← Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
04/12/26 The Next...: The Next Confession
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Homily from Divine Mercy Sunday. It’s not about your first or last confession. It’s about your next one. The Christian life doesn’t end with a first confession, baptism, or Easter moment, it continues through the next step. What keeps love alive is not looking back, but continually returning to Christ through confession, mercy, and grace. Each “next” encounter with Jesus strengthens faith and guards against a cold heart.
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Welcome to Sunday Homilies with me, Fr. Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the One who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this and other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up@ascensionpress.com Sunday or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe in your podcast app for weekly notifications. God Bless the Lord be with you and with your Spirit. A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to John 31 on the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, peace be with you. When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained. Thomas Scalditimus, one of the 12, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. Now a week later, his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here and see my hands and bring your hand and put it into my side and do not be unbelieving, but believe. Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said to him, have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed. Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. I want you to have a seat. So something incredible happened last weekend. Something amazing. Something across the country happened. It was remarkable. In fact, it was in some ways, I don't want to say unprecedented, but in some ways it was unprecedented. Thousands and thousands of people were baptized who were Received into the church, received confirmation, received their first Holy Communion. And it was remarkable. In fact, here in the Diocese of Duluth, kind of the stats came out that, you know, some other diocese might be like the most valuable diocese or, you know, the MVP of the. We were the most improved. We were the diocese of the most improved. We had more increased number of people coming into the church this year over last year, which is pretty incredible in the whole state and the whole country. I mean, but one of the things that just keeps coming back to me again and again is all of these people who just had their first confession, probably many of them, these people who had their first Holy Communion, these people who had these, these first steps, my guess is this weekend are still on fire. And maybe you, maybe if you're, you've been Catholic for a while, you had your latest confession or you had your latest Holy Communion, and maybe there's an aspect where you also are on fire. But here's the thing that's been sitting on my heart, like, even leading into last week and even leading into Easter, and right now is still here is what next. Because we all know this. We all know the reality is that I can have my first confession, I can have my first Communion, and then what can be true is my heart can still grow cold, love can still grow cold. And you and I might have had our latest confession or our latest Communion, and we know that love can grow cold. And the question we have to ask is, is that just how it is? Are we helpless when it comes to this reality that, like, yeah, I mean, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, and just you can't really control it, you can't really influence it, you can't really affect it. It's just sometimes love just grows cold. And so I thought, you know, we have four weeks, four Sundays left on campus with our students for Sunday's left with these 55 new Catholics, as well as the hundreds and hundreds of other Catholics who are joining us. And it's like, let's focus on this. Let's focus on is there a way that we can prevent love from growing cold? And I think there is. I think it doesn't rely on our first confession or our first Communion or our latest confession or latest Communion. I think it's all about our next confession. I think it's about our next Communion. I think it's about the next thing. That's the series. The series for the next four weeks, as we lead into graduation, as we lead into the summer is the next. So it's the next confession, it's the next communion, it's the next step. And even it's the next goodbye so that love doesn't grow cold, because it's possible. It's possible for love to grow cold. In fact, today is Divine Mercy Sunday, and we've been given this gift by Jesus himself through the church, this Divine Mercy Sunday. Why? Because there was a time, even though God had done all of this work in this. On this earth, with humanity, that Jesus had done all the things that we just celebrated over the last Holy Week. What had happened is in the middle of life, even for those who had faith, love had grown cold. So what happened was basically in the. In the Beginning of the 20th century, in between two world wars in the 1930s, Jesus appeared to this nun. Her name was Saint Faustina Kowalska. She's just a Polish nun who was. I mean, in some ways nothing special, right? She wasn't famous, she wasn't influential. She had a hidden life. She was very ordinary. And then all of a sudden, in 1930, Jesus begins appearing to Saint Faustina, her sister Faustina, at the time, later on, Saint Faustina. And he asked her to write everything down. And that becomes what we now call like the diary of Faustina. Saint Faustina. But what did Jesus reveal? Jesus revealed to a world whose love had grown cold. His message was the same. It was over and over again. It was, the world is in need of mercy. Another way to say it is the world is in need of love, that souls are drifting. In fact, this is the key, that people know about God. People knew about God. They weren't coming to Him. The reason why love had grown cold is because people had heard of the Lord. They had heard about what he had done for all of us. They had heard of his love, but they weren't trusting his love. In fact, Jesus