The Church’s Sacraments are for the healing of humanity. The liturgy of the Church reminds us constantly that the plan of salvation is primarily aimed at allowing human beings to become fully human. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote that the greatest glory of God was a human being fully alive. The essence of the plan of salvation was to make it possible for us humans to grow and become as perfect as God had always wanted us to be. In Genesis, we learn that God created us in his own image and likeness; that implies that we were originally designed to be perfect. After all, God does not have any imperfections. If we are in his image and icon, then we must have been designed at the beginning to be perfect. When the evangelist Luke recounts the birth of John the Baptist, he specifically mentions that John will announce the coming of the One who will forgive the sins of the people. “To give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.” The one who follows John will save the people. But he will be one of the people through his incarnation. Human shall be saved by human. Human sin shall be expiated by the sufferings and the humility of a fellow human being. The pride of Adam shall be expunged by the humility of the New Adam. The central point of the coming of Christ is that he will forgive sins with tender compassion and with faithfulness. His dawn shall always appear and his forgiving kindness is dependable. Nothing is more certain than that God desires that his people be healed of their sins and that they love Him with all their hearts. The fall of Adam and Eve represents human failure to live up to that divine intention. Through selfishness and sin, we have fallen far short of God’s plan for us. Through the Incarnation and the Passion and Resurrection of God’s son, Jesus Christ, God healed the human race of its imperfection; or at least he made it possible for us to avail of the healing. Jesus Christ is human as well as divine, and we are saved by one like ourselves. The preface to the Eucharistic Prayer IV tells us that we are saved by one like ourselves in all things except sin. God is incapable of sin, and so the Son of God is equally incapable of sin. In our journey towards the ideal humanity for which we were originally destined, we must leave sin behind us. Christ Jesus is not only divine, he is also a second Adam, the most perfect possible example of what a human being should look like. When we seek to know how we must behave, we look at the life and ministry of Jesus. In the early Church, Christians sought to make amends for their wrongdoing by fasting and by almsgiving. Christians copied the Jews in doing penance, although they chose Wednesdays and Fridays to be deliberately different from the Jewish Tuesdays and Thursdays. By the third, many churches has formalized themselves to the point where serious sinners who wanted to repent were publicly enrolled in the order of penitents. These people generally stood or knelt in a special section of the Church apart from the general congregation. At the Council of Nicea in 325, the Fathers decree that no Christian should kneel during the season of Easter. Some speculate that this may be partly so that they sinners can be readily identified as they will be the only ones in the crowd who are kneeling. 1 In the time of Saint Cyprian, there was great dispute among Christians as to whether some sins could ever be forgiven. The orthodox and official position maintained that God’s great sovereignty was such that all sins were forgivable, and that the Church was obliged and empowered to do so on behalf of God. Later on, during the days of Saint Augustine, that bishop makes many references to the need for people to pray for the forgiveness of sinners and their acceptance back into the Church. But through all these early centuries, there appears not to have been a liturgy especially for the purpose of formalizing the forgiveness of sins. We know that widows and others prayed publicly over the penitents, but we do not have a ritual that was particular to what we now refer to as the sacrament of reconciliation. Certainly, in some churches, the laying on of hands was seen as a necessary part in the reconciliation of sinners. The role of the bishop in reconciling sinners and in forgiving serious sins is also very common. But there can be no doubt that the Church held closely to the opinion that forgiveness of sins was central to the mission of the Church. In the Celtic Church, the administration of God’s grace of forgiveness was different to what was known on the continent. For some reason, perhaps related to the rigidity of the Celtic class and sept system, the idea of a public and communal service at which sins were admitted and forgiven never took root. James Dallen claims that the crucial factor was that in Ireland the monastic system became the norm for ecclesiastical organization by the end of the fifth century.2 The Irish seem to have been far more concerned to have a relationship with a holy man or woman than to formally accept forgiveness from some person in authority such as a bishop. There appears to have been reluctance to lose face in society by being publicly named as a penitent. The priest or monk or abbot, or perhaps the nun or abbess dealt with the anxieties of the people in a manner that we might nowadays call spiritual direction. Whether we can ever say that a formula of absolution was involved remains a disputed issue. What we know is that both men and women acted in the role of these spiritual confessors or advisors. It is because of this particularly Irish way of bringing the forgiveness to the individual in distress that we often hear it said that the Irish invented private aural confession. It appears that the Celtic system came up against the demands of Charlemagne’s reforms in the ninth century. At that point, the Irish missionaries had brought their own penitential practices to Europe. The Carolingian reforms attempted to bring an element of Roman orthodoxy to the traditions which the Irish had brought with them. They stressed the power to forgive and to give absolution, elements that appear to have been missing in the way things were done by the Irish. The authority of the clergy was reasserted, whereas the Irish system seems not to have had any notion of absolution. 1Canon 20 of the Canons of the Council of Nicea. Taken from Decrees of the ecumenical Councils, Volume 1. compiled by Guiseppi Alberigo and translated into English by Norman tanner S.J. London and Washington: Sheed and Ward, and Georgetown University Press, 1990, 16 2James Dallen. The Reconciling Community; the Rite of Penance. New York: Pueblo Books 1986. 103-108
Forgiveness is central to healing.
Human nature has fallen away from its original perfection.
Christians have always sought to express their anguish at their wrongdoings.
Disputes among Christians about the forgiveness of sin.
The Celtic interpretation of the Christian mission to forgive.
9th century Carolingian reform of the rite of forgiveness.