Immersed in Christ: Saturday, July 31, 2021

Encountering God’s Love

When confession is what is should be, it is an experience of encounter with the God of steadfast love. He is responding in the body of the living, loving Christ to the sins and failures, the weakness and need, and above all, to the faith, confidence, and love that are receiving expression in the confession of sins. Those confessing their sins experience Jesus expressing his divine love for them in and through the human expression of the minister who is his body. This is both healing and life-giving.

It should be obvious that the sins we need to be most aware of are our failures to love. Jesus declared unambiguously that the “first and greatest” commandment is to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength. And the second is to love “our neighbor as ourselves” (Mark 12:28–31). It should, then, be instilled in us by all the religious formation we receive, from childhood to death, that as Christians we wake up to love, spend our day giving love, and go to sleep asking ourselves whether we have, in fact, been loving to every person we have encountered.