or to agree not to keep hounding a person further for payment of a debt that they've said they couldn't make. In the face of a true confession and the willingness of one person to make whatever restitution they can, forgiveness is accepting whatever they offer as being all right. It goes hand in hand with a confession being real. Someone coming up and saying, "Well, I'm really sorry and I can't make up for this," when there are in fact thirty things they could do to help, like Zaccheus coming and saying to all the people, "I'm sorry I took four times as much from you in taxes as I should have. Sorry about that," when he had the financial means to compensate them would not have been a true confession and repentance. But in the face of a true confession and repentance, where the person has done whatever they can and has put themselves basically at your mercy saying, "I just can't repay this. There's nothing I can do that can make up for what happened. Will you forgive it?" the forgiveness is the agreement that "we'll consider it done and paid in full."

If you read The Upper Room, there was an article that was talking about a woman who worked in a lawyer's office. She was doing clerical work, drudgery filing, and she started to notice at the end of the year on the invoices just from one senior partner that there were many that had "W.O." written on the bottom. Finally she asked about it and discovered that it meant "written off." At the end of the year, this one senior partner had recognized those people who were in financial hardship and just weren't going to be able to pay those bills and had sent a letter to each one saying, "It's paid in full. We've written this off. You don't owe us anything any more." That's forgiveness in a very tangible sense. It's an agreement not to go pursuing these people. Yes they owed money, but they would not be pursued for what was owed.

Notice in the Luke passage that the first response Jesus says when someone sins against you is to rebuke them. And then, when they repent, forgive them. We often miss that. It's not that we as Christians should go around finding every sin and rebuking it. But when someone sins against us it is a normal and correct response out of our own self-respect as children of God to say, "Hey! You stepped on me. I was violated in some way." Because often we do things and we don't even know that's happening, and we need to know. And for our own self-esteem and healthy sense of self-worth we need to stand up and say, "Ouch! That hurt me. Something was taken from me in what you did." That gives the other person a chance to repent, to confess, and to have forgiveness take place. But what I really want you to notice is that forgiveness, like sin, takes two. You can't sin in a vacuum, because sin means you're doing something that affects someone else or God. There's a relationship aspect to sin. And likewise there's a relationship aspect to forgiveness. It's something that happens between two people, or between us and God, not in a vacuum. That's not to say that there's not a psychological benefit in letting go of hurts from people who have died or places where there is no confession or repentance forthcoming. But technically that's not forgiveness. That's a way of letting go, of dealing with our anger. Forgiveness is dealing with two people when there's confession. Someone confesses and they're forgiven.

Going back to the rebuke for a minute, that doesn't mean that we have a right to sin equally and take away from the person who has done something to us. We need to be careful in the way that we say that we are hurt, and how we deal with other people. But it is something fundamental to who we are to say, "It's not ok as a child of God for me to be treated this way or for something to happen to me." But I want you to notice that the command to forgive is in the context of confession and repentance. That's when we are commanded to forgive. Forgiveness means release of the debt. It may or may not mean that the relationship is restored to what it was before. To forgive is to agree not to exact the payment that we might be owed.

For instance, if a doctor in a hospital amputates somebody's leg when they went in for cataract surgery. Big malpractice suit comes down. To forgive that means not to require of the doctor your leg back, to let that piece of it go. There might be some financial restitution that's made from that, but the grudge that keeps insisting, "But you took my leg!" and insisting that you get the leg back is the part that you let go in forgiveness.

Another example, a minor one. Say a kid is in the yard, hits a ball and it goes through your picture window in your living room. Resitution would be if the kid says, "I'm sorry, I've broken your window." Might ask, "what can I do?" Maybe could pay for the window. Maybe can't pay for the window. Maybe could do some work around the yard, something like that, in terms of making restitution. What that covers would be the financial things that happen when your window is broken. But if your window is broken, you also lose time because you've got to mess around with the glass people to come in and try to get the window replaced, you might lose piece of mind because you've got this broken window and anybody could come and go in your house, birds can fly in and mess up your house. All of those kinds of things can't be made up for. To forgive the window doesn't mean not have the kid pay for it, but it does mean that every time you see the kid after that, not still holding a grudge because the kid broke your window. You forgive that piece and let it go.

The forgiveness part is simply agreeing that as far as you're concerned, the debt has been paid, either because it has been technically paid in what someone has done or because you recognize that the person is really sorry but there is nothing on the face of this planet that they can possibly do about it to make it any better, and like the senior partner of the law firm you write "W.O." on the account and say it's written off. It doesn't matter any more. When you do that you have to take that out of any leverage you use in your relationships. If it's a case where you are still in relationship with somebody, forgiveness means you don't keep dredging it up again and again. That's a means of continuing to exact payment. If it's forgiven, it's done, and it's over.

