In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the relationship between God’s forgiveness and the consequences of sin. Joe explains how while forgiveness is granted through Jesus, the temporal effects of sin still require purification and healing, both in this life and potentially in purgatory.
Transcript:
Caller: How does forgiveness work? When you go into church and you confess one, where does the priest get that authority? And also, anything heinous someone can do, I guess they can ask for forgiveness. And are they just completely cleansed of their sin or, you know, does God still judge them?
Joe Heschmeyer: Wonderful. So just if I can ask a clarifying question. In the scenario you give of somebody who does something heinous, are they truly contrite of the sin and going to God for mercy?
Caller: I suppose let’s go both ways on that. Let’s say, yes, someone truly is trying to repent, trying to, you know, rep their life on the right track or as well as they can. And the other case, someone is just going through the motions.
Joe Heschmeyer: Okay, wonderful. So, yeah, first of all, fantastic question. Second, the one who is ultimately wronged by sin is God himself. That every sin is a violation of divine law. Now, we might also hurt other people through sin. In fact, we do hurt other people through every sin. We do. Even sins that feel completely personal, even sins feel completely private, we are still hurting other people, partly just by not becoming the saints were meant to be, partly because we can have a disordered attachment to created things. But first and foremost, sin is an offense against God. And God, as the offended party, is free to forgive, and he’s free to forgive on the terms that he would like to forgive. And so one of the things that he does is he sends Jesus into the world with the power to forgive sins. And so in Matthew 9, you have Jesus healing the paralyzed man. And before he even heals the man’s broken body, he says to him, take heart, my son. Your sins are forgiven. That Jesus sees first the spiritual brokenness before he sees even the physical brokenness. And he thinks that is the most important thing to fix. And then, almost as an afterthought, to show that he has the power to forgive sins, he tells him, rise, take up your mat. And God and the crowds rejoice. Because they said, we’re told, they glorified God who’d given such authority to men, that this power to forgive sins is coming from the Father to the Son. But then in John 20, on Easter, Jesus breathes on the apostles and tells them, receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you retain are retained. So he shares the power and authority that he’s received from the Father with his church. And he talks about this, actually in several different places that all authority from heaven and earth he’s been given go. Therefore, this is in Matthew 28, beginning in verse 18, the Great Commission. We are sent out with God’s own authority. And repeatedly elsewhere, he talks about giving his authority to his chosen followers. That doesn’t mean every individual has it, because you can see right there, he doesn’t breathe on every Christian. He breathes on the leaders. He breathes on the apostles. So that’s where this authority to forgive sins comes from. People who say, well, God alone can forgive sins. That’s the same thing people said when Jesus healed the paralytic. And in one sense, that’s correct. But God can share that authority as he chooses, and he does share that authority. Now then the other part of the question is, okay, so you’ve got somebody who does something heinous and they’re truly contrite for it. Yeah, no sin is bigger than the mercy of God. Now, there was something I said a minute ago that’s relevant here. Sin has all kinds of consequences. One of those consequences is this breach of my relationship with God. But there are other consequences. I do damage to my own soul. I harm my relationship with created things, I harm my relationship with my neighbor, etc. Etc. Being forgiven by God does not automatically make all of those other offenses or all the other effects of your offense simply go away. So it is possible for you to commit a crime, to be truly contrite, and still have to pay some kind of sentence for your crime. And it would be completely incorrect to say, I shouldn’t have to pay the consequences for my crime because Jesus died on the cross for me. That Jesus death on the cross is not meant to take away what we call the temporal consequences of sin. What Jesus’s death on the cross is meant to resolve is that debt that you can’t pay, namely the debt that you owe to God that you would spend all eternity unable to pay were it not for Jesus being the mediator between God and men. So that’s the difference. We have these eternal consequences of sin. Jesus handles that. He repairs the broken relationship. But there may be still some areas where we need to be purified and healed. And that’s the case whether we’re talking about our relationship with humans who may not trust us now with ourselves, because, you know, you’ve been doing drugs or eating junk food or getting drunk all the time, and it does something to your body, or just the fact that, like, you have to be prepared to stand in the fullness of the presence of God in glory. And so it’s not enough that you’re just forgiven of your sins, you have to actually be freed of all of the attachments, you might have to sin as well. So, yes, no sin is too big to be forgiven, but being forgiven of sins doesn’t automatically mean that all the consequences of your bad actions go away. That makes sense.
Caller: Yes. That makes actually really good sense. And in terms of those consequences, those are things that you might have to pay. So you die, but also here on earth, right?
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah. Yeah. So the process of being purified of all of the impurities brought about by sin. So inordinate attachments, damaged relationships, all this stuff, this is all part of this process of purification. This is closely tied to the process of sanctification. Now, ideally, you are completely purified at the moment that you die. And if you’re not, one of two things is going to happen. Assuming that you die in friendship with God. So you’re not apart from God. You’re not destined for hell. You are a friend of God. When you die, you are therefore assured salvation. You can either be supernaturally transformed instantaneously by God. He can do that. He can heal you of all of the addictions and all of the attachments and all of the damage and all of that. He can wipe all that away with the snap of his fingers, as it were. But so often he doesn’t do that. I mean, I think anyone who’s ever gone through the process of being purified of an attachment through sin knows God is able to make that journey very easy. But he often permits us to experience what Hebrews calls discipline, because any son acknowledged by his Father is going to receive discipline, that he wants to make you godlike. And a lot of that means being purified. Which is why, for instance, 1 Corinthians 3, St. Paul can talk about those who are saved as through fire, that there is a purifying fire, not the fires of damnation, but a kind of fire of purgation, of purification. And that can happen here on earth. And that can also happen in the place we call purgatory, which is just as this instance of being prepared to stand in the presence of God. But one thing we know for sure from Scripture itself is that nothing impure will ever stand in the full presence of God. The beatific vision will not be enjoyed by those who are in a state of impurity. And so even Christians have to be reminded to be completely purified. As St. Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 7, that this is our journey. It’s not enough to just say, I want to avoid hell. Our call is to become partakers of the divine nature. In the words of St. Peter Our call, in the words of 1 John 3, is to become not only children of God, but to become like God. And so anything we want that’s less than that, we’re going to have to be stretched. We’re going to have to grow so that we’re prepared for what God has ready for those who love Him.
Cy Kellett: I’m going to leave it there. Thank you for walking the dog, Ned. If you got time to give us an address, I’d love to send you Joe’s book. The Eucharist is really Jesus kind of as a welcome home gift as you come into the Catholic Church. Ned, thanks very much for the.