Communal Reconciliation and Atonement
Frere Dat Hoang, fsc.

I remember being taught, as a child, that I should give myself to God everyday because I was created in the image of God and His likeness.
Moreover, I was made to know, love and serve Him in this world and to be happy in the next. I was encouraged to do it every morning and evening in my family prayer and when I attended the Eucharist and confession. These were the ideas with which I would never want to argue because I was not allowed to do so, and I was too young to understand these concepts.
Therefore, waking up for 4:30AM Mass and going to the confession twice a month gradually became a heavy burden for me. Above all, confession was most challenging for me for it required that the most intimate secrets of my life, Christian life, be brought into the open, and confessed to a minister of the Church. At that time, I saw no reason for the Church to be involved if sin happened between my friends, people around me and myself. I asked myself many times, "why should I confess to a priest? I can take care of seeking forgiveness by myself with the one I offended. Why do I need a middle man?" I eventually got fed up with routine confession of the same old sins and routine recitation of the same old prayers for penance. There was a time I stopped going to confession because I simply had nothing to say.

This is I think the most commonly expressed attitude of many of us. It reflects a great deal of confusion about sin, personal responsibility and the sacrament of reconciliation. However, as I am growing up, I come to understand the importance of reconciliation and the effects of sins or wrongdoing. I realize sin is not only some of the private disputes between me and other people, but it also affects the community to which I belong.
It further damages the love God has for me. The following example will illustrate this thought clearly.

There are ten people on an assembly line. Each one of the people on the assembly has his or her unique task to do which contributes to making the product what it would be. Each one of the people on that assembly line has to presume that all other people of the line are working as fast, as hard, as efficiently and as devotedly as they can. If nine of the ten people on that assembly did exactly what they supposed to do while the tenth one neglects to fulfill his or her part on the job, at the end there would not be a finished product. Rather, it would be just junk. The person who neglects to fulfill his or her part is successful in destroying the work of all the other members on that assembly line.

I think we can say much the same about the effect of sin in the life of the Church and in our relationship with one another. After all each one of us is called to a unique role in fulfilling the life of the Church. Each one of us is call, through our baptism, to make Christ present in a special way.
Seemingly, if we fail to make Christ obviously and truly present in our lives, that part of the Church's work, the work of making Christ present as fully as possible at all times and places to all people, has not been accomplished. Our inability to make Christ present can weaken and undermine the mission of the Church into which we are called by our baptism. Whenever we harm ourselves, whenever we reject God, God's love for us, and our worthiness to be loved, we damage our ability to live freely and fully.
Because we as human beings live in community, harms to us will also effect others. Our sinfulness hurts one another. Our distorted values, false priorities, unjust distribution of material resources and those situation which fragment our lives together in the world and in our immediate society separate us from one another and undermine our true lives and vocation which we are called to live as fully as we can through our baptism.

Therefore, we need to be reconciled with one another. Our desire to be reconciled through the sacrament of reconciliation and our participation in this sacrament is by its very nature an act of atonement which restores our broken relationship, and the rite of reconciliation incorporates images of atonement when our broken relationship is restored. It is at communal reconciliation we come together to listen and reflect on the Scripture, and in the Spirit we pray, respond and sing together as we participate in the rite. In other words, this is an opportunity to educate our conscience. It is the time to uncover some of those hidden dimension of sin that can be so devastating in our lives precisely because we do not even recognize them as sin which effects our relationship with God and with one another. It is only when we realize the impact of our wrongdoing that we are a community, through this sacrament, gather together, joins hands and listen to each other with deep compassion. Together we say "I am sorry for what has broken our relationship," and willingly admit our selfish failures and pledge our efforts to make up for our infidelities as best we can. Through the sacrament we are not only being reconciled with God, but we are also being reconciled with the Church and with the rest of the community. More importantly, it is in the sacrament of reconciliation that God takes initiative through Christ and in the Spirit to restore harmony of friendship
between God and us and among ourselves. We experience the forgiveness and acceptance of God's saving love in Christ through the Spirit both in through
the community.

