Confession? Isn't that what goes on in those wooden boxes round the edge of Roman Catholic churches? We don't want any of that, thank you!
Well, yes and no. Confession does have something to do with our own sinfulness, and it can (even!) take place in those little boxes, though today's talk is mainly of the sacrament of reconciliation, concentrating more on what God does for us than on our own failure to meet God's standards. But to concentrate on "confessing our sins" is to rob the word "confession" of the largest part of its meaning.
For as Paul reminds the Philippians, Jesus was "given a name above all names", so that every tongue should "confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." In the Old Testament and the New, confessing the name of the Lord was part of our response to God's goodness and glory - an act not merely of worship, but also of thankfulness. The same word is used for confessing our sins, but also for giving thanks for God's blessings.
These two meanings are like the two sides of a single coin: for when we face God, we can look either at ourselves, and reflect on how far we still have to go on our walk with God, on how feebly we mirror God's will for us; or we can look at God, and reflect in awe on what God has done for us.
Confession, then, is our response to standing in God's presence - not merely a confession of God's praise, but also an admission of our own sinfulness, our emptiness and our need of grace.
We should not separate one meaning from the other. When we read St Augustine's Confessions, we tend to concentrate on the boy who stole apples from his neighbour, the man who prayed "Give me continence, but not yet!", who said of his sinfulness: "It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself." But the other side of the picture is just as important to Augustine; the opening of the Confessions sets the tone: "You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised; great is your power, and your wisdom immeasurable."
But before we can confess God's goodness or our own need, we need a third form of confession - confession of faith. We need to acknowledge that God is there - there for us, waiting for us, ready for us. Faith underlies our need for penitence and our need to worship. So the writer to the Hebrews talks of praise as "the fruit of lips that confess God's name" (13:15), and of Jesus as "the high priest of our confession" (3:1). We witness to God and to Jesus in seeing all that God has done for us, and also, incidentally, in telling others.
This Lent, let us prepare to confess God's power shown through temptation, through suffering, through death and in triumphant resurrection, as we confess our own weakness and our own shortcomings. In this, we can share Augustine's prayer: "The house of my soul is too small for you to come to it. May it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins: restore it. In your eyes it has offensive features. I admit it, I know it: but who will clean it up? To whom shall I cry other than you?" We confess our need, we confess God's glory. May we confess God's presence in our hearts.
HD