The Christian who is furthest along the journey repeats a constant prayer which is simply, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me a Sinner.” He has developed a metanoia mentality. He is constantly turning around; constantly checking his instinct to be right and acknowledging that he is wrong.

Isn’t it curious how confession is acceptable—fashionable even, within the realm of self help and group therapy while it is considered dark, neurotic and “guilt-ridden” in the realm of religion? If you go to a therapist you will be encouraged to spill the beans because it is healthy. If you receive counseling you will be expected to haul all the skeletons out of all the cupboards without shame. In an Alcoholics Anonymous group the person next to you will be encouraged to say, “I’m George, I’m an alcoholic.” But if you go to church and the person next to you shakes your hand and says, “I’m Mildred, I’m a sinner,”  you will have your fears confirmed that the church is full of fruit loops.

But Mildred shouldn’t be blamed for being honest anymore than George should. Surely one of the most obvious things any human being can say about themselves is, “I’m a sinner.” Being a sinner simply means that we haven’t reached the unbelievably glorious potential for which we were created. As the New Testament puts it, “All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.” If we are created in God’s image and are destined for divinization, then to have fallen short of God’s glory means we have missed the target. This fact ought to be an almost constant nagging realization within our lives. Our first waking moment when we decide to stay in bed for an extra twenty minutes is our first little realization that we’re doing less than our best. If we were operating to our potential we would have sprung out of bed much earlier and got on with the creative, abundant and exciting life that could be ours. And yet it is our instinct to justify our laziness, and that too confirms the point that there is a kink in our nature.

But saying there is a kink in our nature is not the same as saying that we are all evil through and through. Simple observation tells me that I am not all bad, and neither are most people. In fact, even the bad things we do are often only mistakes or misunderstandings. The idea that we are totally evil through and through is one of those theological pathological positions that has damaged millions of lives. The fact remains that we are created in God’s image so it is impossible for us to be totally and utterly evil. Instead, the image of God has been wounded or marred by our sinful inclinations. We need to be healed. The kink needs to be straightened out. The complex knot of our motives, desires, decisions and actions needs to be untangled.

So to say “I am a sinner” is not to grovel in the dust, reveling in low self esteem. It is simply being honest about ourselves and admitting that while we’ve got strengths we’ve also got weaknesses. While we’ve learned  a lot, we’ve also still got a lot to learn. Saying “I’m a sinner” is simply saying that  “I’m not all I could be”. This is a negative definition of sin, but it is a good place to start. Very often that lack of reaching our potential becomes more than an absence of all that we could be and becomes a positive presence of all that we shouldn’t be. When my laziness at six thirty turns into irritability at being disturbed and I then yell at the kids my lack of potential becomes not just something good undone, but something nasty done. To understand how very nasty we can be we only have to examine what we do in private.

Furthermore, to comprehend how ultimately nasty human beings can be we only have to turn to the annals of crime and the horrors of history. Hitler’s holocaust, the bombing or the World Trade Center, the purges of Stalin and the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda illustrate the monstrosity of man. The stories of the serial killers, the rapists and the child murderers remind each one of us of the truly demonic potential of human beings. Human beings are created to be divinized but the sins of mankind remind us that the other option is to be demonized.  The logic follows, that if it is possible to become radiant eternal beings of goodness and light, then it is also possible to become gibbering monsters of unspeakable evil and darkness. So while the saints remind us that we can be divine, the monsters of the human race remind us that we can also be devilish.  We must choose which path we will take. Will we scale the heights of divinization or slide into the abyss of demonization? When you think about it, there really isn’t any other option. In the after life the chips are called in, the report card is given, and the winners and losers are announced. The final destiny is to burn either with the radiance of glory or the dark fires of damnation. There is no room on that side for mediocrity. Every journey ends up somewhere. It is better to decide on your destination while you are still on the journey, than to discover in the end, that you have caught the wrong bus.

Saying, “I am a sinner.” Is simply the first and most brutally honest admission that you have seen the way things are and that you want to make the right choice. Our natural instinct, however, is to say that we are not sinners. Our first inclination is to defend ourselves, blame the other person and justify what we have done. To really say, “I am a sinner” at the level of total reality requires a major shift in perception. There is a word for this fundamental shift of awareness. It is metanoia which means “turning around.” In other words, to say “I’m a sinner” requires a fundamental about face. When Christians go on to say they believe in the “forgiveness of sins” they are saying that once we make the first admission that we are a sinner, and that we need something, that there is help available. There is a remedy for the sickness of sin. The knot can be untangled and the twist can be put straight.

In this connection, Christians (and Catholic Christians especially) are often blamed for spreading guilt. “Oh, the nuns at our school were forever making us feel guilty!” is the lament of the convent girl. But the nuns were there to teach children the truth, and it is an obvious truth that people are actually guilty. The method of imparting this truth may not always have been kind or loving, but the truth still remains. Guilt is a kind of pain that naturally accompanies sin. It is a built in reminder that sin is a sickness, and that any sickness that remains untreated may very well turn nasty and cause an awful lot of pain, heartache and violence.