had said this. He said, let no soul fear to draw near to me, even if his sins be as scarlet. In other words, the problem isn't that God has stopped loving us. The problem in a world where the love had grown cold is that we stop coming to Him. And so Jesus gave us, through Faustina, these incredible gifts. The image of divine mercy, which is just this remarkable image of Jesus with rays of, like, light blue and red coming from his side. What is that? That's the image of baptism and the Eucharist. Jesus walking towards the center in this posture of forgiveness, this posture of mercy, inviting us to respond to Him. The image of divine mercy. Just please look it up. There are promises associated with veneration of this im those who honor this image can receive the Lord's grace in abundant ways. There's also the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, which is literally my favorite prayer out of any prayer. Not just because it's shorter than the rosary, but because I believe it's more powerful than the rosary. The Rosary is in a remarkable meditative prayer. And I'm not saying the rosary is not powerful. But the Chaplet of Divine Mercy is an extension of the Mass. And the Mass is the most powerful prayer that we've been given. We get to offer up the Son to the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit. He had to call upon God's mercy upon this world. That one of the prayers is for the sake of his sorrowful passion. Have mercy on us and on the whole world. We're asking that God gives the love that he has for us, gives it to the pours it out over the whole world. And of course, the message we have, the image, the Chaplet and the ultimate message of Divine mercy. Sunday, which is God's mercy has not run out. His mercies are new every single day. That to a world in which love had grown cold, God's love was still a blazing fire of mercy. And so the invitation is this again, it's not about this weekend. It's not about your first confession or your latest confession. It, I believe, is about your next confession. In fact, that's why Jesus in the gospel today, this is so important. Jesus rises from the dead. This is his first appearance to the disciples, to the apostles altogether. And what does he do? What's the first thing Jesus does when he appears to his apostles for the first time altogether? He says, peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so now I send you. And he breathes on them. We just heard this and says, receive the Holy Spirit. Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven them. Those whose sins retain or retain. People say, why do you have to go for confession to a priest? Because here we are. In John's Gospel, Jesus makes it absolutely clear. This is how he wants us to receive his mercy. The first thing he does, he turns to the people. All of them had run away except for John the Beloved. One of them had denied him and says, no, no, no, you receive the Holy Spirit. I'm sending you out as ambassadors, as emissaries, as missionaries of mercy. Why do I have to go to a priest? Because Jesus established this it this way and again for us today. Then it's not about our first confession. It's not about our latest confession. It is about our next confession. Because I'll say this confession is the exercise that your soul needs. I don't care where you're at. There's some people who say, like, from the person who's convinced that they're beyond God's reach to the person who's, like, genuinely a good person. The person who's like, no, I go to Mass on Sundays, like, I'm good. Like, no, I serve. I help out. The person who says, like, no, I'm fair. The person who can actually say, people like me, and they actually do, like you, like, to every one of us, confession is the exercise that your soul needs your next confession. And I would say this, I would say that that means every one of us, we should have regular confession every two to four weeks. If you don't know how to count between two and four, just three every three weeks, that's not a rule. That's just a recommendation. Why? And I think it's a great question, why should we go to confession every two or four weeks? Amazing question. I think number one is because we need to learn how to be honest. Like, what I mean by that is I think we need to stop. We need to be willing to stop and take an inventory. I think a lot of us. I think a lot of us want to be honest, and we are honest, as honest as we can be. I think a lot of us are just ignorant. Like, meaning we haven't paid attention. I don't know. So have you ever seen these ads that pop up? They pop up on my YouTube and there's someone who stops a person on the street and says, hey, I'll give you, like, all this money or I'll give you a car. If you can tell me, how many subscriptions do you have? Just if I were to stop you for you to ask, like, how many subscriptions do you have? Most people have no idea. In fact, I think the average number of subscriptions on an individual is just over eight subscriptions. Most people don't realize this household is right around 12 subscriptions. But the remarkable thing about this is we don't even pay attention to them. Why? Because there's usually auto renewal, right? We have. They're the small payments. Like, I. We hold onto it because I might need it. But 84% of us who have subscriptions underuse our prescriptions. Subscriptions. In fact, I think 36% of us have a streaming service, a subscription to a streaming service that we have not used in the last six months. And so we don't even know if someone just say, hey, how many subscriptions do you have? I don't know. Someone asks, how many sins do you have? I don't know. Why? Because I haven't stopped and taken an honest inventory of it. One of the things that the iPhone introduced a couple years ago was give you a weekly report on your screen time. And most people, if you ask them before this, if you ask them how much screen time you have and how many hours a day do you have? Most people put themselves around roughly around five hours. But most people, the average is over seven hours. Why? Because we just don't know. We haven't stopped. Not because we're not honest, it's not because we don't want to tell the truth. It's just because we have not stopped and taken