Lent

Sin cuts us off our relationship with God, others

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

	A Lenten series on Reconciliation

You've felt lonely, right? Cut off from the fun? Left out of life?

Maybe you didn't get invited to a fourth grade birthday party. Or you got delegated to "hold the fort" Christmas Eve while everyone else left early.

Lonely, wasn't it?

Sin is like that. It cuts us off from life, isolates us from others

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Worst of all, sin separates us from God.

Moral theologians Russell Connors Jr. and Patrick McCormick explain that "sin is ultimately about a rift in our relationship with God ... sin is not just about doing evil; it's about saying no to God."

Reconciliation is about saying yes again; about repairing our rift with God.

But before we can be reunited, we have to understand what separated us from God.

On Ash Wednesday, we are signed with ashes and told to "repent and believe in the Good News" (Mk 1:15). That Good News is that God's Kingdom - through the work of Jesus - has broken into our lives in a new and healing way.

Some translations of this Gospel use "reform your lives." That helps us understand the meaning of repentance, which is to reshape our lives. And we can do that because God works in our lives, through grace.

In our vocabulary, repentance is often paired with sin. But what is sin?

When I was a child, I understood sin as doing something bad. But what I didn't understand was that sin isn't so much about a list of bad things as it is about what effect those bad actions have on me, and on others. By understanding sin that way, we can approach the biblical understanding of sin, which is a breaking of the covenant, damaging our relationship with God.

The Old Testament has several words for sin. Two are hattah and hamartia, both of which roughly mean "to miss the mark."

"Within the context of Israel's covenant with Yahweh," wrote Connors and McCormick, "these terms took on the religious and ethical meaning of failing to meet one's obligations to other persons, thereby breaching one's relationship with God."

So from Old Testament times we have understood that sin separates us from God. When we are separated from God, we aren't doing what God wants of us, and we're missing out on what God wants for us. We are not fulfilling our covenant with God.

When Jesus announced "the Good News," what he wanted us to know is that God wants to draw closer to us. God stands right at our side, reaching out to us. God's covenant with us wasn't something written on paper, like a contract. God's covenant is written in our hearts, at the center of our being.

Theologian William May explained that, "the deeper understanding of sin as separation from God (seen in the Old Testament) stems from the deeper understanding in the New Testament of the loving intimacy that God wills to share with humankind."

That deepening understanding of sin, and the way it breaks relationships, also tells us that there are many types, or degrees, of sinfulness. And these degrees, sometimes called culpability, can get mind-boggling.

• But the basics are simple. When we sin:

• We are not acting as God wants;

• We are not being faithful to God;

• We are not being like God in whose image (Gn 1:26) we were made;

• We are not acting as children of God, who follow God's Son; and

• We are not responding to our call to be Christ to others (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1877);

And, most of all, we are not imaging love.

God, as revealed in Jesus, through the Spirit, is perfect love, complete and encompassing all creation.

While the Trinity - Father, Son and Spirit - is a mystery that we can never fully understand, we still know that God's existence is one of community: a constant and life-giving relationship of love.

Love that is God-like can only be expressed in relationships. As moral theology professor Fr. Richard Gula, SS, explained, "The Trinitarian vision sees that no one exists by oneself, but only in relationship to others. We grow in God's image when we grow in relationships."

In relationships, we give and receive love. And, in loving relationships, we image God, who both gives and receives love.

To live as images of God, we must love the same way God loves. When we do not, we edge closer to sin and away from the community of love that is God.

"To withdraw into ourselves, to hoard our gifts, and to cut off the dynamic of receiving and giving love by refusing to gift another is to abort our gifts and to mock God," says Fr. Gula. "It is sin, simply put."

Sin cuts us off from love. Sin breaks relationships. Sin separates us from others. Sin is the opposite of God's love.

God's love is all-encompassing. God's love gives life. God's love sustains life. God's love brings forth new life. And God's love heals.

Whenever we do something that damages life, denies life, hurts or injures life, we are not abiding in and with God. We're separating ourselves from others, from community and from love.

That draws us away from God and into the realm of sin.

And that's one lonely place to be.

Sources: Character, Choice and Community, The Three Faces of Christian Ethics; Catechism of the Catholic Church; The New Dictionary of Theology; Reason Informed by Faith, Foundations of Catholic Morality; and "The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World."