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Joe Heschmeyer examines the biblical evidence in support of confessing your sins to a priest.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. One of the most common questions I think we get as Catholics, and I’m sure this is true for our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters as well, is why do you confess your sins to a priest? Now, you’re going to get that sometimes from people who aren’t Christian at all, who just find the whole thing kind of weird, but then you’re also going to get it from non-Catholic Christians, nonorthodox Christians like Protestants, who find the whole thing unbiblical and weird. So what I want to do today is give a short answer to that explaining in two parts. Why do we do this? What’s the biblical foundation for this? And then maybe even go a little deeper and say, why does the Bible call us to do this? So to do that, I want to tackle it in two halves.
Number one, why confess your sins to another person at all? And then number two is going to be okay if you’re supposed to confess your sins to others. Why does it matter that you go to a priest? Let’s do the first of those first. Why confess your sins to another person? The easy answer is because survival says so, a good verse for you to know. The chapter in verse number four is James chapter five, verse 16, James five 16, which says therefore, and we’re going to get into that, therefore, therefore is a connector. It means what came before matters, and we’re going to get into what came before, but right now just know the verse, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. So we are supposed to confess our sins to other people. So if somebody says, this is so unbiblical of you going to a priest to confess your sins, I just confess my sins to God.
Well, they’re explicitly not following what the Bible says. They’re explicitly going astray. James five 16 says, confess your sins to one another and they’re just not doing it. So we can get into whether they should confess it to a layperson, family member, priest, et cetera. But the outset we should recognize, confess your sins to one another is baseline. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not going to anybody else for confession, you are not following what the New Testament says on this subject. And then there’s a flip side to that. Pray for one another that you may be healed. And James gives us an explanation for why he says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. And you can see that power of intercessory prayer all over the place. I always give the example of the end of the Book of Job Job’s.
Friends are punished by God and he tells them explicitly, the only way they will be forgiven is if Job intercedes for them. So one of the reasons we confess our sins to other people is because they might be in a better place spiritually to intercede. For us, by all means, go to God, confess your sins to God. James five 16 is not saying, confess your sins to one another and not to God. That part’s taken for granted. Confess your sins to God but also confess your sins to one another. One of the reasons he gives is that you might be healed, which means if you’re not doing that, you might not be getting healed of your sins. And so this is big. This isn’t just like you’re disobeying God, that would be bad enough, but that you’re disobeying God in such a way that you may not be forgiven of your sins.
This notion that we go to one another and we seek forgiveness and we give forgiveness is really important and we find it all over the place in the New Testament. Once you know where to look, for instance in Matthew six, we’re going to get back to this passage. Jesus says, after giving us the our Father, if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men your trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. So this idea that we need to actually forgive one another, the trespasses that each of us brings to the table matters. But notice in that this goes very neatly with the idea that we’re confessing our sins to one another. So if I’ve wronged you, I’m going to you and I’m seeking your forgiveness. And if you withhold it, God will withhold forgiveness from you and vice versa.
And so this is something that’s really important and really built in. Now you might say why, right? It’s one thing to say, the Bible says we need to confess our sins to one another. We need to forgive one another if we want to be forgiven, which is to say, if you want to be saved, right? You can’t be unforgiven and saved. And so your salvation is tied to the fact that you’re having your sins taken care of. Now, in one sense, of course, Jesus takes care of them on the cross, and yet we still find this language that we have a role to play in the healing of one another and withholding forgiveness in a way that can cause us to lose our own salvation. Because if the Father will not forgive our trespasses, we’re dead in our sin. I want to just make that clear at the outset.
The Bible says that if your theology doesn’t allow that, that’s a different thing. But the Bible says that then we might say, well, why? Now here I’m going to cite to a couple of saints. I realize if you’re not Catholic, you’re not going to be like, well, I believe it because the saints say so. That’s fine, but at least listen to what they say because I think they make a lot of sense. The first one I want to point to is St. John Paul ii, he has a document called reconciliation and penance, and I love the way he talks about this idea of social sin. He says, all sin in one sense is social. Even the most private personal sin you have is actually a sin that has rippled out and impacted in a negative way those around you and the whole church and the whole world.