The fullness of human hope is shown in the revelation made to us through the Word made flesh, "And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory, the glory of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) He came to drive out all despair and fear that comes from the loss of hope in God's mercy and love. He also delivers us from a false hope built on presumption. Such presumption believes in God's constancy of love and forgiveness, but, like a spoiled child, refuses to see the need to respond as true faith requires to God's overtures of love. More positively, Jesus Christ comes to reveal himself to us by his teaching, and above all by his acting out from his nature as one with God. This is revealed in his self-emptying on the cross. Jesus Christ "died for us so
that, alive or dead, we should still live united to him." (1Thes 5:10)
Jesus came to redeem humankind from the effects of sin. His blood was the price of salvation. By his passion and death, he regained for us and restored our broken relationship with God which had been disturbed by sin.
It is in his self-sacrifice we receive forgiveness and are brought back into God's love. This is Christ's work of atonement.

The celebration of reconciliation is a participation in Christ's work of atonement when this celebration becomes the channel through which we express our sorrow. Our sorrow is an expression of trusting faith that God is the merciful Father who is ready to welcome us back. Expressing sorrow moves us toward communion with God. It is an expression of gratitude that God still loves us even in our sin. Our sorrow should be expressed in acts of penance which usually express the desire to change and the willingness to restore the harmony disrupted by sin. This celebration is further a participation in Christ's work when through it we are motivated to die to self, to give up our selfish ways in order to give birth to a new way of life promoting life and love in the community. In doing that, we share in Christ' dying and
rising and work to bring about genuine reconciliation in our community. We embrace the cross of suffering out of love for others.

The sacrament of reconciliation becomes a vehicle for Christ to bring about a change in our lives when we begin with our initial response to move away from sin, to love and serve all whom we meet and to identify ourselves more completely with Christ in his loyalty to the Father. Since Christ is one with all members of his body, our awareness of sin includes our awareness of our relationship to the body of Christ. Our desire for conversion includes reconciliation with the community of God's people. Therefore, it is precisely that communal reconciliation in the Church that can be never an individual affair only, but it is always a community experience with a
personal and wider social dimension. It is in the sacrament of reconciliation that we are willing to lay ourselves open to being converted by the power of God's Word and Spirit in the belief that by changing our attitudes, behavior and relationships Jesus now live in this world through us. He transforms the world into his body as we, through the sacrament of reconciliation, again cooperate to bring him alive in the outcast, the poor, the sick, the suffering, the lonely, the imprisoned and those around us. In short, reconciliation is an opportunity in which our conversion gradually moves from inner conversion of heart to exterior conversion of our lives which involve relationships among people, person to person relationship and transformation of our lives to a living influence in the society at large.
Through the sacrament of reconciliation, we humbly receive Christ's call to go forth into a broken, sinful, darkened world to be a transforming light of God's love to all people we are privileged to meet and loving serve. It is the reconciliation that deepens our awareness of being forgiven and draws us closer to God and one another. Every sacrament is a celebration of what God has done for us in Christ. In the sacrament of reconciliation Christ is a channel through which we are brought back to God. Christ by his grace and example draws us toward good choices. He strengthens us against selfishness and encourages us to live more for others.

Sin is more than mere personal wrongdoing for which we can simply ask pardon. There is deep mystery of evil in sin which is rooted in our human condition. Our human nature has dark forces and mysterious power within itself which are not simply the effects of social deprivation of a mental or physical order. We are all sinners in the very depths of our being, and so we all need healing. There is so much we do not understand about the mystery of evil, and sin is evil. Forgiveness and reconciliation on this level is more costly than we can appreciate. God, in Jesus, entered fully into our human family and took upon himself our burden of sin. He "became sin" for our sakes. His very presence provoked and brought out the evil in us to be soaked up and neutralized in his silent, suffering body as he went to the cross and accepted death on our behalf. This is the cost Jesus chose to pay so that the reconciliation between God and us could take place. It is in Jesus that God has reconciled us to Himself, that in Him we have the forgiveness of sin. Additionally, in the ministry of Jesus, forgiveness and healing went hand in hand. Hence, the consequence of our reconciliation should be a visible sign of healing in our relationships with one another.
We can say that we are the members of the Church, God's family. We have an obligation to serve and support our brothers and sisters by our lives and examples. We can not love and serve God unless we love and serve our brothers, our sisters and our community. As Gregory the Great sai, "The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it does great things.
But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exists." If we are the light of the world, we must be credible witnesses to the love of God incarnate in Christ.
We must give a continual example of mutual pardon and communal love. We must be the visible sign of God forgiving love. Not a sign pointing elsewhere, but an open invitation to a community in which we are healed, made whole, reconciled to each other and made friends with each others and with God.