4th Sunday of Lent 2022
Joshua 5:9-12; 2Cor 5:17-21; Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32
I have been doing my sums, and have worked out that it is 51 years since I heard the Late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP preach on “A New Creation”: that is seventeen cycles of three years each of liturgical readings.
Fr. McCabe’s homily (or “conference” as they were known at Fisher House) made a deep impression on me. He was elaborating on St. Paul’s words which we have just heard from the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation”.
Ponder that for a moment. If we belong to Christ, the whole world is made new for us. It is a positive place, a place re-created in Christ, reconciled by Him to its Creator, God the Father.
That word “reconciled” is fascinating. The Greek word is katallasso and Paul uses it, or the noun katallage (reconciliation) five times in a very short passage. Five times, St. Paul points out that the incarnation, suffering and death of Jesus the Son of God have reconciled the world to God; have undone the damage caused by human sin; and have thus created the world anew, if only we have eyes to see, hearts to accept.
As you know, “Reconciliation” is now the official title of the Sacrament of Penance, or Confession, and the great twentieth century English Catholic writer GK Chesterton experienced the New Creation precisely in the context of that sacrament. In his Autobiography, published in 1936, he wrote “When a Catholic comes from Confession he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning....He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man....He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old”.
Chesterton had captured the essence of the sacrament, which is a renewal of that New Creation which is ours by virtue of our belonging to Christ. As a convert, he experienced Confession first as an adult, and I would maintain that it is an adult sacrament. I hope that I won’t be burned as a heretic for saying this, but I have come to believe that it is a pity that children make their First Confession. I say that for two reasons: firstly because, in today’s world, it is, as often as not, their last confession, as they make no further use of the sacrament: secondly because so many, though by no means all, of those who have continued with the practice of confession, have continued with their first confession all through their lives, presenting their shopping list of peccadilloes, never coming to an adult grasp of the wonders of the sacrament. What, I have wondered more than once, does it mean when an elderly person comes to me and confesses to having been disobedient?
I am heading off at a tangent here, but I believe that Reconciliation, and not Confirmation, should be the sacrament of the teenage years. The current practice of administering Confirmation to adolescents comes perilously close at times to heresy, in the form of Pelagianism. Confirmation is a sacrament of Initiation, and should be administered with baptism, whether to adults or to babies.
It was my experience at the Diocesan Youth Centre which persuaded me that First Confession is for teenagers. On a Wednesday evening at Castlerigg we would have a Reconciliation Service, after which I would go into “the box”, and would often be swamped by the number of confessions. I remember one course, during which the 15/16 year old participants kept me occupied till midnight with individual, and very mature, confessions. The following evening, there were requests for confessions again, and it was one am before I emerged from the confessional box, frozen to the marrow because the heating had long switched itself off. Those teenagers had shared GK Chesterton’s experience: they had encountered the New Creation.
“Hang on!” I hear you cry, “What about the Prodigal Son?” The parable ties in with St. Paul, who writes “For our sake, God made the One who did not know sin (in other words, Jesus) into sin”. God actually made Jesus into the Prodigal Son, returning to the Father carrying the sins of all the world, and effectively dumping them. Consequently, Father and Son, and the whole of creation, a creation now made new, could celebrate in enjoyment of the new dawn of the world.