Now that sounds really kind of strange. How are we that tied up one with another? And we live in a society that tends to be very individualistic and doesn’t take seriously the way my actions might impact you and vice versa. But he makes the point that on the positive side, we can talk about the communion of saints. That if you think about your own spiritual life, think about the number of people who’ve helped you spiritually. Why do you have a Bible? Why do you know Christianity? Why do you have the gospel? Why were you formed in theology? What were the good examples of people who demonstrated the truth of the, that list goes on and on and frankly goes back 2000 years to a bunch of people you’ve never even heard of or met, whose names you won’t know this side of eternity, that all of their actions, actions you do not even know about, played an incredibly important role in your own faith journey.
Even actions from thousands of years before you were born if Abraham hadn’t said yes, if Mary hadn’t said yes, right? These kind of things are these incredibly important moments, and this is of course solidly biblical. It is usually described in the context of the mystery of the communion of the saints. So for instance, in Ephesians chapter four, St. Paul talks about the gifts God has given us. And he says that these are for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. So if you are doing the things you’re called to do, this is having this positive ripple effect outward where you are helping those around you. The gifts God has given you, in other words, are not just for you, the gifts God’s given you, whatever those are are for other people. And if you’re using them well, you are enriching the lives of other people.
But this means that if you’re not using them well as we’re going to see, you’re hurting other people, even if just in the way that you’re not giving them the gift, God intended them to receive through you, but often because you’re actually harming them more directly. This is one of the reasons why we’re going to have to go to one another and ask for forgiveness because in sin we haven’t just wronged God, we’ve also harmed one another. So I want to look at this particularly in light of the family connection because there’s a cool connection. John Paul ii, he’s quoting this line that I didn’t recognize at first, and he says, through the community of saints, it’s possible to say that every soul that rises above itself raises up the world. It’s a beautiful way of saying what Ephesians four is saying, like you’re building up the body of Christ when you’re cooperating with this working of grace.
But I wanted to know, well, where is that line coming from? And it’s quite exciting to me at least because it’s coming from Elizabeth Lase who is this French woman who was married to a really outspoken atheist doctor who was called an anti clericals. He hated priests, he hated the Catholic church, he hated Christianity, and he’s married to this very devout Catholic woman and she is just writing in her diary all of this stuff where she’s praying for him. She’s even prophesying that she thinks he’s going to convert and become a Catholic priest. And his name is Dr. Felix, later father Felix Lazu, because as you might have guessed through her selflessness, through her great Christian witness, he is eventually convicted. He does become Christian, he does become a Catholic priest. He writes the preface to the, he has her diary published and he writes in the preface of it, and one of the things he mentions that one day her youngest sister had a day book and asked her to write a motto in it.
So she thinks about it and she writes that line. And the translation we have here is every soul that uplifts itself uplifts the world. But it’s that idea that be who you are meant to be and the whole church and the whole world will be benefited through it. But this is also true in a more direct way, like those immediately around you. And we see this, for instance in one Corinthians chapter seven, that the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. That’s a fascinating kind of claim and is followed by another one. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they’re holy. So one Corinthians seven 14 has this fascinating kind of marital theology that St. Paul sort of tucks in a conversation about divorce. And then two verses later, he says, wife, how do you know whether you’ll save your husband?
Husband? How do you know whether you’ll save your wife? And I love that because that’s exactly what Elizabeth Lessor lived. She didn’t actually live to see her husband convert. It was after her death that he finds her diaries and all of the ways that she’s been praying and for him and suffering for him, and he ends up being pretty convicted by it is a great story. It’s a story for another day. But my point there is one of the reasons why we confess our sins to one another is we have these duties and obligations towards one another. Not just that we wrong one another, but also that we can pray and intercede for one another. And so we go to one another confess in our sins, both because I’ve hurt you and because I think you might have a spiritual power to help me because the prayer of a righteous man has great power in hiss effects.
James five 16, going back to St. John Paul ii, he says that there’s the inverse of the communion of saints, a sort of communion of sin whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin drags with itself the church and in some way the whole world. And we’ve seen this as well too. Think about the horrors of, if you want to say the abuse scandal in the Catholic church or fill in the blank, you can see how one person’s sins can ripple out in ways that wreck people for generations. That kind of awful power is also within us because of this human solidarity that John Paul II speaks of. And so he says, in other words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one that exclusively concerns the person committing it with greater or lesser violence with greater or lesser harm.
