Quinquagesima Sunday

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
15th February 2015

Realising the Gravity of Sin by Fr. John A. Hardon S.J.

Objectively and theoretically no Christian will doubt that sin is the worst evil in the world. One venial sin, as Newman describes it, is more terrible in the eyes of God than the death of millions of men in extremist agony. Yet practically sin is so common, even among those who profess to believe in Christ and are bound by the most solemn promises to His devoted service.

The wages of sin is death: bodily death to the human race for the sin of Adam and spiritual death in hell for the unrepentant sinner. For the demons and their victims it means the separating of a created spirit from the Source of its happiness for eternity. All this because of sin.

We get a deeper understanding of sin by reflecting on the disproportion between the sinner and the Lord against whom he sins. Since the gravity of an insult depends on the dignity of the person insulted and his superiority to the one who commits the injury, then a deliberate flouting of the divine law, as happens in mortal sin, is the acme of wickedness. In order to bring home this infinite distance between God the offended and us the offenders, I should abase myself first by comparison with the rest of creation (a drop in the ocean of mankind), which itself is inferior to the angels and saints, who are as nothing compared with the infinite God. Then I compare myself alone with the Creator against whom I have sinned: my ignorance with His wisdom, my weakness with His omnipotence, my malice towards Him with His goodness to me.

There is more than psychology in these contrasts. They touch upon the essence of sin, which pretends to self-sufficiency, possessed by God alone but madly aspired to by every sinner since Paradise, when the devil persuaded our first parents that by eating the forbidden fruit they would become as gods, knowing good and evil. This deep-rooted instinct needs to be corrected by prayerful reflection on God's greatness and my nothingness. Otherwise past sins will scarcely be recognised as really serious and future amendment is proportionally more difficult. Especially under the stress of passion, when pressure from the senses tends to obscure the mind, I must be thoroughly convinced that because the God who obliges me to self-control is all-wise, He knows better than I what is good for me, and because He loves me more than I love myself, His commandments must be obeyed under penalty of self-destruction. Looking back, I will see how irrational my sins have been when I followed my own puny judgement in preference to the wisdom and goodness of God.

But sin is not only irrational. It is unjust. Since God is man's Creator, He has a right to determine His creatures' conduct and prescribe the conditions on which men will attain their final destiny.