If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.
1 John 1:9-10 (NIV)
Dust, and Forgiven
A man walks back into the county courthouse for the first time in nine years, about his mother’s house and the papers on it. He takes a number from the machine by the door and takes a seat in a row of chairs bolted together. The vending machine takes cards now. There’s a new sign taped inside the clerk’s window and the same painted number over the door, and he knows exactly what happened to him in this building the last time he was here. Today’s errand has nothing to do with any of that.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. John rests the whole thing on what God is like. Faithful means he keeps his word, and the same letter says the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin, so the forgiving stands on what God has done and on what he is. The person only has to say the true thing. The second half keeps harder company. Claiming we have not sinned makes him out to be a liar, and his word is not in us.
Today people stand in a line at a church and come out with ash on their foreheads, and one at a time they are told that they are dust. Plenty of readers here have never done that and never will. Being dust was a fact about every one of them before the words were ever said over anyone, and John puts the same offer to every one of them.
Confession in this letter is a plain saying of what’s true, spoken to the one who already sees it. It arrives with a feeling some days and with nothing at all on other days. A person can say the true sentence in a flat voice on a Wednesday morning, tired of himself and not even sorry in the way he’d like to be, and what the verse promises rests on God being faithful and just.
His number gets called, the clerk stamps two pages, and he carries them back out to the sidewalk. Walking to the car he passes people with ash on their foreheads, out on a lunch hour, going back to work as dust that has been forgiven.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you for the thing I told you last winter and have never told another living person. You took it, and you have not held it over me once since. There’s one more I’ve been carrying around behind my teeth, God. I’m going to say it now, plainly, and I would like to be done walking the same circle around it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
