This essay is paired with another, appearing yesterday, on the traditional confession of sin.
Forget that it’s familiar and you’ll see: this is strange, not only in substance but in order.
The Almighty and merciful Lord grant you (1) absolution and remission of all your sins, (2) true repentance, (3) amendment of life, and (4) the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit.
The first claim is astounding, that the priest can, following your confession of sin, call upon God to grant you absolution of all your sins: all of them, not just the ones on your mind, not just the ones you might have said in your heart, and not just if you were particularly attentive and serious in your immediately preceding enunciation of a confession in words in a book without any particular fill-in-the-blank for those sins especially needing confessing. No, it’s an absolution “of all your sins.”
This first claim is to cover them all, and it covers them with two nouns. First, absolution, which is literally to turn away (“ab-”) by making something soluble; a “solution,” as a chemist might say, to turn sins that are stuck onto you into things that can be washed away. Absolution is a removal of dirt, and here, of the dirt of your sins—all of them.
The second noun is remission. This is, unfortunately, a word we hear oft-used regarding cancer, meaning the disease is not causing trouble but may be lurking nearby and might reappear; one is said “to be in remission.” Literally, however, “re-” has to do with taking back, with removal, and “mission” has to do with being sent. Remission of sins happens when God sends them away. God sends back (to oblivion) the sins that you have done, sends them away for good. Later, you might repeat a sin generically, but the specific sins you have done are now dismissed from your life and have no effect upon you.
It is “absolution and remission of all your sins,” which sins are, in the earlier confession, elaborated with five images or terms that become increasingly particular and active: from erring and straying, to following the devices and desires of our rebellious hearts, to disobedience of God’s laws, to inactions, and finally to specific things done that ought not to have been done.
The priest pronounces absolution and remission for all of that. Why, then, does the priest not stop at this point? What is the point of the absolution saying more?
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Here it gets interesting. It seems that only after God has forgiven us is it possible for us to be truly repentant of our sins. This is the opposite of how things happen in the world. We are more likely to be excused of our wrongs and shortcomings if we show we are aware of them and sorry for them. In the world, repentance precedes forgiveness. But in God’s world, the world of the Scriptures as captured in this little prayer of absolution, it is only after our sins have been washed away and banished from God’s sight that we are able to see them as they really are. Only after God has taken our sins away are we able to see what our sins really were and then to have true repentance.
It seems that the confession of sin is particular and real only after the priest has finished the absolution. Note the grace in this reality: God forgives us even while our repentance is partial and not altogether true. God gives us grace so that we can truly see our sins and thereby truly repent of them. See Romans 5:8: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
So the sequence is (1) absolution followed by (2) true repentance is itself also a gift of God. This is followed by another gift of God, (3) amendment of life. Here we say the same thing as before. In the world, before you are cut some slack you try not only to show you understand what you did that was wrong but also you try to demonstrate that you have changed, that you are no longer the person who did the bad thing; you show contrition by your actions. This is “amendment of life,” and in this absolution by the priest, amendment of life is God’s gift to you.
God creates in us changed hearts, so that we live changed lives. God, in fact, causes us to live amended lives. We didn’t have to earn his forgiveness; in fact, there is nothing we could do to earn his forgiveness. But God, forgiving us, gives us amendment of life. God makes us different.
And what is that difference? It is the fourth and final thing God grants penitents in this absolution, “the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit.” In the confession, we said we “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” Jesus’ diagnosis of the human problem is that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the like: that we have hard hearts. And the solution to a hard heart is to have it transformed into one that beats in rhythm with God’s Spirit. The gift of Jesus is the Holy Spirit, who takes up residence in our heart.
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This absolution is the one used in Rite One for Morning and Evening Prayer in the 1979 prayer book. It appeared first as an alternative absolution in the 1928 book at Evening Prayer (only). There was an earlier alternative in the U.S. prayer books, namely, the absolution pronounced in the Order for Holy Communion—printed in 1789 and 1892, and cross-referenced by rubric in 1928; this absolution remains the one provided for the Eucharist in Rite One.
It speaks of God’s promise to forgive those who “with hearty repentance and true faith turn unto him,” before pronouncing God’s mercy, pardon, and deliverance “from all your sins,” confirmation and strengthening “in all goodness,” to “bring you to everlasting life.” This is longer and venerable, going back to the Communion rite of the first prayer book of 1548/49. It also lacks the specific declaration of God’s being the grantor of true repentance, amendment of life, and the Holy Spirit.
Marion Hatchett, in his prayer book commentary, says the 1979 version had been proposed, then rejected, for inclusion in the 1892 book. He traces it to a late medieval absolution “said near the end of Prime and Compline,” but he provides no text for it (which would have been in Latin anyway).
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There is an inescapable weirdness when we speak of God. God is not a thing, therefore not something we can point to with a noun. God is not a creature who acts in time, therefore his acts in themselves cannot be temporally situated. God creates time, space, creatures, nouns, verbs, all of it. So, what does it mean when we say God absolves and remits all our sins? It means simultaneously that we must repent of our sins and that he “causes” us to repent, he “grants” us our repentance.
It means that, from God’s perspective, these various things are not laid out in the chronological way they seem to us. From our perspective, we become aware that we have erred and strayed, and we are sorry about that, we confess it, we are particular about it, we want to do better, we make intentions that we will do better, we ask God for help in doing better. And God gives us, it seems in response to all this, further grace to bring us to himself. God gives us clean hearts and his Holy Spirit.
But there is no reason to insist on one chronological order here, because the weirdness of dealing with God is that while we are in time he is not, so his causality is not like our causality. For him, the end can precede the beginning, and the beginning and the end are always present. This does not take away our responsibility or freedom. But it does confront us with the mystery that in the end everything about us and everything we do is there because God continues to hold us in existence, and to love us.
And that’s why I’m particularly fond of the absolution in Rite One of Morning and Evening Prayer.
The Rev. Victor Lee Austin, Ph.D. is theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. He writes books and essays at the intersection of faith and everyday life.
