The Meaning of Sin

 April 12, 1990

The Meaning of Sin

In olden days, today was when sovereigns distributed Maundy money, specially minted silver coins, to the needy. The practice must have harked back to the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus. Doubtless the high and mighty of yesteryears resorted to this symbolic sharing of largesse to expiate their own perfidies. Through it they sought to bear witness to the message of Christ’s passion and resurrection, which is that of greed overcome through generosity, sin transformed by grace.

No such bounty awaits our people now in the hands of those who preside over their lives. Not only is there no reprieve from their grinding poverty; today, total darkness also threatens this parched land. To many these are clear signs that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn and that the anger of God has been unleashed. They are harsh warnings that without cleansing and contrition, there will be no redemption and resurrection.

At EDSA our prayers were answered: the sea parted to let us through and then swallowed the chariots of the pharaoh. But in exchange for our hour of deliverance, we turned contumelious and haughty anew. Our leaders schemed and squabbled. We grumbled and rebelled, resuming worship of false idols and graven gods. After four years of aimless wandering in the desert, surely the time has come to acknowledge how far we all have strayed from the law, from the path of righteousness.

We must accept that human frailty, rather than divine severity, has caused our plight, and the reason we have brought so much pain and suffering upon ourselves is that given every opportunity to do well by ourselves and others, we have chosen to do otherwise. That at its most basic is the meaning of sin.

To err when we shouldn’t and needn’t is failing sorry enough. But sin is not just wilful folly; in many instances it is also a deliberate refusal to share with our fellowmen what they need and what we can give to make life more equitable and bearable for all. Selfishness – lack of kindness  and compassion – is by far the more grievous offense, as it tempts others to despair of man’s goodness and God’s justice.

It is worse, not just because it is also more insidious and endemic. It is worse because at its root is pride, the sense, if not the conviction, that we deserve to live fully and others not, and that what we are and have is owed to our being better at what we do than the rest.

To sin, in such light, is to forget that we are all sons and daughters of the same Father, and that He has made us to be each other’s keeper and custodians of the same earth, whose goods we must therefore enjoy in common and in more or less equal measure. It is to lose sight of the truth that without Him we would not be, and that without his love and mercy we are nothing.

Above all, then, this is the lesson that Jesus, His Firstborn’s agony and death teaches us: the highest and greatest must be the last. For how can it be otherwise for us, when He who is without sin has seen fit to bear all our sins?

This is the time to remind ourselves of how far we are still from the ideal of total giving and self-forgetting, wherein the salvation of mankind ultimately lies. Today and tomorrow we must mourn, not just the dying of our God, but the reason why it had and has to be: our continued wavering in the choice between His cross and our silver.

Let us endeavour to see, in the dry and dark season that the blindness of our leaders and our own wastefulness have brought upon us, not just a reproach to inconstancy and weakness, but a call to penitence and pardon.