If you like, guilt is to sin what pain is to cancer. If you have cancer you will eventually have pain. Likewise, if you are a sinner, eventually you will suffer from guilt. A good doctor doesn’t say to you, “Oh my dear! Are you suffering pain? I will give you a pain killer and then you will feel better.” On the contrary, the good doctor gathers his courage and says, “Let’s talk straight. You are feeling pain because you have cancer, and the only remedy is going to be surgery followed by an awful dose of chemotherapy, and even then, you may not pull through.”

In a similar way a good priest or nun does not say, “Are you feeling guilty darling? Never mind, you are not really a sinner. You are just suffering low self-esteem.  When you feel bad about yourself it is just a result of your sad home life. Just tell yourself you are a nice person and you will feel better.” No, a good priest or nun says, “What are you feeling guilty about? Have you sinned? The remedy is to confess the sin, accept forgiveness, then go and make amends.” This process seems to me to be utter common sense. Any child who has fought on the playground knows that if he has done something wrong he needs to say “sorry” and then put things right. It is the same with any person’s fault. Although the circumstances may be far more complicated, the principle is the same.

The only thing that remains is the concept of forgiveness, and forgiveness is one of those quirky ideas that Jesus Christ brought into the world. We take it for granted that saying “sorry” and forgiving people is the way to go. But it is not so in other cultures. In fact, there are whole rafts of other ways for people to deal with things that have gone wrong. People might sacrifice virgins to appease the gods. They might pay a ransom to an injured party to put things right. They might cut themselves with knives, starve themselves or dance in a whirling dervish to satisfy the angry gods. The most common recourse instead of forgiveness is revenge; and revenge makes sense. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth seems to be a rather logical way of dealing with the problem.

But Jesus Christ comes in with this absurd idea of forgiveness. Where does this idea come from? Have you thought what this really means? It means that someone has the final power to either hold our sin against us or to lift the charge.  Why should anyone have the nerve to claim such power? Where does it come from? This is precisely the question the religious leaders asked of Christ himself. When he forgave people they said, “Who does this man think he is? Only God can forgive sins.” They were right of course. Only God can forgive sins because only God can be the judge, and only God can be the judge because only God knows everything.  Therefore only God can forgive sins and mete out just punishment. But when they accused Jesus Christ, what they didn’t see was that in Jesus Christ God was forgiving the sins. In other words, when he claimed to forgive sins Jesus Christ was making a huge claim. He was claiming that he himself had been given the authority on earth to do just that.

This is the crunch point of the Christian faith, that Christianity is not first and foremost a religion of theologically good ideas. It is not a religion of decent morality. It is not first and foremost a religion of proper ritual and the right philosophy. It is a religion of forgiveness. The simple transaction is this: Human beings say, like George at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “I am a sinner.” Jesus Christ then says, “I forgive you, and to prove that I have forgiven you, I will take the punishment for your sin myself, and if you accept this astounding sacrifice, then your slate will be wiped clean. You can get a fresh start, and then with your co-operation we can solve your sin problem once and for all. Furthermore, if you persevere, you will receive the power to become like me.”

This transaction is not a once and done affair. It is a once and done over and over again affair. An old monk was asked what he does in the monastery all day. His reply was, “We fall and get up again. We fall and get up again.” If the Christian life is scaling a monumental mountain, then at times we lose our step and fall down a crevasse. We get knocked off the ledge and grab a tiny lip of rock by our fingertips. Sometimes we stumble so badly that we plummet to our deaths with only the thin, but unbreakable line of forgiveness to save us from our fall. At times we climb the mountain in a driving snowstorm not able to see the way. We may even climb on our hands and knees, but still we climb. In fact on this particular mountain we may even come to realize that our best progress is made on our knees.

Because of this you can immediately tell the good and authentic Christian from the phony. The phony one thinks he has climbed the mountain already. The authentic Christian doubts whether he has actually started yet. This is one of the tricks of the kingdom, the ones who are furthest along really do believe they are at the back, and the ones who think they are furthest up the mountain really haven’t left the training camp yet. It is true that the last shall be first and the first last.

That is why the Christian who is furthest along the journey repeats a constant prayer which is simply, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me a Sinner.” He has developed a metanoia mentality. He is constantly turning around; constantly checking his instinct to be right and acknowledging that he is wrong.  To one who does not understand, this constant prayer sounds like the depths of doom and gloom religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of being a paean of pessimism it is a prayer of peace. Rather than being a muttering of gloom it is an word of utter joy. For in that prayer the simple soul repeats the essential human truth. In that prayer he affirms the fundamental condition of the human race, and declares with total dignity, clarity and joy what it means to be human: that I need help; I cannot climb alone. I am lost and need to be found.

This essay is an edited version of chapter seventeen of Father Longenecker’s book The Quest for the Creed.

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The featured image, uploaded by Hans A. Rosbach, is a photograph of the sanctuary vault of Monastery of Hosios Loukas. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.