inventory of our hearts. I mean, how many of us know exactly how much we're spending on any given day or week or month? Many of you do, but some of us just don't. Why? Because I don't know, because I haven't taken an honest look. The same thing is true with our souls. Someone says, I don't have anything to confess. What would he even say in confession? The first reason why confession, the next confession is the exercise your soul and my soul needs, is because so many of us have not stopped and taken an inventory. I don't know what to confess because I haven't taken an honest look. Or it's this because I've looked, I've looked, I've looked at my sins, but I haven't found the sins I used to confess as a child. Some of us, the last time we investigated or examined our conscience was as a kid. And so we're like, well, I don't know. I haven't sassed my parents for a while. I haven't annoyed my sister for a little while. So I don't have anything to confess. As opposed to having an adult examination of conscience, an actual stopping and saying, okay, maybe I'm a young adult, single, maybe I'm a young person who's married. Maybe I'm someone, maybe an older person in my state in life. Is there an examination of conscience for me? And the answer is absolutely there is. Wherever state in life you are, just Google search examination of conscience for and then fill in how you describe yourself. There's examinations of consciences for priests specifically. And it's one of those things where it's very, very important that I go through this and say, okay, I need to stop and take an honest inventory of whether I'm saying yes or no to the Lord. And if you don't like the examination of conscience, there's another prayer called the consciousness examen. I know this sounds the same, but it's kind of different. The consciousness examine is something you just do on a regular basis. It's something you can do every single day. In fact, basically, you just get to the end of the day and take a few moments. It doesn't have to be long. It can be five minutes. And you just ask the Holy Spirit to help you go over your day. Just kind of like, okay, what did I do first? What did I do next? What did I do next? And just look for where did God bless you that day? And just thank him. God, you were there. Wow. I thought it was going to be late, but I was on time. Thank you, Jesus. That. Oh, I had the most amazing lettuce wrap for lunch. Thank you, Jesus. And you go back and you say, okay, God, where were you? But I ignored you. Where were you inviting me to take a step and do something good, but I just didn't do it. Where were you inviting me to not do something bad, but I still did it. Get to the end of that and just say, God, Lord, I'm sorry, because I think we need to do this. I think if we don't stop and take an inventory, of course I don't have anything to confess because I haven't thought about it. Of course, when we go to confession, we have to be practical. This is what is to take an honest inventory about ourselves, we have to be practical. What I mean is, I may or may not have had a conversation with someone where I said, okay, so here's a question of, is God the center of your life? And they said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, God's the center of my life. So, okay, have you been praying on a regular basis, consistently making time for God Consistently on a regular basis? And they were like, no. I said, okay, well, I don't know how to tell you this, but God's not the center of your life. I just got to say this because we have to be practical. I can say that God is the center, but if I don't make time for him, then he is not the center of my life. And I'll miss that. And I'll have nothing to confess because I'm a good person if I don't stop. Take an honest inventory of my soul. Why? Because your next confession. My next confession is the exercise that our soul needs. Because why? Because it's an Exercise of faith. That's the second reason. First, we have to stop and take an honest inventory of ourselves, our souls, but also because confession is an exercise of our faith. I don't know if you've ever wondered this. You've ever wondered, like, do I have faith? How many of us stop and think, like, man, I don't even know. I don't know if I have faith. I don't necessarily always feel faithful. Sometimes we're in the place where we think like, man, I just have questions. I struggle. I wrestle with things. I don't know. Sometimes I've heard this. I. I don't know if I believe strongly enough. And maybe my face has grown cold. Maybe my love has grown cold. In this moment, we have to remember that faith isn't a feeling. The faith moves. The faith is. It's a verb. Faith is a posture of trust. It's a habit of trust. It's a step of trust. Again, faith is an action. It's not a feeling. And every time you and I go to confession, every time we actually go to a confession, and we bring ourselves, like, we bring our actual heart as it actually is. Like, you know, the person you are, not the person you would like to be. And we say. We go to that confessional and we say, jesus, I believe, I trust. I know that you can do something with this heart. That's an exercise of faith. Whether you feel it or not, that's an exercise of faith. Whether you think, like, do I believe strongly enough or not. That step is the step every single one of us needs to take. So that what? So that our love does not grow cold. We need to stop and take an inventory of our souls. We need to take that step and exercise our faith. By just going to confession. You guys, every time you go to confession, that is an exercise of faith. You wonder whether you're a faithful person or not, if you have faith or not. Have you been to confession? If you haven't, you might not have faith. If you have, you absolutely have faith. And then in the face of this question of will, my love grow cold. You are not helpless. But sometimes we feel helpless. Sometimes we feel so helpless. And we look. Look at ourselves, look at our lives, and we think, man, I just look at your heart and like, I wish I could go back and undo things. I wish I could go back and change what I've done. I wrestle with this a lot. Like, I personally, I remember getting to a point where I was just. There