Pentecost 7: Sin and Betrayal

Amos 7.7-15

Psalm 85.8-13

Ephesians 1.3-14

Mark 6.14-29

You may have noticed that I don’t often talk about sin, not least of which because what so often goes by the name of sin and for which we condemn others and condemn ourselves, are merely mistakes we make in our attempts to do right, or they are the consequences of living in a complex world comprised not of black and white, but of shades of grey.  So much of what goes by the name of sin are normal mistakes we almost have to make in order to learn to get things right.  The New Testament Greek word for sin is harmatia, and it is essentially an archery term which means to “miss the mark.”  Yet, if you’ve done any archery at all you know that you have to miss the mark a lot before you actually hit the bulls-eye.  In fact, missing the mark is part of learning to hit the bulls-eye.  What normally passes for sin in our religious education, is like that.  We fail and fail as we learn to get things right. 

Now, while these sinnings – these failings – may cause distress, disappointment and heartache to those who feel their effects, there is a deeper and more insidious understanding of sin, an understanding which is deeply rooted in the Church’s tradition.  In this understanding, sin is a deliberate transgression of what one’s conscience regards as the divine law.  Sin in this sense requires three conditions: that the act be sinful, that I know and believe the act to be sinful, and that I freely consent to it nonetheless.  Without any of these it is not sin in the truest sense.  So, while sin has often been portrayed as a betrayal of God, it is equally a betrayal of self, because when we sin in this deep way you go against what our conscience knows to be right and good and truthful.  Perhaps there is no better example of this in the New Testament than the story of Herod and the execution of John the Baptist.  The writer of Mark tells us that Herod, while knowing John a righteous and holy man, and while he liked to listen to John, still put him in prison at the instigation of Herodias, his brother’s wife whom he had married.  Then later in order to save face and against his conscience – Mark tells us that Herod was deeply grieved – he had John executed.  Nowhere along the way does he voice or act upon what he believes and knows to be true; in this case that John is a righteous and holy man.  Herod is not a morally weak man or a morally ambivalent man.  Neither is he stupid or uninformed.  He understands the difference between right and wrong, and yet he cares more for what others think, willingly travelling upon the path of least resistance.  This is sin in the truest sense of the concept.  At every step of the way Herod betrays what he knows to be right, at every step of the way he betrays his conscience: he marries his brother’s wife, he imprisons John, and he eventually has John executed.  In him we see not a man who fails in his struggling to do right, but one who knowing what is right and having the power to do the right, nevertheless chooses otherwise.

Sin in its truest sense is more than the doing of wrongful acts, but it is also the wilful and knowing opposition to the right in order to save one’s skin, or save face, or avert an argument.  It is the choice of ignoring the right in the name of expedience or pragmatism or group solidarity;  and the effects of sin always return to wreak their vengeance.  Think for a moment on the history of our own country.  The compromises made with slavery – even by those who believed it to be fundamentally wrong – exacted eventually in the form of civil war a terrible toll on the nation and her people.  The character of Thomas More put this well in Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons when he said, “I believe, when statesmen forsake their private conscience for the sake of their public duties…they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”  Herod too must have known that this was true – this thing about the repercussions of sin – because when he heard about Jesus and his healings and miracles he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.” (Mark 6.16)  Having betrayed his conscience he could never now rest easy.  There would be repercussions and Jesus might just be one of them.  Sin in its truest sense is the betrayal of what we hold most dear or believe to be most true for the sake of getting on, even for  the sake of  some supposedly higher ideal.

We do not sin by accident, neither do we sin out of ignorance – both of those are called mistakes.  But sin is not a mistake.  We sin in the deliberate rejection of what we know to be true.  We sin in the conscious decision to shirk our personal responsibility to do what we know to be right.  Sin is the action of a responsible person acting irresponsibly.  For this reason it has been believed by the Church that children below a certain age – usually seven – cannot sin.  They simply do not have the responsible capabilities that the act of sin requires.  They make mistakes, they throw things, they struggle with trying to understand their world, but they do not sin.  They do not sin because they have not reached what moral theologians call the “age of reason.”  Sin requires reasonable and reasoning knowledge of the act.  And yet, for adults, mere ignorance of the facts when those facts are available to us does excuse sin.  Indeed to deliberately ignore information in order simply to spare ourselves the onus of responsibility is in itself a sin.  We know that the informations is available, we know that our encounter with it will lead us to understand better our responsibility, and yet we choose to ignore it, to keep ourselves in ignorance.

Sin in its truest sense is the deliberate doing of wrong, even when we know it to be wrong, even when we know the right.  It is what Herod did.  It is what we all do when, even in the name of some supposed higher good or purpose, we deny or betray our conscience, our beliefs.  In its deepest sense sin is not the little mistakes we make through life in our attempts to get things right (damaging and hurtful as they may be), but it is the clear and conscious denial of the right, it is the clear and conscious choice to do that which we know to be wrong.  It is the clear and conscious betrayal of our deepest selves, that place where God abides.