Luther's Six-Hour Confession

Johann von Staupitz dreaded seeing the young monk approach. Martin Luther would kneel in the confessional at Erfurt's Augustinian monastery and stay for six hours, cataloguing every sinful thought, every impure motive, every failure he could dredge from memory. He would leave, walk across the courtyard, then return minutes later, terrified he had forgotten something. Staupitz finally snapped, "Martin, if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive — patricide, blasphemy, adultery — not these scraps!"

Luther was doing exactly what the writer of Hebrews describes: repeating sacrifices that could never make the worshiper perfect. Year after year, the priests of Israel offered bulls and goats, and year after year, the people returned because "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." Luther's endless confessions were his own version of that annual ritual — sincere, exhausting, and ultimately powerless to quiet a guilty conscience.

What finally broke through was the truth of verse ten: "We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." Not repeated. Not partial. Once. When Luther grasped that Christ's single offering accomplished what a thousand confessions never could, it didn't just change his theology — it changed his posture. He stood up from the confessional and never went back to that kind of kneeling again.

What no amount of repetition could achieve, one sacrifice already has.