Sin
Lord, What are Human Beings? Sin
Swanbourne 7.3.2021 Lent 3
Jesus said to the crowd all too ready to stone the women taken in adultery as a sinner: ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her’. Clearly, the implication of our Lord’s words are that there is no such person without sin. Yet we see the same ignorance and self-righteousness about their own condition in accusers in our world today, from our own country’s politics to the self-righteousness of the Chinese Communist Government which abuses its own Uygher people and Tibetan Buddhists while sitting on the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
You may remember some fifteen years ago in 2006 the inquiry into the dealings of the Australian Wheat Board. It emerged that there was considerable duplicity and misleading behaviour by the company, as well as corrupt practices going on in the culture of international wheat sales to Iraq. Even if particular individuals were not corrupt the business culture they worked in was morally dubious, if not worse. However, in their various defences before the Inquiry the politicians, bureaucrats, public servants, businessmen, and officials all used phrases we have become quite used to since 2006 in subsequent inquiries into the banking, the finance sector, and other areas of institutional life. Phrases such as ‘I was not aware’; bribes becoming ‘gifts’; and ‘no comment’ were the standard evasion technique. What has been missing are words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘my responsibility’, or ‘immoral action’. Until the corruption becomes public it seems that all was sweet. So it wasn’t the immorality of the actions which prevented anyone from participating in them; what was unconscionable about them was getting caught. When that happened participants looked everywhere else but themselves for blame; or to simply passed off the actions as something other than they were – so those involved were simply ‘misguided’, ‘unfortunate’, and their actions merely ‘regrettable’.
C. S. Lewis decades ago drew attention to this sort of human behaviour in his little book Screwtape Letters. In this short work Lewis imagines an experienced tempter and devil known as Screwtape sending letters of advice to his inexperienced demon nephew Wormwood. In one of them Screwtape counsels Wormwood to tempt the new Christian he is trying to seduce into Hell by encouraging ‘his patient’ to look at the shortcomings of his mother whom he lives with rather than at his own. This is a tried and true way, says Screwtape, to undermine the new Christian view of life of Wormwood’s patient.
His attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself . . . Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy – if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her.
Lewis was thinking of how easily we become blind to our own failings, and how easy it is to attribute blame to others and exonerate ourselves - perfect as we are of course. But recent inquiries, not to mention the trial by media going on at the , point out that this failure to see, name, and accept right and wrong in ourselves can also apply to institutions and cultures. Such as the media. “It isn’t me - the blame lies with the police, the Indonesians, the Americans, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Iraqis, our competitors, the right, the left, etc, etc.” In fact, anyone is to blame but me. People only too ready with their accusations seem to have become blind to their own sinfulness and to consequences of their own actions. They have lost a sense of truth and are alienated from right and wrong.
Jesus was very much involved with this condition because alienation from truth and right and wrong was alienation from the source of these things who is God. It also results in alienation from others. Such alienation is sin. Contemporary Western culture might have dismissed the idea of God and therefore the idea of the reality of sin, but both God and the condition of being alienated from God and from one another were very much central to Jesus’ life and work. Forgiveness of sins was right at the heart of his public ministry. Not for him the idea that there is no such thing as sin. For example, Mark in his gospel account of Jesus’s healing the paralysed man has sin at the heart of Jesus’ action.
According to Mark, Jesus only heals the paralysed man after forgiving his sins. The healing is done by Jesus only to show the outraged scribes that he does indeed have the power to forgive sins because he is God’s Messianic agent to bring in God’s kingdom. So Jesus is much more interested in the forgiveness of sin than he is in performing works of wonder. This is because forgiving sins is about restoring to wholeness those who were previously alienated from God, and from others in their society. So the paralysed man is not just restored to health but to complete reinvigorated strength so that he is able to pick up his mat and walk immediately. The formerly paralysed man’s fully restored health, and his consequent return to an active life in his community, is an outward sign of his fully restored relationship to God and to other people..
But healings were, of course, not the only way in which Jesus sought to bring forgiveness of sins to those who he wanted to restore to a living relationship with God. One of the most prominent things about Jesus in the Gospels is the extent to which he sought out the company of sinners; those people who were thought by their contemporaries to have ritually offended God by their actions or conditions of life. People such as tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and the like were the sinners Jesus associated with. It was his way of showing that they were acceptable to his loving Father. But he also wanted to take these deplorables further and to prompt them into seeking a restoration of their relationship with God. These were people like Zaccheus the tax collector. Jesus sought out this sinner’s company, inviting himself to dinner at Zaccheus’s house which made Zaccheus overjoyed to be so accepted by Jesus. However, it was only when Zaccheus, as a consequence, said he would return with interest the money he had defrauded that Jesus asserted ‘Today salvation has come to this house’. That is because Zaccheus had shown his awareness of his alienation from God, and its destructive effects on others in his greedy defrauding of them. Zaccheus knew he was sinner, not because of any ritual impurity but because he had become alienated from God in his exploitation of others. If Zaccheus had been in a living relationship with God he would not have dealt with people in this dishonest way. Love of God and love of neighbour are one, as Jesus and rabbis understood. So, in reverse, dismissal of God leads us to dismiss our neighbour also.