The reason that was given in scripture for forgiving others is because it's a response to what God has done for us. God has been willing to forgive us for every sin. "If we repent and forgive our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness," I John says. That's why we forgive others. We're being the body of Christ. We're doing what God would do in that situation. In the face of repentance, we offer forgiveness. It doesn't necessarily mean that the relationship is going to be the same. If the doctor took your leg off instead of cataract surgery, it does not mean that you're obligated to go to that doctor ever again. It means you agree not to hound them. If you're in an abusive relationship, forgiveness does not mean that you can't leave it. Forgiveness means that after you leave you don't hound that person for the rest of your days, trying to exact back what was taken from you in the abuse. You agree to let it go. But forgiveness doesn't have to mean that the relationship goes back to being what it was before. I hope you can see that distinction.

Confession and forgiveness go together, and not only because one preceeds the other. We confess our sins to God; we're forgiven. Someone confesses their sins to us and asks for our forgiveness. But the two work together within ourselves also. I've found in my life when I am faithful about confessing my sins, both to other people as I commit them and to God, I am much more tolerant of the sins and abuses of others, because as I recite those sins to God I realize, "You know, Anne, you've come back every single day for the past two weeks to God with the exact same thing that you've done over and over again." And when I see how difficult it is to get sin out of my life, then I become a whole lot more tolerant of how difficult it is for other people to get it out of theirs. If you find that you have a lot of difficulty forgiving other people, even when they're sorry, even when they come forward and they've done everything they can, I would recommend that you not worry about the forgiving right now and look at confession. Start to focus on yourself and doing a daily or at least weekly confession of actual sins, real things that you've done or thought or said that you wish you hadn't, confessing those to God. As you start to open up and see those things about yourself, I think you will see that your attitudes toward others soften.

There's a lot of truth in that little kids' rhyme, "Takes one to know one." That's true. We recognize best both the strengths and the weaknesses in others that we have ourselves. I know that's true for me. My best means of self-analysis is to listen to myself when I say, "You know, I can't stand people who....." Whatever follows that "who" is 99.9% of the time describing me, and it's a piece of my personality that I have not been willing to raise up to the light of day and look at. As much as that hurts, the minute I can bring that up and say, "Oh, my God, that's me," then I can still recognize it really well in other people but I give those other people a whole lot more rope than I ever used to. I think, "If I hate it that much, and I do it, I'd better not say anything until I can at least get it out of my own life." Confession and forgiveness go together in that way also.

For the debt that we owe God, there's nothing we can do. The news of the Old Testament was that sin requires death, in a very technical sense, because it separates us from God and everything that we hold sacred. It abuses God's world and God's earth and God's temple which is ourselves. There's nothing we can do to make that up to God. So we go to God, and we say, "Have mercy on me, a sinner. There nothing that I can do that can restore what I have taken from you." And God forgives. Always. Every single time. Seven times, seventy times, it's always there.

I encourage you to make confession to each other a regular part of your lives. To not let time go by, when you've taken something from another, whether it's taken love that they were due, taken respect or honor, taken health, taken money, whatever it is -- don't let grass grow under your feet. Confess your sins. Ask for forgiveness, and allow those relationships to grow and become godly. That's how conflicts get resolved.

I was a mediator for two years in the Atlanta court system. Time after time, people came into that room with lawsuits, asking for the world, with criminal charges brought against each other. We'd go in and we'd talk for a couple hours, and what they wanted was a confession that someone had hurt them and an acknowledgement that they'd been hurt, that something unjust had happened to them, either through an accident or a series of events, or something that was purposefully done. Because they couldn't get the confession, the apology, the acknowledgement that they were hurt, they went to the only means they knew, which was the legal system, saying, "I'll make you acknowledge it. I'll make you confess it by having a judge declare it so." Time after time I had people sitting in that room that I thought would never settle. All of a sudden somebody would say, "I'm sorry. I didn't realize how badly you were hurt." And the other person would drop everything -- thousands of dollars they could have legitimately gotten, antiques, parts of inheritances, all sorts of things. They just dropped them. They would say, "That's all I wanted." And they would shake hands across the table. They might never see each other again, but it was resolved. Because that's what they were looking for.

Make confession a part of your lives, to each other, and to God. When someone confesses to you and repents of their sin, forgive them. Put W.O. on the bottom of their account and write it off. It's what Jesus did, it's what God did. And as the body of Christ, it's what we are called to do also.

Amen.

© 2000, Anne Robertson

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