A New Creed declares that Jesus is both our judge and our hope, two roles that don’t seem like a natural fit. Judgment, after all, is very rarely something that we hope for! But, there’s something about Jesus that brings these two roles together: unrelenting love. Jesus is the one with both the necessary power and the necessary grace to sit in judgment over humanity and welcome us warmly into eternal life.
It is this picture of Jesus as judge and hope that helps to make confession understandable. We do not confess our sins because we would otherwise be condemned; we confess our sins so that we might be healed by God’s love. The act of confession is not a punishment; the act of confession is a gift of grace provided to us by God for our sake so that we might be transformed
This is why we fast and pray during Lent. Our Lenten practice is a lived form of confession, a constant reminder that God, not the other good things that sometimes distract us, is our real source of strength. During Lent, we confess our attachments and our limitations and we invite God to overcome them with love. And we do this somewhat publicly! By doing it together, we doubly encourage one another, first in acknowledging that all of us do indeed have sins to confess, and second in walking with one another in the good way toward transformation.