TURNING AWAY FROM SIN

march 27, 2009

Every Lent, Christians commit themselves afresh to do what they are instructed to do when ashes are imposed on them on Ash Wednesday: “Turn away from sin, and be faithful to the gospel.”

What does it mean to turn away from sin?

The simplest definition of sin is the one put forward by St. Augustine: any violation of God’s law. Augustine packed a lot of deep meaning into his definition, which is not immediately apparent. As an unfortunate result, many have been “turned off” by the Church’s moral teaching, because they have mistakenly perceived it as being too legalistic, offering a vision of God as only a lawgiver and judge, and of morality as a set of rigid rules.

Christian morality at its heart is not about keeping rules.  It is about attaining fullness of life and avoiding death, about finding happiness and avoiding sadness and despair, about being free and avoiding slavery.

In speaking of God’s law, Augustine said that the reason God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses on stone was because people had become morally blind and could no longer see these laws written on their own hearts. How did this blindness come about? Augustine said (as the Church has always said), that it was the result of Original Sin. When Adam and Eve chose their own will over God’s will for their happiness, and ate of the forbidden tree in the garden, their minds were darkened and their wills,  weakened. They could no longer easily see the good, nor could they easily attain it. Now, they had to struggle to understand what was in conformity with God’s plan for their happiness, and what was not. Moreover, even though they desired to do the good and to avoid evil, their moral will was so weakened by sin that they found it very difficult to bring their actions into conformity with their hearts’ true desires.

The mystery of sin is that we sin not so much because we want to, but even though we do not want to. We experience what St. Paul the Apostle did when he confessed that the desire to do good was in him but not the power (Rom 7:18). He immediately added that “I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (7:19).

In Scripture, sin is about the debilitating condition of blindness and weakness into which we’re all born as a result of Original Sin. Originally, to sin meant “to miss the mark”, in the sense of aiming poorly.

This is what happens when we sin. Although we desire to attain life and happiness, we undertake choices and actions that misdirect us. We “aim wrongly” and miss the mark of life and happiness, arriving instead at sadness and diminishment. We experience guilt and shame.

Why do sinful choices not lead to happiness and life? Because we are aiming at things that can never bring us life and happiness. We aim at, say, self-gratification through comfort, pleasure, wealth, power, or fame. Or we simply aim at getting what we want, without realizing that it won’t bring us happiness. When we seek to impose our will in one area, we discover not contentment and peace, but  continued agitation and unrest. We, then, seek to impose our will in another area, and  continue to suffer  further stages of spiritual want.

The blindness and confusion brought about by original sin so color our way of thinking, seeing, and choosing that we cannot see our own pride.  In our self-assurance that we know what’s best,  our own will is destroying us. We muffle the inner voice of conscience, which is trying to speak the truth to us, and instead justify our wrong actions through unending rationalizations.

By following our own way, we allow ourselves to be deceived again and again, and the result is always the same. We lose more and more self-possession, and find it more and more difficult to control our passions and appetites. We are less and less free, less and less able to see the truth of our condition of slavery, and less and less willing to confess it.

God’s law frees us from this sad condition. It is like a North Star that enables us to get our bearings and steer our lives toward the happiness for which we long but cannot attain on our own. God’s law is like a navigational map that unerringly leads to the life and happiness we seek.

By adhering to God’s law, we liberate ourselves from the unbearable burden of trying to be gods ourselves, of having to make all the heavy navigational decisions alone, of having to chart a course for our lives with nothing to guide us except our own egos, and with no assurance whether our path will eventually lead to happiness or not.

The heart of the problem with sin is that it never leads to true love, but always away from it. It was love for which we were created, and no one can supply the love our hearts long for except God. By our own wits and will, we are powerless to attain love. We must allow love to come to us.

God’s law leads us to himself, who is love. He gave us his law out of love, to lead us to love. To obey God’s law is difficult, but God is more than ready to sustain us if we turn to him. What is necessary is to admit that we are in sin, that we have missed the mark, and that we have become lost in our search for true and lasting happiness. That is turning away from sin. Being faithful to the Gospel means faithfully trusting that the path God’s law has opened before us will infallibly lead us to him, which is to say, lead us to the fullness of life and happiness for which we were created .

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 09-Jun-2010 10:44 sitemap