Citizen Columns
Question
How does your faith group view guilt?
Answer
This is the most spiritually important week of the year for us. As Abp. Seraphim said on Sunday, we not only remember the events of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, we strive to be there with Him. Why? To identify more and more with Jesus and what He has done to liberate us from sin and death. And this connects with the Citizen question for this Saturday, which asks, “How does your faith group view guilt?” Here is my answer.
Tomorrow, Orthodox Christians will celebrate Easter. But this past week we have been recalling the death of Jesus and how he was betrayed by Judas and abandoned by Peter. Both were objectively guilty, and both also felt a sense of remorse and guilt. But Peter was later able accept forgiveness; Judas hung himself. As a bluegrass song says of Judas, “I was forgiven but I could not bear the shame.” Judas could not bear the shame because when he came face to face with what he had done, he had too much deformed pride to confess his sin, accept forgiveness, and then live in gratitude. He preferred suicide to such humility. Peter, in contrast, never forgot that he had abandoned Jesus, but he accepted the free gift of forgiveness and was then liberated to live a fearless life unburdened by guilt.
Of course we may be pathologically guilt-free, when we deny, rationalize or blame others for our failings. At the other extreme we may be pathologically burdened by guilt feelings, when we blame ourselves unjustly for almost everything that goes wrong. But dealing with appropriate and normal guilt begins with honesty, confession to God and to another human being (in the Orthodox tradition, this is normally a priest). It is an ancient struggle, but refusing to confess can tear us apart even physically. As Psalm 32 puts it, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
Guilt is part of human reality. But the whole point of the Resurrection is that we are forgiven and don’t need to be bound by guilt. In the words of St John Chrysostom’s fourth century Eastern sermon, “Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.”
Father John Jillions
|
