Homily: 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Tears of Repentance

Back in the 1950s Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen hosted the most watched prime time television show in the country.  Once, when Archbishop Sheen  was working in a parish in London, and a famous actress wandered into the church while he was praying.  He recognized her and started up a conversation.  She was a Catholic who had been away from the Church for years and she said she couldn’t stay long.  So Bishop Sheen invited her to come back later so he could give her a tour of the famous artworks in the Church.  She agreed, on one condition, that he not ask her to go to confession.  He agreed. 

The next day she came back and Bishop Sheen gave her a tour of the Church.  There were two very famous paintings on the wall and the confessional was located right between them.  Bishop Sheen explained the first painting to great length and they began to walk towards the second painting.

As they passed the confessional, he pushed her into it, closed the curtain, and sat down.  She was furious.  She yelled at him, “You promised you wouldn’t ask me to go to confession!”  Bishop Sheen calmly answered, “my daughter, I have kept my promise.  I didn’t ask you.  Now, how long has it been since your last confession”?  She confessed her sins, came back to the Church, and Bishop Sheen became her life-long friend.

In our Gospel, we heard the beautiful account of a woman who was known to be a public sinner.  We don’t know much else about her, we don’t know the nature of her sins, other than she was known to be living a sinful lifestyle.  But we do know the most important thing…she came looking for Jesus.  She learned that Jesus was dining in the house of a Pharisee.  You could imagine all of the faces of everyone gathered in the house turning towards her as she entered the house.  She wasn’t merely making a social visit, she had come looking for Jesus; so, she knelt in front of him, and bathed his feet with her tears, as she sought his mercy.  She recognized in Jesus what others did not, that he is the fount of mercy.

There were other sinners in the room, but it was she who knelt before the Lord, and that made all the difference.  Throughout the Gospels Jesus condemns the Pharisees for their pride—for their hardness of heart—they fail to recognize Jesus as the fount of mercy because they fail to recognize their own sinfulness and hardness.

True Christian faith allows us to see Jesus as the one who forgives sins.  And was Jesus repulse by this sinful woman, did he embarrass her.  No.  To the sinful woman who acknowledged her sins, he proclaimed, “your sins are forgiven.  Go in peace.”

There is no sin too big to be forgiven by Christ, it is only the sin that is not repented of that is not forgiven.

Often as I priest, I hear people claim that they don’t need to go to the Sacrament of Confession because  they pray to God directly.  But this is not a Catholic understanding.  Jesus has established Sacraments in which we encounter him in very real and concrete ways.  By establishing the Sacraments he was saying, this is the way I want to be encountered. 

And he is pretty insistent in the Gospels concerning the Sacramental Participation.  He said, “Unless you are born again by water and the spirit you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”, so it’s through the Sacrament of Baptism that we receive new life.  He said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you”, so it’s through the Sacrament of the Eucharist that he sustains life in us.  He to the Apostles, the first priests and bishops, “those whose sins you forgive are forgiven them”, so it’s through the sacrament of confession that he absolves sins.

He didn’t say, “well, if you commit a serious sin, say a little prayer, and that will be enough”.  Jesus invented Confession, and he wants us to use it.

In the years following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s there has been a decrease in the celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both attributed this to what they called a “loss of the sense of sin”.  Our culture breeds an attitude that is much more like the Phrarisee in today’s Gospel than the sinful woman who knelt in tears.

Pope Benedict explained that the root of the loss of the sense of sin is because people have excluded God from their life.  They don’t look to God’s revelation to learn the difference between right and wrong, they sort of make it up on their own.  And we’ve seen the awful consequences of godlessness in own culture, where behavior that was not tolerated 50 years ago, is not only permitted but encouraged.  Behavior which is condemned very clearly by the Church is portrayed by television and movies and in many schools and universities as normal. 

But, just like a parent rightly tells a child “no” when they put their hand to the flame, the Church teaches God’s commandments, not because it is trying to ruin our fun, but because after the Fall in the Garden of Eden, we have a tendency to hurt ourselves, and put our souls in danger of hell. 

So one of the tasks of the Church is to announce God’s mercy and call sinners to repentance.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Pope John Paul II used to go to confession every week.  As a priest, I could go every week, but I go about once a month.  Maybe at first glance you can’t think of anything to confess, but as the Christian takes more seriously the examination of his life in light of the Gospel, he begins to identify selfishness or hardness or self-centeredness that God wishes to transform.

When do we have to go to confession?  If we’ve committed a mortal sin, such as missing mass, we have to go to confession before we can receive the Eucharist again.  Being assigned here at Saint Angela’s for less than a week, I’m not going to push anyone into the confessional, like Bishop Sheen, at least I don’t think I will.  But please, if you need to go, go.

You’ll never regret going to confession, but we’ll always regret not allowing the Lord to free us in the way that he wants to.

As we celebrate this Mass, we ask God’s Spirit to bring all sinners to repentance, especially those who have fallen away from the Church, that they can hear the Lord calling them home, for the Glory of God and salvation of souls.