In September, I wrote a reflection on the relationship between forgiveness as a means of psychological healing and forgiveness in the Christian tradition, all in response to a fine article published in the New York Times earlier this year. In this article, I would like to follow up my previous reflection with a deeper investigation of how the Christian understanding of forgiveness I outlined in my first article might shed fresh light on the Church’s sacramental theology – particularly regarding the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
In my previous article, I argued that authentic Christian forgiveness is not and can never be the fruit of our own efforts at reconciliation. On the contrary, every act of Christian forgiveness is initiated and completed by Christ alone. It is Christ who, through his sacrificial love on the Cross and ongoing presence among us, reconciles through bonds of charity those separated by moral injury. At the bottom, this is what Christian forgiveness is. Everything short of this may well be a necessary precursor to Christian forgiveness but is not in itself the uniquely transformative— and also distinctively Christian—sort of forgiveness made possible by Christ.
Now, I want to press one further point: the abovementioned description of forgiveness is not only distinctively Christian but also distinctively sacramental. Indeed, the ‘Sacrament of Reconciliation’ exists precisely in service to and as a reflection of this perennial sacramental forgiveness, constituting a basic element of the priestly ministry exercised by every baptized Christian. Put differently, every time a Christian forgives a brother or sister in and through the love of Christ, he or she has celebrated a sacramental act as a priestly member of the “holy nation, [and] royal priesthood” (1 Pt. 2:9) we know as the Church.
It may seem strange to refer to a supposedly commonplace act of forgiveness performed by any baptized Christian as a form of sacrament and the one performing it – just your ‘average run-of-the-mill Christian’ – as a priest. But it most emphatically should not. The reason the equation sounds unfamiliar is a common error among Catholics regarding the Sacraments. Most of us, conscious of it or not, see the Seven Sacraments as uniquely powerful loci of God’s grace to such an extent that they have almost no analogs in everyday life. But this could not be further from the truth.
On the contrary, the Sacraments exist not because they are unique sources of God’s grace but because they are Christ’s unique opportunity to reveal in sign and reality God’s grace present in power and mystery everywhere. They are, to adapt a phrase used by my sacramental theology professor, ‘preeminent analogies of God’s grace’ given by Christ to the Church to help us recognize all God’s analogous works of grace in our everyday lives.
This concept needs to be clarified, so an illustration might help. If I asked ten people to imagine ‘the most stereotypical sort of hat,’ it is likely that every person would imagine something different – some a top hat, some a winter cap, some a red hat, some a brown one, etc. All are hats, but what each person has imagined is what, to their mind, constitutes the ‘hattiest of all hats.’ For each person, this imagined hat is their ‘preeminent analogy’ for a hat.
That is similar to what the Seven Sacraments are for God’s grace. Each time we participate in the Sacraments, it is as if God, through God’s Church, were showing us in the purest manner possible, the most iconic of all his grace-filled acts. In the Seven Sacraments, God says, “Don’t forget what my grace looks like! Don’t forget what it feels like to be strengthened by my nearness and touched by my mercy!”
Everyday life is messy, and God’s grace is often hidden behind layers of sin and competing motivations. In fact, in the midst of our sinful lives, God’s grace often doesn’t feel like ‘grace’ at all…sometimes it even feels like suffering, sadness, and pain. This can make it hard for us to allow God’s grace to be truly efficacious in our lives. Thus, with all their careful ritual and symbolism, the Seven Sacraments are meant to remind us in the most iconic and efficacious way possible of how and when God acts and what happens when we allow God to act.
Through the Seven Sacraments, we learn that when we allow God’s grace to work in us, Jesus becomes truly present among us, and his once-for-all sacrifice saves us. We realize that by grace, we are made adopted sons and daughters, heirs to the promises (cf. Gal. 3:29). We learn that by grace, our souls are fortified to proclaim the Gospel.
By grace, we are strengthened to remain faithful to another person for life. By grace, we are empowered to pasture God’s Church in imitation of the Good Shepherd. By grace, our bodies can receive such profound healing that they can endure eternal life. By grace, we come to experience that real forgiveness is possible, and in Christ, sins really are forgiven.
The Seven Sacraments are seven signs and reminders made uniquely efficacious because what they represent with such clarity is vindicated in reality by grace. But it cannot be overstated that the grace mediated by the Seven Sacraments is not somehow ‘more powerful’ or ‘more graceful’ than the same sanctifying grace at work freely in the world, especially in the sacramental ministry of God’s priestly people.
Instead, we experience ‘the big seven’ as more effective channels of God’s grace – and in this sense more ‘potent’ – only because they arrive at the door of our senses by the most iconic of all means (the rites of the Church) and are vouchsafed in their purity by the most trustworthy of all persons: Christ himself through his Mystical Body, the Church.
The relationship between the Church’s Sacraments and the sacramental ministry of the baptized is nowhere more evident than when a baptized Christian forgives his or her brother or sister. No matter how messy the immediate context of our lives may be, in that moment just as in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it is Christ who forgives through the power of the Church working through the baptized Christian. The baptized person has become Christ for his or her brother or sister and, in so doing, has acted as a genuine priest of the new covenant. Indeed, in a profound sense, the Sacrament of Reconciliation was modeled on this perennial act of divine power and grace. For “who but God alone can forgive sins” (Lk. 5:21)?
If in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the baptized Christian recognizes and receives the divine encouragement necessary to exercise their call to “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18; cf. Eph. 4:32), the Sacrament will have served one of its most important roles in building up the body of Christ on Earth.
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote that we as Christians must “repent of our acting as if it matters little whether people are baptized or not” 1. I fully agree. Christian baptism is not just a ‘rite of passage’ for a specific cultural group. It is a consecration by which all Christians are given “the power to become children of God” (Jn. 1:12), to “share in the priesthood of Christ [and] in his prophetic and royal mission” as ministers of God’s sacramental grace for the world 2.
So, the next time you’re challenged to “forgive from your heart” (cf. Mt. 18:35) your brother or sister (mother or father, son-in-law or daughter-in-law, friend or stranger), rest assured that from a Christian perspective, you are doing far more than just a good deed. Rather, you are living out your baptismal promises by mediating God’s grace as priest, proclaiming God’s power as prophet, and announcing God’s reign as king.