were a couple things in my life. I just. I remember Looking back and just thinking, God, if only. I felt so stuck and so helpless, so powerless to do anything about, like, I made these choices, and now these are the consequences. And there was so much in me that just is like, God, I wish I could go back, but I can't go back. So what do I do? Well, it's one of the reasons that your next confession is the exercise that your soul needs. Why? Because, okay, we know this. We know that Jesus is the good God, right? He is the merciful Lord. If Jesus is Lord, right? Lord. That term, Lord, that means he has dominion, right? Every Lord has dominion. What are we doing in confession, saying, okay, Jesus, you're the Lord, you're my Lord. That means I place everything I am, everything I have, everything I've done, I place it under your dominion. This is my invitation for all of us at your next confession to be able to say, you know what I'm doing here in this confession. So I'm placing all of it. I'm placing all of it under the dominion. That's what it is to surrender to the Lord Jesus. That's what it is to let Jesus be your Lord. To surrender. Surrender is not for Christians. Surrender is not giving up. It's giving access. Surrender is saying, okay, God, here's what's in my heart, here's what's in my past, here's what's in my present. God, even my future, I place it all under your dominion, under the dominion of your mercy. The reason your next confession is the exercise your soul needs to stop and take an honest inventory, to be willing to exercise your faith and to be willing to place yourself, ourselves, under the dominion of Jesus. And all for what? The fourth thing, because it glorifies God. I mean, sometimes we go into confession, we're like, gosh, I feel so badly. Which is not bad. It's not bad to feel badly of your sins. We can do that. We go into a confession. Like, gosh, Lord, I just. I feel so badly. I feel like a failure here. Fine. Realize, though, every time you go to confession, God is glorified. Like, when you go to confession, you lay down the worst sins, you place yourself under the dominion of Jesus Christ. What happens? God is glorified. God is honored. God is praised. God is adored. He is glorified. Why? Because think about this. Everything we celebrate on these Sundays, everything we celebrate in this church from. From the Incarnation, right? The Nativity. Why did Jesus come to Earth? Why did Jesus become one of us? Why was he born of Mary? Why did last week. Why did he take up a cross? Get scourged? Go to Golgotha, get crucified? Why did he die? Why did he rise from the dead? So that our sins could be forgiven. He did all of it so that our sins could be forgiven. What happens every time you go to confession, your sins are forgiven. That's what happens when you go to confession. Jesus is glorified. Why? Because you're giving him what he wants. You're giving him what he won. You're giving him the victory. Every time you and I go to confession, God is glorified because you're letting him win. Not just back then in Jerusalem, you're letting him win now. Your next confession is giving Jesus Christ the victory now in you. And when we do that, love will not grow cold. I recently got an email from a young woman. She's 46, young, and she's new to Christianity. She was baptized as a child, but new to Christianity speaking, wasn't really raised Christian or Catholic at all and was just coming into the church this last. She was welcomed into the church this last weekend and she sent a message and she. She said that on. On Good Friday last week. Good Friday. She had taken a lot of time and she done. She. She had stopped and done that honest inventory of her life. She had taken the exercise of faith, went to a monastery with her priests there and set up a time to. To. To place herself under the dominion of Jesus and went to confession. And she said, it was everything I imagined and nothing like I imagined, but she just gave it all to Jesus and placed herself under his dominion, under his mercy. After she had received absolution, this complete forgiveness of her sins because of God's love for her, she went back out into the church and just wept and cried in gratitude and then went back out to her car, sat in her car, started her car, and her phone connected to her Bluetooth and it started automatically playing. And she heard a voice that said the words, heaven can begin now. And as she wrote this, she wrote those words, took the words out of my mouth and the breath out of my lungs and more tears out of my eyes, because this is what it is. This is what it is. That was her first confession that love doesn't have to grow cold. She will have a next confession and so will you. And this is the last thing. For my new friend who wrote to me, for our friends who just came into the church, and for every one of us, every one of us who knows who. Who Jesus is. We know that Jesus is God. We know that he established a church. We know in the Gospel today that Jesus gives us confession. He gives his priest the ability to extend his mercy into the world. That's the feast of divine mercy. For those of us who know that this is true, there is only one way the enemy would ever win. And it's not to get you and me to sin. Because you and I know the truth, right? We know the truth. That even in our sin, God's mercy is greater. We know that even when we turn away from him, he never turns away from us. So the enemy cannot win by getting us to sin. The only way, the only weapon the enemy has left is to get us discouraged. To get us to that place where like. Well, I made my first confession, and it was good. Or I had my latest confession and it was good. But to keep us from our next confession. If you and I want our love to never grow cold, We need to know that. Yeah, I made my first confession, but not my last. To know that we're not helpless because we have him. Confession is the exercise that your soul and my soul needs. Is the exercise that our love needs and resolve. No matter how many times I fall, no matter how many times we fall. No matter how many times you fall. This is not my first confession. It's not about my latest confession. But you and I will find mercy, grace and healing and love in our next confession.