Confession is one of the hardest and most healing things a person can do. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins" (1 John 1:9). Yet confession can also be twisted, either by being delayed until it is forced out of us, or by turning it into public shaming.
These two stories about confession, retold in our own words, come from very different centuries. One is the true story of a twentieth-century art forger who confessed only when he had to, and then could not get anyone to believe him. The other is about how early Irish Christianity, often linked with St Patrick, changed the way the church heard confession. Each ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
The Confession Nobody Believed: Han van Meegeren
In the 1930s, the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren felt humiliated by critics who said he had technical skill but nothing original to say. He decided to get his own back by fooling them. Working in secret, he painted a picture in the style of the seventeenth-century master Johannes Vermeer, using old canvas and carefully hardened paint, and called it The Supper at Emmaus.
In 1937, the leading Vermeer scholar of the day, Abraham Bredius, declared it a newly discovered Vermeer, perhaps even the master's finest work. The painting was bought for a fortune and given pride of place at the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam.
Van Meegeren later claimed he had intended to reveal the hoax and embarrass the experts. He never did. The money was too good. He painted more fake Vermeers and sold them for huge sums. During the war, one of them, Christ and the Adulteress, was sold to the Nazi leader Hermann Göring.
That sale caught up with him. After the liberation, Allied investigators tracing art from Göring's collection followed the trail to van Meegeren. In 1945 he was arrested and accused of collaborating with the enemy by selling a Dutch national treasure to the Nazis, a charge that could carry the death penalty.
Now, facing ruin and possibly death, van Meegeren finally told the truth. The "Vermeer" was not a Vermeer at all. He had painted it himself, along with the others.
No one believed him. The experts who had authenticated the paintings insisted they were genuine. The confession that should have been liberating sounded like a desperate lie. To prove it, van Meegeren had to paint another fake under the eyes of witnesses. For weeks he worked on a new "Vermeer," Jesus Among the Doctors, painting quite literally for his life.
It worked. Experts and investigators were convinced, and the treason charge fell away. In the eyes of many Dutch people he was suddenly a hero, the man who had swindled Göring, as The Telegraph later recounted. He was still tried in 1947 for forgery and fraud and sentenced to a year in prison, but he died before serving it.
Takeaway: Van Meegeren's confession came too late to be free. It was dragged out of him by fear, and by then his lies were so tangled that the truth sounded false. That is often how unconfessed sin works: the longer we hide it, the harder honesty becomes. "Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy" (Proverbs 28:13). Do not wait until confession has to be forced out of you.
Source: Information from "The forger who fooled the world," The Telegraph, 5 August 2006, and standard accounts of the van Meegeren case.
St Patrick and the Mercy of Private Confession
Historians generally credit early Irish monasteries with spreading private, repeatable penance. Thomas Cahill links this change with St Patrick's influence; the precise origins are debated.
For many people today, confession brings to mind a priest and a small booth. Most Protestant churches reject that practice, believing that Christians can confess directly to God through Christ. But the history of how private confession developed is still worth knowing.
In the early centuries of the church in much of Europe, serious sin was often treated as a public matter. To sin was to wound the whole Christian community, not just your relationship with God, and so penance was frequently public and visible. Even when a sin was first confessed privately, it could end up being known by everyone. And in many places, formal penance for grave sins was allowed only once in a lifetime. If you fell again after doing penance, there was no second chance.
St Patrick knew what it was to have your private failures exposed. In his Confessio, a short autobiography written late in life, he describes confiding a sin from his youth to a close friend, who years later revealed it to undermine him.
Patrick, a Briton who had been kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland as a teenager, returned there as a missionary. According to Thomas Cahill, the Irish church that grew out of his work developed a gentler practice of confession. Sin would be confessed privately, and what was confessed would stay private between the penitent, the confessor and God. Penance could also be repeated as often as needed, because people sin over and over and God's forgiveness is always available. Irish monks later carried this approach across Europe.
Takeaway: Whatever your church tradition, Patrick's story points to some truths worth holding on to. We all sin, often. God calls us to confess. His forgiveness is freely and repeatedly available. And people should not be humiliated for their failures. James puts the community side of it simply: "confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed" (James 5:16). Is there someone safe you need to confess to, or someone whose confession you need to keep safe?
Source: Reported in Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995); St Patrick, Confessio.
Final thoughts
One man confessed too late and had to fight to be believed. The other story shows a church learning to receive confession with privacy and mercy. Together, these stories about confession invite us to tell the truth early and to make it safe for others to do the same.
What would it take for you to bring one hidden thing into the light this week?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.