The joy of salvation
October 20, 2023 - Friday, 28th Week in Ordinary Time
Psalm 32:1b-2, 5, 11
Blessed is he whose fault is taken away,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed the man to whom the LORD imputes not guilt,
in whose spirit there is no guile.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
my guilt I covered not.
I said, "I confess my faults to the LORD,"
and you took away the guilt of my sin.
Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you just;
exult, all you upright of heart.
Two insights from Psalm 32 are worth pondering. The first one is about unwillingness to confess one’s sins. In verse 3, the psalmist says: “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long” (Ps 32:3). Someone drew an apt conclusion from this verse about silence that kills. The pain that the unconfessed sin brought upon the psalmist was unbearable.
“Then I acknowledged my sin to you, my guilt I covered not. I said, "I confess my faults to the LORD," and you took away the guilt of my sin” (Ps 32:5). The second insight is about the liberating experience that the confession of sins brings to our lives. The psalmist confessed his faults to the Lord and the moment he did it, he was free from it. The Lord took away the guilt of his sin.
Saint Paul uses Psalm 32 in his letter to the Romans to support his argument that justification of sinners comes through faith in Jesus Christ (see Rom 4:6-8). Paul’s argument follows the pattern of the psalmist. At the beginning there is the recognition that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 4:23). Only when we acknowledge that we have sinned against the Lord, we can hear the statement that the Lord has put away our sins.
In the Catholic tradition, there is one sacrament that deals with sins committed after baptism. Like David, we need to hear God’s representative pronouncing God’s forgiveness upon us. And so we come to our priests, acknowledge our sins against the Lord and hear from them one of the most powerful words that nobody else can utter: “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. Then, the priests add: “The Lord has taken away your sins. Go in peace”.
The psalmist ends with a call to joy: “Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you just; exult, all you upright of heart” (Ps 32:11). The awareness that our sins are forgiven and that we have been justified by God’s grace brings joy to our lives. In the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999, we find this statement: “When persons come by faith to share in Christ, God no longer imputes to them their sin and through the Holy Spirit effects in them an active love” (JDDJ, 22). We can call this experience “the joy of salvation” (see Ps 32:7) and it begins our new life in Christ.