Every sin has repercussions on the entire ecclesial body that is the church and the whole human family. So even if you think you’re alone in your room, if you think nobody knows about your sin, it can still do real damage. One, because you’re not becoming the saint God meant you to be. And two, because there’s other ways that it distorts maybe the way you think about other people. If you’re falling into sins of lust, it’s going to change how you interact with people of the opposite sex or fill in the blank, right? There’s no sin that is purely private. It impacts all those other things that kind of ripple out whether you see it or not. And we see the big ripple effects. We’ve experienced them. But notice in both the cases of the ugly stuff like the priestly abuse scandal, many of those priests were long dead by the time we found out the horrors of what they had done and all the suffering that didn’t cause the ripple effects from that, they didn’t see those ugly ripple effects.
On the positive side, the holy ripple effects Elizabeth Lasser and her husband, she didn’t see those until after she died. And so you may not see the ripple effects of your actions, but we should know that both your good and bad actions ripple outwards. So one of the reasons we confess to one another and we seek forgiveness from one another is because our actions hurt one another when we sin. And I think this is worth thinking about, particularly in the context of the family. So even though I’m going to focus on why go to a priest, we shouldn’t only go to a priest, and that’s something I think Catholics need to hear. You should also be confessing your sins to those you have harmed and to those who you think are in a good position to pray for you, that’s important to have. Now, the catechism of the Catholic church has some beautiful stuff on how to live as a Christian family, and there’s great advice that I rarely hear people talk about that I want to talk about.
So we’re going to talk about a couple of those pieces of advice. Number one, in paragraph 2223, the passage reads in part, parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children by knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them. Okay, so think about that. You have a grave responsibility to give a good example to your kids if you’ve got kids, and that’s a heavy burden and you’re going to fall short. And God knows that the Catholic church knows that. Everybody knows that. You know that, right? What are you going to do when that happens? One thing you could do is pretend like you didn’t make a mistake because you’re afraid if you confess your mistake to your children that they’re not going to respect you as their parent. But here’s what’s really going to happen.
If you don’t confess your sin, if you pretend you didn’t make a mistake that you did make and that they probably know you made, you’re going to look like a hypocrite. They’re going to receive the lesson. When I sin, I should cover up my sin and not confess it to other people. And you’re going to give them a spiritually distorted kind of message just by being too proud to admit your fault to your kids. On the other hand, by knowing how to acknowledge your own feelings to your children, you are now in a better position to guide and correct them because now, if you correct them, they know you are not Mr. Or Miss Perfect, and they’re the screw ups. No, it’s like one broken person showing another person like, yeah, look, I have struggled with this. I’ve made this mistake. Now I see you making this mistake.
We don’t want to go down that path. You’re in a position where you can give an authentic fatherly or motherly bit of counsel. Now, there’s a flip side to that. Some of you listening aren’t parents. Maybe you still live with your parents and you’re saying, I can’t wait for my dad to hear this. Well, good news, a couple paragraphs later, you’re on the hook as well. And paragraph 22, 27, children in turn contribute to the holiness, the growth and holiness of their parents. And as a parent, I can say that’s true. I am sometimes convicted by even my 4-year-old will say, you seem like you’re in a bad mood today. She’ll call me out on stuff and it’s good because I may not be aware of it, but you contributed to the holiness of your parents in any number of ways. I give that one because this one near and dear to my heart, each and everyone should be generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices and neglect.
There’s a decent chance your parents have let you down. My wife’s a therapist. She hears all the time about people whose parents didn’t love them in the way they needed to be loved. You can hold onto that resentment or you can forgive them. The catechism says, mutual affection suggests this. The charity of Christ demands it. So we go to one another, we ask for forgiveness, and we also have a duty to forgive one another. That’s the first thing. Why do we confess our sins to one another? Because there’s this social dimension. But the second is why then confess to a priest, maybe you say, okay, I get it. I need to go to the person I’ve wronged to confess. Why in the world do I go to Father Smith? I didn’t do anything to him. Well, I mean obviously in one sense my ripple effects might’ve hurt him.
