I Have Sinned Before the Lord

You have probably heard at one time or another that the Eskimo language has at least ten words for what we “southerners” call snow.  You may not have heard that Hebrew has three words for what we call sin.  I don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, but the closest I can come to representing those three words is “hatta,” “awon,” and “pesha.”  Each of them connotes a difference of intensity.  In English we sometimes add adjectives to do something similar when we say “venial sin” and “mortal” or “serious sin.”

It is interesting to note that in Psalms 32 and 51, two of the more familiar penitential psalms, all three of the Hebrew words are used in a poetic image that is called a “chiasmus.”  This figure of speech is used to illustrate that God’s ability to forgive covers every kind of sin there is.  It is, in point of fact, impossible to exhaust the ocean of God’s mercy.  Throw all of the sins of the world into the ocean as so many pebbles, and God’s ocean of mercy would never be filled.

The Scriptures today ask us to consider this at the same time that they instruct us that God’s mercy is available IF we confess our need for it.  David, the murderous and adulterous king, is forgiven when he states very simply, “I have sinned before the Lord.”  The woman in the Gospel is forgiven when she weeps for her sins and washes the feet of Jesus with her tears.  Simon the Pharisee, on the other hand, is not forgiven because he does not admit that he needs to be forgiven.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II Church will remember that the Sacrament of Penance was a far more practiced ritual than it is today.  If you were living during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960’s, you might also remember the long lines of penitents that stood outside the confessionals as we contemplated the possibility of an imminent nuclear attack on the United States.  I wonder whether that would happen today.

As we continue to traverse this Jubilee of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis, we could not do better than to simply stop and admit that we are all in need of God’s mercy.  What better way to do that than to imitate David and the woman of today’s Gospel by celebrating the Sacrament of Penance before this Jubilee Year comes to a close?

Fr. Lawrence  Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator