4th Sunday of Lent (Scrutiny)
Are you a sinner or are you someone who sins?
One of our catechists asked that question of our RCIA
class a couple weeks ago. It was one of those questions that caused everyone to
pause a second, think about it, and then say “Hmmm”. It wasn’t as simple as it
sounded. What was she getting at? Of course we’re all sinners, right? Isn’t
that a core Christian belief?
But this question stopped us in our tracks. Most of
the class answered at first that we are sinners. Isn’t that what original sin
is all about? But then the whole mercy thing kicked in, and they started
waffling. Being a sinner is a definition of who we are. Being someone who sins
seems more like something outside of ourselves. It is something I do, not who I
am. I think it gets to the core of what you think sin is and how you view
yourself. No, it’s really about how God views you.
What is your image of how you were created? Were you
created bad and in need of saving, or were you created good but you make bad
decisions and are in need of forgiveness? The first image is sort of
fatalistic. You’re condemned before you’re even born. You were created in sin,
and you are basically evil. Martin Luther wrote, “Conceived in sorrow and
corruption, the child sins in his mother’s womb”, and he described the human soul
as a pile of dung that is covered by a blanket of snow. On the outside we may look
pure, but deep inside we’re really…well, you know.
The Catholic view of humanity is that while we are
fallen, we are not worthless excrement. Rather, we have great value. Our God
values us so much he died to conquer our sinfulness. As St. Paul wrote in the
letter to the Romans,
“Just
as through one man’s disobedience
all
became sinners,
so
through one man’s obedience
all
shall become just.”
God doesn’t create anything evil, but because he has
given us free will we sin. It may seem like a subtle distinction, but I think
it means a lot. One image I think is a positive, hopeful view of human nature
and the other is a negative, destructive image of human nature, one that has
caused great suffering in the world. We see both images at play in today’s
gospel.
The Pharisees believed, as did all Jews at the time,
that prosperity, good health and good fortune were signs that a person was
righteous. Conversely, if you were sick or poor or suffered misfortune it was
because you were a sinner. This was especially true if you had some serious
disease like leprosy or a major disability like blindness or deafness. And in
the case of someone born disabled, the thinking was that since a baby really
couldn’t be held responsible for their affliction, it must have been because of
the sins of the parents. And if the child continued in their affliction, the sins
of the parents lived on in them.
The
blind man could not enter the temple. Everybody said he shouldn’t be there, and
he himself thought he shouldn’t be there. He also thought he was unworthy to be
in the presence of God, because he was a sinner. He was reduced to begging at
the door. The people who passed him every day saw him as unworthy, beneath
them, worthless to God and man. And so he saw himself as unworthy and
worthless. How could he ever become worthy? How could he ever come in out of
the darkness and be included among the seeing?
And the self-righteous people, the good church going
folks who had it all together shunned and avoided the unrighteous. Publicly.
Just like today.
What is sin today? Do we even see it anymore? It is
topsy turvy. Many actions that are sinful are socially acceptable and to be
lauded and what does not conform to the conventional wisdom is considered sin.
The modern day Pharisees are the self-righteous who condemn people because of
the groups they do or don’t belong to. Just as the Pharisees condemned the
blind man as a sinner because of his affliction, so today we condemn people
because of their affiliation. We shun the “sinners” who are not the same color
as us, who don’t have as much money as we do, who don’t share our religious or
political views. We paint entire groups of people as evil because they’re
different from us, and we do it in the most humiliating and vicious and public
ways imaginable. If you disagree with me, you are not just mistaken, you are evil.
All you have to do is check out the comment boxes on social media to see that
this is true.
Non-conformity has become sinful, and real sin is
misunderstood or ignored.
Sin is a reality. We must recognize and acknowledge
that sin is real, that it affects all of us, even the sins we do not commit
ourselves. Then we must acknowledge that we ourselves sin. This may seem a
silly thing to say, but I believe that there are millions of people in the
world today who do not believe in sin, that right and wrong depend on what the
individual person thinks is or isn’t wrong. There are no moral absolutes, no
objective evil, just the individual will.
And on the other side, there are many people who feel
so guilty when they sin that they actually believe they are unforgivable. Their
sense of their sinfulness has become a crushing burden. We can be both blind to
our sin and blind to the mercy of God that frees us from sin.
We must have a balanced sense of sin, both in our
individual lives and in society. If we refuse to believe we sin, we will be
destroyed. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by our sinfulness, we will
be destroyed. We must not be so blind to our own sinfulness that we think everything
we do is ok and yet not be so discouraged by our sin that we feel worthless,
helpless, and lose hope in God’s mercy.
We must always live in the hope of our redemption. We
sin, yet we are still very much valued and loved by God. We need to focus not
on our failures, but on God’s mercy. The hopeless have no desire to change. We
must confront our sinfulness with the resolve to be better than we sometimes
are.
Jesus did not see the man born blind as someone
steeped in sin from his birth and therefore without hope of salvation. He saw
his very purpose in being born to be for the glory of God. And he physically
cured the man without even addressing his sinfulness. He actually turned the
beliefs of the Pharisees against them by removing the very thing that they
thought made the man a sinner. He cured his blindness. The Pharisees could no
longer claim that the man was a sinner because he had been made whole. And the
blind man began to see himself differently, too. Jesus exploded their entire
world view and reversed their situations. The blind could see and the seeing
remained blind.
Jesus has the power to cure the body and the soul. Physical
afflictions do not make us sinners. Our own choices do that. But Jesus forgives
us our sins. He does not see us as inherently bad people; he sees us as good
with infinite potential but in need of forgiveness because we choose to sin. He
saw the goodness in the blind man as a son of God. He showed him great mercy. He
sees the same in us and offers us the same mercy.
This morning we will be celebrating the second
scrutiny with our elect and candidates preparing for the sacraments of
initiation at the Easter Vigil. It is good that we all scrutinize our lives
along with them, to acknowledge that we have sinned and accept the forgiving
love of God that continually calls us all to conversion. I now call forward our
elect and candidates along with their godparents and sponsors to the foot of
the altar.