Who knows? But why go to him? Well, remember how earlier I said in James five 16, there’s this word, therefore, and therefore is a connector pointing back to something that happened before. Well, let’s look at what that passage says in context. It starts in verse 14, and it talks about the healing of the sick. It says, is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders, the Greek word. There’s like the presbyters of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name with the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Now, that’s going to be an important line. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven because notice it’s taking for granted that Christians can still sin.
That should be obvious. But sometimes people act like, well, we’ve been forgiven in Christ, therefore we don’t have to worry about all this stuff about going to confess our sins and being forgiven. No, not according to the Bible. James five is very clear that you go and you’re going to notice the presbyters here. Now, presbyter eventually gets shortened in English to priests, but the presbyters, those are the priests. And so why do we go to them? Well, one reason is right here in James five, we’re told these are the people to seek out. We’re not told yet why, but this is something that, okay, this is our first clue.
And then it says, okay, if he has committed sins, he’ll be forgiven, therefore confess your sins to one another. So notice that confessing your sins to one another is coming right in this passage of seeking out the priest, seeking out the presbyter and having him pray for you and heal you. That when he’s talking about this, we don’t want to separate verse 16 from everything that came before it because that therefore is a connector. It makes sense that even though James five 16 doesn’t only mean confessor sin to a priest, it certainly has in view that priests are some of the people you’re confessing to. This is also, of course, very much the Jewish practice. Now, one of you asked me to mention this detail, so I’m only too happy to do that. Peter c crt, the philosopher writes, why must we confess to a priest and not just to God?
And he points out, well throughout scripture, God’s forgiveness is always mediated. In the Old Testament, it was mediated by the high priest and the scapegoat and the Hebrew feast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And of course you can see that all over the Old Testament. This is something that’s easy to kind of miss, but think about the way the Old Testament is set up. This isn’t going to be Yom Kippur, this is going to be Leviticus four, but it shows this Old Testament practice. And so this is under the Mosaic law. If one of the ordinary people, one of the common people sinned unwittingly and they realize they’d done something they weren’t supposed to do, and they’re guilty when the sin which he has made is made known to him, he shall bring for his law for in a goat, a female without blemish for his sin, which he has committed.
And he shall lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and kill the sin offering in the place of burnt offering. But where is he bringing that? Well, he’s bringing it to the priest, which means people were going to the priest to have their sins confess, even if it was just confessing, I sinned and here’s my sin offering. There was some sense that you were going to the priest and the priest was offering sacrifice to aid in your forgiveness. Now, the question then becomes, well, okay, but Jesus is both our sacrifice and our great high priest. So is there any role for this now? And the biblical answer to this, the biblical answer is yes. How do we know that? So the first verse I want you to know to just have in your back pocket was James five 16. The second one is John 20.
Really it’s 20 to 23. But if you got to just get one verse, just John 2023, this is on Easter, and Jesus appears through the disciples and says, peace be with you as the Father has sent me. Even. So I send you notice, he’s been given authority by the Father. He’s now giving authority to the apostles. And when he says this, he then breathes on them. This is, think about the importance of that God literally breathes life into Adam. So here is God the Son, breathing on the apostles and saying, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they’re retained. Okay, so why do I go to anybody else to confess my sins? Well, partly because I’ve wronged them and because in sin, I’ve hurt the human family. I’ve heard members of the church, I’ve heard members of my family, and I need to acknowledge that and own that.
But why do I go to the priest? Well, not just for those reasons, but also because the priest unlike me and you, unless you’re a priest, the priest unlike me, and you has the ability to forgive sins because this is a power that Jesus gives here to the apostles. Notice he doesn’t give it to everybody. He doesn’t say gather the 500 who see him after his resurrection, and he doesn’t breathe on all of them. He’s breathing here on the 12, actually 10 of the 12, because Judas and Thomas are not there for different reasons. But notice this is something he’s giving to his church leaders, if you want to call it that clergy, if you want to call it that. The elders, the presbyter, St. Peter refers to himself as an elder. And so there’s clearly this sense that the church leadership has been given a special authority to forgive sins through the ministry of Christ and this gift of the Holy Spirit, they have a gift of the Holy Spirit.
You and I have not been given. So I was curious, well, what would someone who isn’t Catholic have to say about this? So I wanted to, I dunno, take a look and see what would be a good sort of response to this. And so this is a group called Basic Gospel, and this is someone from basic gospel unpacking this passage, John 2023, from a Protestant perspective. Now, I’m not saying this is every Protestant read of the passage. I’m giving this as one read as a way other people might read this. And then I’m going to answer why I think that’s a mistake.
