Thinking about Forgiveness--Via the Cross
On reviewing material for a class this Sunday I found myself reading in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's simple, yet eloquent work called Life Together. In particular, I was reviewing a section on the practice of confession.
Bonhoeffer raises the question about who does one confess to. The concern, of course, is that once you get up the nerve to actually spill the darkness that lies within your soul, the person that you are sharing all of this with will either come to despise you, laugh at you, or simply choose to ignore you.
But at this point Bonhoeffer makes a remarkable statement about the nature of the cross and about the human situation in light of the cross. His reminder is worth remembering and repeating:
"Anybody who lives beneath the Cross and who has discerned in the Cross of Jesus the utter wickedness of all men and of his own heart will find there is no sin that can ever be alien to him. Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother. Looking at the Cross of Jesus, he knows the human heart. He knows how utterly lost it is in sin and weakness, how it goes astray in the ways of sin, and he also knows that it is accepted in grace and mercy. Only the brother under the Cross can hear a confession." (Life Together, 118)
Bonhoeffer's comments heighten not only the practice of confession, but at the heart of human interactions, they speak to the practice of how we live with and for the men and women in our lives.__
Carson Reed
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