“Sin”--what causes it and what is to be done about it—is not a popular topic nowadays. It’s not a word that people even use anymore outside of church, at least not without sarcasm. I think the church bears some responsibility for this; we have a long history of trivializing the subject. Although it is basic to the human condition, and colors our whole lives, we have tended to speak not of sin, but of “sins”. The church has often acted as if the fears that haunt us, the obsessions that drive us, the failures to love that rob us of peace and fulfillment, can be reduced to a question of “being nice” and avoiding bad behavior.
But it isn’t fair to single the church out for promoting this trivial approach to sin—today’s gospel is Jesus’ critique of a way of applying the Jewish law that was pretty much the same. If you were here last week, you may remember that Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and that “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” I think there is a little wry joke here, which might come through more clearly in the King James translation, which says not “one jot,” not “one tittle shall…pass...” It may sound like Jesus is arguing for a nitpicking application of the letter of the law, but in fact he is poking fun at that approach.
And so he goes on to point out the inadequacy of using the law simply as a limit on bad behavior. It is not enough to say “you can be angry and disrespectful to people—just don’t kill them,” or “you can ogle women and objectify their bodies for your pleasure—just don’t sleep with them,” or “go ahead and divorce your wife—just be sure to fill out the proper paperwork.”
But we shouldn’t mistake the ironic tone of these sayings as meaning that Jesus is making light of sin. Rather he is saying that this moralistic approach doesn’t go nearly far enough. What is at stake in the struggle with sin is not whether people can behave “well enough.” Sin is more than misbehavior, more than a problem to be managed—it is a disease to be cured, and it is not enough to treat the symptoms.
Jesus’ forceful language in this passage says that he wants his disciples to take sin more, not less, seriously than other people. But to take these words literally, as a series of addenda to the law, is to miss the whole point that he is trying to make. Jesus points beyond the law as a checklist of bad things not to do, to the corrosive effect that these kinds of actions have on our souls and on the community.
Remember that this text is part of a sermon that began with Jesus announcing God’s blessing. He went up on the mountain and looked out on the crowd that had gathered from every place with their sick, the paralyzed, the demon-possessed, and he said “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
What’s wrong with sin is not that it breaks God’s rules, but that it rejects God’s blessing. God has placed in our hearts a pure reflection of his own glory. Sin obscures that image of God. When we insult one another and take each other to court, make each other into objects, and reject one another, we violate the blessing of God’s peace. We take the world in which each person is a beloved child of one and the same wise, merciful, and just creator, and turn it into a burning garbage dump (that, by the way, is what “Gehenna”, the word translated in most English bibles as “hell” was—a garbage dump outside the walls of Jerusalem. It was perpetually on fire.)
So Jesus is saying that consequences of sin are dire, and it is worth any cost to prevent it. That is the obvious meaning of “if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into the burning garbage dump.” But the ironic meaning is also clear—the real cause of sin is in the whole person, not in one part. It is absurd to think that treating the symptoms—tearing out the eye—will cure the disease. Once we start down that road, it won’t be long before we’ll be completely dismembered. And yet that is the piecemeal approach to “sins” that a legalistic religion promotes.
I was in college when I discovered that I was intellectually arrogant. I had grown up a big fish in a small academic pond and after hearing everyone tell me how smart I was all those years I had come to believe it. I could be falsely humble about it when the competition was weak. But when I got to an exclusive college with lots of other smart kids the truth came out. It didn’t happen often, but when I was disagreed with or felt threatened, I would find myself using my intelligence and verbal ability to put people down and make them out to be stupid. When I realized that this was going on, I was ashamed, but my solution was to reject academic learning altogether. For the next thirteen years of my life I avoided my intellectual vocation and made my living doing manual labor.
Those thirteen years weren’t wasted, and one of the most valuable things I learned from them is that I can be arrogant in other ways as well. Arrogance was the problem, not the expression of it as intellectual superiority. I wonder if any of you have had the experience of thinking that there was some part of yourself, one bad habit or difficult behavior that was the problem, and tried to eliminate it, only to find the same kind of pain popping up somewhere else. This outrageous statement of Jesus about plucking out eyes and cutting off hands is a poke in the ribs, asking us how long we are going to waste our effort.
It’s not that we shouldn’t strive to do what is right, it’s that we have to begin with the knowledge that the causes of sin lie deep in the heart, so close to the “I” that “I” think that “I” am as to be indistinguishable from it. If we don’t address the problem there, any program of self-correction we undertake will only be a kind of self-mutilation.
That’s the bad news, sort of. That’s the Christian doctrine of our sinfulness. It is not a personal guilt trip, but the simple truth about the condition we share in common with everyone. Accepting this is the surrender that leads to poverty of spirit and tears of compassion for the great weight of needless suffering that lies upon the world. This is the coming to ourselves that gives rise to a longing for healing and justice as sharp as hunger and insatiable as thirst.
The good news is that here we find the Word of our blessedness. St. Isaac the Syrian wrote, “As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of their creator.” We do not have the power to sever the root of sin in our hearts, but the promise of Our Savior is that the Holy Spirit does, and it is to that end that he came and showed us the way of self-giving love through which she does it. We can try to make ourselves perfect, cutting off pieces until we become narrow and brittle and hard as bone. Or we can offer our whole selves to God in faith and hope and love, and become full and warm and radiant as the sun we reflect.
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