CLIP:
And first, we need to, I think set some premises, set the foundation that this is not a passage that gives us the authority to forgive or withhold forgiveness.
Joe:
So I want to just notice at the outset his framework is the first thing you have to say is that when Jesus says receive the Holy Spirit, if you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they’re retained. The first thing we have to say is that does not mean what it says that the apostles do not actually have the ability to forgive sins or retain them. And there are plenty of reasons you might not want them to have that power. But it’s very strange to say the one thing the passage can’t mean is the thing it says, but I want to look a little deeper and say, well, why does he claim that it can’t be Jesus giving them the power through the Holy Spirit to forgive sins?
CLIP:
We don’t have that ability. Only God can forgive sins. And he says that in Mark chapter two, Jesus said that, that only God has the authority to forgive sins. And when he looked at the paralytic and said, son, your sins are forgiven, he was claiming to be God in the flesh. So only God has the authority to forgive sins.
Joe:
So he’s claiming that in the healing of the paralytic, two things happen. Number one, Jesus teaches that only God can forgive sins. And number two, that Jesus, by healing the paralyzed man and telling him his sins are forgiven, is claiming to be God that he’s showing himself to be God in the flesh. Neither of those things are true. Now, don’t get me wrong, Jesus is God in the flesh. But if you read the passage of the healing of the paralytic, and I would recommend you actually read all three versions because each one has different details that aren’t in the other two. This is Matthew nine, one to eight. This is Mark two, one to 11, and this is Luke five 17 to 26. Well, a few things are going to emerge. First, Jesus is not the one who says only God can forgive sins. That’s his opponents.
That’s the scribes in the Pharisees. Jesus doesn’t say that. Jesus says your sins are forgiven. Now you might think, oh, he’s claiming to be God, but no, even though he is God, what he actually claims is that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And this is striking because when the people hear that afterwards, they rejoice. When the crowd saw it, they were afraid and they glorified God who had given such authority to men. So that’s Matthew nine verse eight. But it’s, it’s the same story, the healing of the paralyzed man. And so what Jesus teaches and what the crowds rightly receive is that God has not reserved the authority to forgive sins. Now, clearly in one sense, only God can forgive sins, but it’s like this. If I said, who can work miracles? Well in one sense, obviously only God can.
I can’t just decide tomorrow I’m going to go out and work miracles. On the other hand, God clearly shares this authority with others. There are people who have performed miracles. There are people we would say who are performing miracles. So we can both say this is a divine power miracle working and it’s a divine power he has chosen to share. So the people are rejoicing in Matthew nine, eight that the power to forgive sins is a divine power that God has chosen to share. And it’s not Jesus. It’s scribes in Pharisees who say, no, only God, he can’t share that. So it’s very strange to hear Protestants say the Pharisees are right and Jesus and the crowd is wrong. That seems like an obvious misread of the text, and you read it in context, but that then leaves the question open, okay, well if this doesn’t mean that, what does it mean? And to get there in basic gospel, he’s going to go, I don’t know the guy’s name. I apologize for that. He’s going to go through two extra steps. Explain that. We don’t need the apostles to have the authority with the Holy Spirit to forgive sins because we’re already forgiven in Jesus, and so therefore they can’t have received the thing Jesus told them that they got. Here’s first that argument.
CLIP:
Anyone who receives Jesus believes in his name receives forgiveness of sin. If you’re in Christ, you’ve already received forgiveness of sins. That’s the good news, yes.
Joe:
Now, in one sense, we wanted to say amen, brother. We completely agree with that. If you have been brought into Christ, you have had your sins forgiven. That doesn’t mean you’re not still going to go out and sin as a Christian, and you should know that because you pray they are Father. Now notice, see, our Father is only a prayer for the children of the Father. If you’re estranged from God, if you’re not a son or daughter of God, this isn’t your prayer because it begins our Father who art in heaven. But notice those of us who can say our father of God also have to say, forgive us our dad serve. Forgive us our trespasses because we realize we have still sinned since we’ve come to Christ. And if we say we haven’t, we’re liars. John says, so forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors or forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Either translation you use, this is something we’re praying regularly. And then Jesus comments on it. Now, I quoted this before, but it’s worth tying in here because he makes it clear that if we don’t do this, we won’t be forgiven. Even though we’ve already been forgiven in the past, we won’t be forgiven of the new sins we may have. He says, if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. That couldn’t be clearer, right? If that wasn’t enough that Christians do in fact sin in a way that needs ongoing forgiveness and healing, you also have plenty of other passages. So you had James five 16. The verse I always get confused with is one John five 16, which is thematically similar and has five 16 in it.
