Tag: Sacraments

      When younger I though the best and most beneficent gift given to sentient creatures was free will.  But I found that the fact is the best most beneficent gift God gave them was the ability to become intelligent – to have well formed reasoning skills.  I am totally blown away by the fact that any of the angels decided not to remain with God.  Here on Earth if people decide to stray from God, they may have demonic based temptation, human based temptation and ignorance and pride to blame.  In my estimation angels only had half of these to contend with – ignorance and pride.  Theologians I have read postulate that the devil and his angels left due to pride and the only reason they could was they were ignorant of how much better (infinitely better) staying with God would be, because He gave them freewill and did not want them to stay if they did not want to stay, or had reservations about staying.  If they had reservations they should have erred on known good which I think a lot of them logically must have. There was no reason not to want to stay because He had just created them and in line with justice they should have wanted to stay to serve the one that had just made them out of nothing.  The angels, I assume, were aware of the fact that they couldn’t die so the warning God gave Adam and Eve, He could not give them and, short of losing existence they could think of no worst thing that could happen to them.  Unfortunately, their lack of foresight robbed them of the prospect of unimaginable happiness.

       But as in the case of several famous movie stars (Marilyn Monroe), politicians (Seward’s folly), singers (Kurt Colbain) and business men (Ted Turner’s father) a life of physical ease, power or fame does not make up for lack of love in a person’s life and what the angels lost was Love itself – God.  See the effects of Jesus Christs _ God’s Love on the first Christians, and their willingness to die horribly, even with the understanding of their own mortality, produced for them what would haunt them throughout the rest of eternity, not knowing the incredible bliss of the Love of God – the Beatific Vision.  The curiosity that doomed Adam and Eve to damnation before the promise of a savior, would be part of the punishment that would damn the fallen angels for the rest of eternity – the gnawing curiosity of what perfect love would feel like. Theologians also hypothesize they had not witnessed the Beatific Vision – seeing God as he really is, otherwise they would not have the free will to leave.  Only upon deciding to stay with God were angels granted the Beatific Vision. Man of course is granted the Beatific Vision for the same reason as angels, that is deciding to stay with God, no matter what. Wanting God without reservation.

      Why must we give our unconditional affirmation to whatever God wants of us?  Because to have the Beatific Vision we will be fundamentally changed in ways incomprehensible to human beings.  Mark 12:25 says: ”For when they shall rise again from the dead, they shall neither marry, nor be married, but are as the angels in heaven.” As the angels? We have nowhere close to the intellect of angels or the control since they are not affected by the ravages of concupiscence as emphasized here.  God is not going to ask us: is changing X okay, or is changing Y okay?  He will simply change it and if we have reservations on His goodness as with the angels, we really don’t want to be in His presence for all eternity.  This life is to learn to trust him without reservation and to want whatever he wants without reservation (remembering 1 Corinthians 2:9).  ”This is my body and this is my blood” (Luke 22:18-20) must be believed (John 6:26-71), not what we might think or what might be easier to think: “this is a symbol of my body and is a symbol of my blood.”  We must believe the almighty God who created the universe actually transforms, through the priest he sent by way of apostolic succession, who offers the sacrifice of the mass that he is truly the bread and wine, all there, body, blood, Soul and Divinity.

      Similarly in the case of the forgiveness of sins, we must believe only through baptism can original sin and any other sin be removed or having been baptized, if one commits a mortal sin only through the power of an ordained priest and performing the penance he prescribes can sins be forgiven.  Believing anything else, specifically that we can ask God – Jesus Christ, directly is simply lazy or the sin of presumption. Doing a Bing search yield this explanation of presumption: The Catholic Church does not consider presumption itself as a sin, but it is a violation of the virtue of hope. The sin of presumption occurs when a person assumes God’s mercy without genuine repentance or effort to follow His will. This sin can lead to a distorted relationship between human freedom and divine mercy, risking turning faith into a shallow convenience rather than a lived commitment. Salvation remains possible, but only through repentance and a return to God’s grace.

