All three readings this Sunday address the question of sin and call for repentance. But what is sin and why are we so concerned about it? Sin at its core is idolatry, worshipping something other than God. We know that many people are unbelievers, but no one is a non-worshipper. Worship is the centering of our being on someone or something, making that entity the organizing principle of our life. Everyone worships. If not God, then someone or something else.
God is love and he made the world out of love for us, to share his love with us. Deep in our essence is a fundamental yearning for his love. We can never find true fulfillment until we accept his love and give ourselves in love to him in return. As St. Augustine famously says at the beginning of his Confessions, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Centering our whole being on God gives us true joy, abiding peace, eternal fulfillment.
When we have God in the center, we also have a well-ordered relationship with the people and the things in our lives. The problem is when we put someone or something other than God in our center. For example, there is nothing wrong with enjoying healthy pleasures, such as food or wine, in moderation. But when we put those pleasures in the center of our being, looking to them for ultimate fulfillment, they take over our lives and can destroy us. When we put something other than God in the center, we start to make bad choices. For example, if we worship money, we will start acting selfishly, treating others as means to the fulfillment of our desire, rather than as children of God for whom we should be channels of God's infinite love in our lives.
Because in sin we no longer have God in the center, sinful acts increasingly separate us from the love of God, our ultimate joy. Sin, therefore, brings with it unhappiness, lack of peace, a fundamental lack of fulfillment. The trap of sin is that as we start to separate from the joy God gives us, we are increasingly tempted to reach for more and more disordered ways of filling that inner emptiness, which then would lead us to even greater misery.
One important concept in our spirituality is that the acts defined as sinful are not arbitrarily designated as such. It's not like in a game, like football, where the NFL can change the definition of a catch or the distance required for a certain kick from year to year. Sinful acts are sinful because they inherently put a wedge between us and God. By their very nature, they take us away from God's love.
God invites us into an eternal relationship, where he pours his infinite love into our lives and calls us to love him back with our whole being. Sin always damages our relationship with God, but the degree of damage varies. Some sins, which we call mortal sins, destroy our relationship with God completely. These are sins we need to confess in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Other sins are smaller and merely damage the relationship without ending it. These sins we call venial, for which we can receive forgiveness through a simple prayer of repentance.
But though venial sins do not need to be confessed in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we should not gloss over them in our spiritual life. Little sins will lead to bigger sins. They harden our hearts and cause us to lose sight of God's love in our lives. In all things, we should act with a desire to open our hearts fully to God's love and to give him our love without holding back in any way. Let us therefore pray for the grace to be free from all sin, like our Holy Mother, so we can truly love God with our entire being.
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The readings for the Third Sunday of Easter, Cycle B are:
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19
Ps 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9
1 Jn 2:1-5a
Lk 24:35-48
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Confession Language Signs in Medjugorje by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2022.