So in one John five 16, John says, if anyone sees his brother, notice it’s a brother. It’s not a non-believer. If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask and God will give him life. For those whose sin is not mortal or deadly, there is sin which is mortal. I do not say one is to pray for that all wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal. So look, you have, even though you’ve come to Christ, even though Christ has paid the price for your sin, you’ve gone and committed additional sins as well. It doesn’t mean Christ needs to die on the cross, but you need to have the merits of the cross repeatedly applied to your life. In the Old Testament, you’d have to resacrifice a new animal every time. You don’t need to do that anymore.
But there is this sense that you need to be restored to write relationship with God. Now, that can happen in a couple different ways if it’s a light sin and not a deadly sin. John says in one John five 16, just pray for that person, right? This is another reason why we confess her to sins to one another and pray for one another. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in his effects. My intercession may help you to be forgiven of the smaller sins you have, the ones that haven’t cut off divine life in your soul, but have heard it. But clearly there is wrongdoing and it’s all sin. Some of it is deadly sin or mortal sin, and he’s talking here about a brother Christian. So this idea, we don’t need the apostles to have the authority to forgive sins because we’ve already been forgiven in Christ just gets the role of sin in the Christian life fundamentally wrong in a fundamentally unbiblical way because Jesus did breathe on the apostles, gave them the Holy Spirit and gave them that ability. But okay, if you don’t think the apostles actually have the ability to forgive sins and you don’t think Christians even need priests and presbyters to pray for them and have their sins forgiven, any of that, then we’re still left for that question. What is John 2023 about? Because so far we’ve heard what this guy thinks it’s not about and why it can’t be what it says. So here he is laying what he thinks it is about.
CLIP:
So there’s a couple of ways to look at this particular passage. He is giving the apostles authority to deliver the good news to those who receive the good news. They receive forgiveness to those who reject the good news. Then they remain under the power of sin and death. So this forgiveness that you receive in Christ releases you from that power of sin and death so that you can be made alive together with Christ. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news.
Joe:
Now, there should be two things that jump out to you as obviously erroneous about this. The first is, if this just means the apostles could preach the good news, they already were doing that. They were doing that before Jesus breathes on them and gives them the Holy Spirit. In Luke nine, we read Jesus, let’s say he called the 12 together and gave them power and authority. Notice this, he doesn’t just call them and send them on their way. He actually gives them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases. And he sent them out to preach the gospel, excuse me, to preach the kingdom of God and to heal. So this proclamation of the kingdom and this healing ministry is something Jesus has sent the apostles on. That’s the first thing that should jump out. If all he’s doing is saying, keep up the good work boys, you don’t need to breathe on them and give them the Holy Spirit and tell them they have the ability to forgive sins if you haven’t actually given them any new authority.
Because notice in the prior sending back in Luke nine, he doesn’t just send them. He sends them with power and authority. He sends them with power and authority to do what? Number one, cast out demons, number two, to cure disease. And number three, he sends them to proclaim the gospel. If all he’s doing is just number three, you don’t need to give them new power and authority. Second, all of us, even if we’re not apostles, even if we’re not presbyters, even if we’re not ordained clergy, have both the ability and indeed the duty to proclaim the gospel. And so why breathe on the 10 and say, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sentence of any, they’re retained. If what you really mean is you don’t have any special authority apart from even ordinary Christians, just keep up proclaiming the good news. So I mentioned this to say that while you can find people who ignore the meaning, the plain straightforward meaning of John 2023, it’s quite clear from context that unlike you and I, priests actually have been given the authority and authorization to forgive sins. So that is why long way around, we don’t just go to one another and ask for forgiveness, but actually go to Catholic priests and have our sins forgiven because they have the ability to forgive or retain sins for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.