     You may ask why am I of the opinion that these are the only two ways? Well I base my opinion on at least 4 biblical references. First Acts 2:38 which states: But Peter said to them. “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins: and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For to you is the promise and to your children and to all who are far off, even to all whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

     Second is Matthew 9:1-8: 2And behold they brought to him one sick of the palsy lying in a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee. 3And behold some of the scribes said within themselves: He blasphemeth. 4And Jesus seeing their thoughts, said: Why do you think evil in your hearts? 5Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee: or to say, Arise, and walk? 6But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then said he to the man sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house. 7And he arose, and went into his house. 8And the multitude seeing it, feared, and glorified God that gave such power to men.

      Now this passage shows how Jesus Christ made clear that only God can forgive sins and partially made the case that he was God with the many signs (miracles) He performed during his life.  In the resurrection, in that He raised himself from the dead, He completed the argument. Now if only God, Jesus Christ can forgive sins, how can saying you are asking Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins when he is not there, result in your sins being forgiven? “Christ” or God has to say your sins are forgiven.  But can we in any way get Christ in our midst? According to Matthew 18:19-20, yes.  It says:

• 19: “Again I say to you, that if two of you shall consent upon earth, concerning anything whatsoever they shall ask, it shall be done to them by my Father who is in heaven.”
• 20: “For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

So if two of Jesus followers are together, IF THEY AGREE, and ask the father it shall be done for them.

       The problem with this is you need a second person and they must agree.  Also, it is not clear if Jesus is referring to any of his followers or just his apostles, the first priests and bishops.

      As serious as sin is, and Christs reference on how much harder it is to forgive and offense against God than it is to heal a cripple, should there not be some New Testament Biblical verse referring specifically to the forgiveness of sins, and how to obtain forgiveness of sins?

       The fact is there is, John 20:21-24 reads as follows:

• 21: Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
• 22: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
• 23: Whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained.
• 24: But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
• 25: The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

In the verses just prior to this we find the apostles are gathered away together in a locked room for fear of the Jews coming after them.  My point is that only the 11 apostles were there.  This strongly suggests that Jesus Christ only gave the first priests/bishops and their chosen successors the power to forgive sins.  The fact that Jesus sent them and that they were to chose successors, should be evident in that it was in the first Chapter of Acts if the Apostles (Acts 1:15-26) those successors, chose the successors, who in turn chose their successors so on and so forth until we get the priests and bishops of the present day.

     The question is even if you can just get another person to agree your sins should be forgiven, if you believed that would be accomplished, knowing the specific way Jesus appeared to want us to be forgiven, would you rather ask another believer, who may gossip, or a priest, who is under the seal of the confessional to tell no one even if threatened with death, in the anonymity of the confessional?

     Now Adam and Eve had a similar problem to the angels and that was they lived in a paradise and needed nothing, and though they knew God created them, because they had the “benefit” of physical bodies and since they had more distractions than the angels who were pure intellect, they might have thought more knowledge might have contributed to making their physical life better. But a concept that, I think, God has needed to teach thinking beings is there is a happy medium in everything. In life you must pray, be brave, meditate on God’s word and follow where we feel his words are leading us.  If where God is leading us seems to hard or dangerous, we can be classified as “cowardly,” avoid doing it and miss opportunities to improve either our spiritual lives or our physical lives, or both. If we try and do things which seem great, without proper meditation on the consequences, prayer and caution, we may do something which could be classified as “foolhardy” or “stupid” and lose either our happiness, our lives or quite possibly out souls doing it.  

     Good parents must foster the creation of a “right conscience” and if they can accomplish this then relying on conscience as to what to do in certain cases as touted by modern day clerics can be an acceptable solution.  But if one’s conscience is not well formed it will lead to damnation. But part of the sacrament of confession is not only the psychological reinforcement it gives us from telling someone else (which beats $70/hour psychotherapy session), it gives us the additional reinforcement of a priest (God’s Judicial arbiter and representative as a district court judge represents the country he is a judge for) prescribing your punishment (your penance, what you need to do to have your sins forgiven which may include turning yourself in for a crime to saying the prayers the priest asks you to say) and saying your sins are forgiven.

This training of the conscience and also the training of the will is an important part of raising a good Catholic child, one who will fulfill their ultimate destiny to make it to heaven and be eternally happy.