Tolu’ Elusiyan
It
is obviously the will of God that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of
the truth (I Tim.2:4), who in many times and various ways spoke of old to the
fathers through the prophets (Heb. 1:1), for he wishes to give
eternal life to all those who seek salvation by patience in well doing. In his
own time God called Abraham, and made him into a great nation. After the era of
the patriarchs, he taught this nation, by Moses and the prophets, to recognize
him as the only living and true God, as a provident father and just judge. He
taught them, too, to look for the promised savior. And so, throughout the ages,
he prepared the way for the gospel. When the fullness of time had come, God
sent his son, the word made flesh, anointed by the Holy Spirit, to preach the
gospel to the poor, to heal the contrite of heart, to be a bodily and spiritual
medicine: the mediator between God and man. For his humanity united with the
person of the word was the instrument of our salvation. Therefore, in Christ
the perfect achievement of our reconciliation came forth.
Right from time, God is love, this love
continues to manifests through the ages; God continually uplift man from his
predicament, through his journey with Abraham our father in the faith and the
effect of God’s action, saving the people of Israel. Man is constantly running
away from God while God out of his immense love for man is always giving man a
new room to come back to him.
It
is this same love he has for man that made him to send his only begotten son (Jesus
Christ) so that we can all be saved. This begotten son of the father instituted
the sacrament of reconciliation for all the sinful members of the body, the
church (ccc.1446). Above all, for those
who since baptism, have fallen into grave sin, and have thus lost their
baptismal grace and wounded ecclesial communion. It is to them that the
sacrament of reconciliation offers a new possibility to convert and to recover
the grace of justification.
Moreover,
during the public ministry of our lord Jesus Christ, we are not oblivious of
the fact that he not only forgave sins, but equally made plain the effect of
this forgiveness, he reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the
people of God from which sin had alienated or even excluded them. A remarkable
sign of this is the fact that Jesus receives sinners at his table, a gesture
that expresses in an astonishing way both God’s forgiveness and the return to
the bosom of the people of God (ccc1444). In imparting to his apostles his own
power to forgive sins, the lord also gives them the authority to reconcile
sinners with the church.
This
ecclesial dimension of their task is expressed most notably in Christ’s solemn
words to Simon peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and
whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on
earth shall be loosed in heaven” the office of binding and loosing which was
given to peter was also assigned to the college of the apostles united to its
head. So man must now approach God in the sacrament of reconciliation, for the
love of God endures forever.
So
the sacrament of reconciliation automatically becomes that arena where man can see the merciful face of the
father, even though it is an action of God, he is the one who allows the flow
of his mercy, he does not benefit from this action, it is man who enjoys the
fullness of this action.
Furthermore,
since the fall of our first parents, temptation plagues us at every turn. We
are prone to become slaves to our appetites. We are constantly challenged by
the difficulty of seeing through a glass darkly. We are in conflict, strife and
turmoil with one another spanning across the countless centuries into times
long forgotten. Yes, misery is a single word that captures the essence of man’s
experience in this life on earth, and even though modern man strives to conquer
nature by technological means, the tears still flow.
But
God’s immeasurable mercy and love is always there. After all he made us in his
image and likeness. Our clearest and most profound look at his love is in
Christ on the cross, that unimaginable self-emptying carried out before his
passion. He endured degrading torture and insult for our sake. He is the source
of all life and the end of all things. He is the alpha and omega. We come from
dust gifted life by his abundance and we are offered a return to his loving
embrace at the end of all time for an eternity of heaven. If that’s not love,
then what is it?
The
entire puzzle of human existence can be surveyed in the strain between these
two extreme positions of man’s misery and God’s vast mercy and love for us. The
gap between the two is an incredibly immense space where man asks all his
seemingly unanswerable questions about the nature of human existence, our
purpose in life, human suffering and about our final ends.
Philosophers
and scholars have been positing solutions to the problems that arise concerning
the reconciliation of man’s obvious misery and the omniscient, omnipotent,
omnibenevolent creator’s boundless love for us. Nothing wholly satisfying has
been discovered by the light of man’s mind on these matters. The only real
answer that bridges the gap between these two extremes is found in the second
person of the trinity, Christ Jesus, our savior who instituted the sacrament of
reconciliation and as such handed this over to the church so that man can
continue to obtain the mercy of God.
So,
for the fear that the church might be like sheep without a shepherd, Christ in
his wisdom also instituted the priesthood, so that priest can continue the
mission of salvation, so a priest is another Christ who automatically becomes
the intermediary between God and man, and as such he stays at the confessional,
where man approach God with his misery in other to obtain the mercy of God.
Because the tension between the two extremes can be illuminated by God’s
infinite mercy. So in the fullest expression of the divine economy concerning
salvation history, God’s profound mercy is the key to interpreting what appears
to be cruel suffering or misery and illuminates it as redemptive. So the
fullness of this mercy is enjoyed at the sacrament of reconciliation, when man
is largely waged with his misery, but then, the mercy of God is always ready to
wash away man’s misery, so man must always meet God through the sacrament of
reconciliation for the mercy of God is unlimited and it over flows.
ELUSIYAN TOLU’ FRANCIS
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