sorry seems to be the hardest word

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word:

reflections on the grace of confession

by Troy Cady

In my calling as a pastor, I think there is little that troubles me more than this: Christians suck at saying “I’m sorry” to others. After 35 years of trying to follow Jesus, I can honestly say I have witnessed very few times when I heard a Christian apologize to another person and ask their forgiveness. 

Typically, we do one of three things, instead:

1. We defend.

2. We avoid addressing our offenses with others at all.

3. We offer a pseudo-apology, with qualifications.

The last type sounds something like: “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings but I didn’t mean it.”

In other words: “You’re the one who should be sorry because your feelings wouldn’t have been hurt if you weren’t so sensitive or if you had just understood me better. For my part, I didn’t mean to hurt you, so I did nothing wrong.”

The problem with this type of apology is that there is no recognition that intent does not diminish impact—and it was the impact that hurt. When we make a qualified apology, there is no recognition of responsibility. It is a pseudo-apology, to be precise.

The irony of this is that a Christian is one who should be the first to acknowledge their own imperfections. After all: no one is perfect, but by grace we are set free through the wonder of forgiveness. That’s the Gospel. Receiving that forgiveness, however, is predicated on the knowledge that we need to receive it in the first place.

To be sure, every Christian will tell you they know this. In fact, they will tell you quite freely “I’m a sinner and God has forgiven me.” But this “forgiveness exchange” between God and an individual has taken on a rather Gnostic character in modern day Christianity; it is a disembodied exchange, involving no seeking of forgiveness from one’s fellow human. By contrast, when we live out a genuine forgiveness exchange—when we confess our wrongdoing from person to person—we can experience a deep, deep liberation through the gentle work of humility.

In light of that, I find it astounding that Christians today can find it so easy to say “I’m a sinner” to God but so difficult to say “I’m sorry” to others. And I wonder whether one can even call oneself a Christian without going to their brothers and sisters to seek their forgiveness. I wonder whether the phenomenon we are witnessing today in western Christendom isn’t rather a pseudo-Christianity because of this.

It seems to me that Christians today have forgotten they really are sinners in a concrete sense. We like to make an abstraction of sin but are loathe to admit that, when we sin, we sin against people whose names and faces we see an awful lot. Though it is possible to sin against people we don’t know, most of the time we sin against people we see day-by-day, week-by-week, quite regularly. And our refusal to seek forgiveness from them is a betrayal of the very Gospel we proclaim.

The situation should be reversed. Instead of hearing “I’m sorry; I was wrong” only once in a while, we should be saying it and hearing it quite regularly, if we want to claim we are Christian.

Church, it is time to wake up and learn to be quick to confess in precise detail how you have wronged or hurt others.  The healing words are easy to pronounce, but hard to admit. The healing words carry a powerful simplicity: “I’m sorry; I was wrong. Will you forgive me?”

No excuses. No qualifications. No defending. Just an acknowledgement of our need for grace.

How freeing! How difficult!

I invite you to consider whether there is someone whose forgiveness you need to seek. And I pray that God will grant us all such courageous humility to actually ask forgiveness, from one person to another.

Amen.

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Photo: untitled by Felix Koutchinski via Unsplash. Creative Commons.