I guess that’s why Jesus added that disturbing clause into the prayer he taught his disciples – ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’. This is a prayer in which we ask God to forgive us only to the extent and in the same measure with which we offer forgiveness to those who have offended us. This is both serious and scary. The consequences certainly came home to one group of government soldiers in the hate-filled civil wars in France that followed the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. These soldiers captured some rebels and wanted to execute them then and there. This was the same sort of self-righteous behaviour we have seen in more modern wars, and also in the recent behaviour of many of those who have bayed for the blood of public figures such as cardinals and politicians. In this instance, the soldiers’ general insisted they should first pray the Lord’s Prayer aloud, which they did. When the soldiers came to the words ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’ the penny dropped. The soldiers wept and let the prisoners go. How ironic then, but how much like the pattern of Jesus’ life, that later in the same year when the general himself was captured by the rebels he was summarily shot by them. That self-righteous behaviour and unconsciousness of sin by the general’s captors would not have surprised our Lord, for whom sin, this state in our lives of being alienated from God and therefore from others, was so much a reality. For that reason, as Jesus told the scribes, ‘the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’.
For Jesus, sin was real and serious enough in people’s lives for it to be a major focus of his life’s work. Sin was not something to be glossed over, or explained away, dismissed as unreal, or complacently accepted like many do in our culture today, including many Christians. In the way in which sin alienates us from God and from each other it has the power to pull us away from the life of love lived out towards God and other people. This disposition to selfishness that comes so naturally to us we call original sin. It is something so fundamental in our human nature that our Lord knew needed to be confronted and overcome. He overcame it with the forgiveness of God so that it’s power in our lives to destroy our relationship with others and with God would be broken.
To do so Jesus would, for the time of his public ministry, challenge the power of sin in people’s lives. Finally, he would give himself totally into the destructive power of sin and by doing so overcome it. He would undergo peoples’ hatred, jealousies, greed, lust for power, and the self-centredness of the religious and political powers of his day and die as a consequence of their sins. So he would also rise again as a permanent sign of God’s triumph over all the worst that human sin can do. So Jesus would in his death and resurrection bequeath to those who followed him the power to repair the alienation in the human heart from God and from each other. This is what Mark and the Christians he wrote his Gospel for knew in their lives, which is why they told stories about the ways they remembered Jesus forgiving and overcoming sin.
So the Church today continues Jesus’ work of facing up to and overcoming sin by the power of God’s forgiveness available in following Christ Jesus. But, as in the case of our Lord, our Christian work of forgiveness is never easy. How could it be otherwise when to do so cost our Lord his life? This is why I believe the old Book of Common Prayer was more realistic about forgiveness than the present liturgy of the Church. The old prayerbook understood only too well that forgiveness could not be taken for granted. It is always readily offered by God our loving Father, time and time again, yet it comes at a cost. There is no such thing as cheap grace. We cannot take God for granted. So before each general confession in the old prayerbook the priest reminded himself and his congregation of the cost of seeking God’s unlimited loving forgiveness.
Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways; Draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your com\fort; and make your humble confession to Almighty God, meekly kneeling upon your knees.
God loves us, his creation, passionately, and for that reason Christ Jesus our Lord underwent the great cost to himself of bringing us the possibility through him of unending forgiveness from his Holy God and Father. So, like the old prayerbook stated, we should not dare to seek forgiveness for ourselves unless we have first repented, sought to be reconciled from those from whom we have been divided; and really intend to lead a new life walking in Christ’s way. Certainly it is not a case of taking sin so lightly, or God’s love so complacently, that we merely rattle off the words without any of these costs to be reconciled with God and your neighbour. Understanding the cost of loving forgiveness is why the old prayerbook always had the confession said kneeling
There is a saying from the monks of the fourth century known as the Desert Fathers that sounds harsh. However, it is a wakeup call to those Christians and many more in our generation and culture who believe there is no such thing as sin, and act as though there is no forgiveness we need to seek, and no consequences of sin we need to bother about. ‘An Elder saw a certain one laughing and said to him: “In the presence of the Lord of heaven and earth we must answer for our whole life; and you can laugh.’
Topics for Discussion
1. Do you consider every human being has original sin?
2. Sin has been presented in this sermon as alienation from God and that resulting in alienation from other persons. Was that helpful to you?
3. Do you think forgiveness of sins was central to Jesus’ mission? Why?
4. Are people and even Christians as unmindful of sin as the sermon presents?