A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. This is a continuation of our reading of this evangelist. A leper came to Jesus beseeching him and kneeling before him said to Jesus, if you will, you can make me clean. Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the man and said to him, I will be clean. Immediately, the leprosy left him, and the man was made clean.
Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once and said to him, see to it that you say nothing to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded for a proof to the people. But the man went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread the news so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in the country. And even there, people came to him from every quarter. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. There is a phrase in the first reading today that I don't think we should overlook. I don't know what the Greek is, but the English translate it as this, Saint Paul refers to the deceitfulness of sin. Now we hear a good bit about the good, but we don't hear much about evil. That is in the sense of asking ourselves, what is evil?
Oh, you hear plenty about evil, just go out and get yesterday's post, get to today's post, get tomorrow's Washington Post, get the star. You won't have any trouble finding evil. But how many people ask themselves, what are we talking about when we say speak of evil? Now notice I'm sin is a moral evil. Whatever else it is, it is that.
But evil is a much broader term than sin. Sin is just one form of evil. Illness is a form of evil. Ignorance is a form of evil. Disaster is a form of evil.
Death is a form of evil. Everybody's agreed to this. Well, what do we mean by evil? And what does Paul mean when he says the deceitfulness of sin? Now it's I I cannot understand.
I say this absolutely as frankly as I can. The fact that we we use language so often without asking ourselves, what what are we saying? Now I was just reading a a text from the the the second Vatican Council, And you'd say you'd think that those texts would be pretty carefully written, but they're they talk about man's inclination to sin. Now now, look, I know I can explain that, but why use words which are so misleading? Because if we have an inclination to sin, then I ask you as I have on so many occasions, if I, in virtue of being a human being, have an inclination to sin, that is an inclination to evil, an inclination to moral evil, then I ask two questions.
Where did it come from? Where did that natural inclination come from? And if you if if you say that god made made me, that god is responsible for our human nature, then you are absolutely forced to say that god has given you an evil inclination, meaning an inclination to evil. You can't escape this. Therefore, god has given you his own creature destined to be with him, to know him, and to love him, and to serve him in this world, and then be with him for eternity in the next that he's given me an inclination to the opposite, to sin, to evil, tomorrow evil.
Can you say that and say you're rational? It's absurd, and yet we're saying it all the time. Now secondly, if I have an inclination to evil, then evil's gotta be something. You can't have an inclination to nothing, and the opposite of nothing is something. This is great on a snowy morning like this, isn't it?
But you know, this just gripes me no end the way we we throw these words around. Now if you say I have an inclination to evil, then evil's gotta be a something because I say if it's a nothing, you can't have an inclination to it. Because an inclination is certainly something positive. Now, therefore, I say, first of all, what it is, and secondly, where did it come from? Because it's going to be a reality.
And then it's either created itself and therefore it's going to be a god, and we'll have two gods, and then we'll be nice to find god fearing polytheists, or you would say, god, the omnipotent, the all good, benevolent god created evil. Can you say that and be an irrational human being? You cannot. It's absurd. And yet we're talking in these terms all the time.
I'll bet you before this day is out, some of you here will hear people talk about man's sinfulness, man's inclination to evil, man's desire for evil, evil appetites, or language of this sort. It's it's said in all kinds of ways. The in other words, that we have some kind of an evil principle in us which is inclining us to something outside which is real and which is evil. And that whole that whole pot of fish is wrong. It's all wrong.
Every bit of it's wrong. As Clive Staple Lewis says, the devil can't create a single pleasure. He can't create anything. Not and if you're a Christian, you don't admit there are two gods, a god of good and the god of evil. If you wanna believe that, well, then get out of the Christian orientation of thinking.
That is not by a long shot Christian. Christian. That there's a that there are two gods and one god is great and good and the other one is god is great and evil, and they are warring with each other. I know you can find this, but where do you find it? You find it in mythology.
That's where you find it. Now Saint Paul talks about the deceitfulness of sin. Now Paul was not a philosopher. None of the evangelists were philosophers. They weren't concerned with philosophical lingo or philosophical argument or anything else.
But and I I know that some of the language they use as well as you do. But when this word is the keyword, deceitfulness of sin. You see, you have to, it seems to me, go back to this idea. If god made me, and I believe he did, if god made the world, and I believe he did, then I have to admit that what he made is good. Because I cannot think for a minute that god can be the author of evil, the creator of evil without getting into an absurdity.
And so I find myself then a good person. I know about original sin and I know how I can manipulate around this. But what I'm saying is that God created me as a good being because everything God created is good, and everything that I want is good. Notice what I said, everything I want is good. And I stand by it.
You'll say, well, this is absurd. How can a man want good when he goes out and commits rape or murder? The point is this, we can be mistaken about the good. There is where the deceitfulness of sin comes in. You take a person working in a bank handling a lot of money.
What's wrong with money? There's nothing wrong with it. What's wrong with using money? There's nothing wrong with using money. What's wrong with taking money?
That is going to a bank and having a cashier give you some money. There's nothing wrong with it. We're doing it all the time. Then where does the evil come in when I walk into the bank and put a gun in the face of the cashier and said give me some of your your cash. It isn't the money that's evil.
It's not my inclination towards the money that is evil. It's not my inclination towards what money can buy that is evil. What's evil about it? Have you ever asked yourself that? Where does moral evil come in?
And we say, Saint Paul says, the deceitfulness of sin because you can so easily argue that nothing that I'm doing is wrong. I'm not hurting anybody. The bank will be reimbursed by the insurance company. The insurance company will re raise its premiums. It'll get more business.
Therefore, I'm doing the insurance company I'm doing them a favor by robbing their bank. They ought to be paying me for it. There ought to be a bonus to what I'm stealing. Where is the essence of evil? Have you asked yourself that?
And I mean, cross the board, whether it be physical evil, intellectual evil of ignorance, whether it be moral evil of sin, makes it's what is the what's the essence of it? And I think you have to come back to an idea that it is a nothing, a nothing. It's the absence of a do good, the absence of a do good. Because when I go in there to that bank and hand in my book or whatever I do and they give me the cash, there's nothing wrong about it. I go in there and put a gun instead of a of a passbook and and I get it that way.
The whole thing is the same except in one instance, I have a right to the money and in the other case, I do not have a right. Notice that negative, not have a right. And so it it we can deceive ourselves about the good that is obligatory or we can easily deceive ourselves. And Saint Paul says it succinctly, have to pray with god's help to avoid the deceitfulness of sin. That's what original sin did.
It has clouded our vision. It has clouded our intellect. It has weakened our will so that now I say I can see the good and approve it and I love it, and by golly, I do the opposite. I do the opposite. And that's what Saint Paul said.
They are his words. There's where, if you wanna talk about inclination, there it is. But that's not inclination in the real sense. It's a weakness that I'm that I am that I become the victim of the deceitfulness of sin. I don't fully understand.
I don't fully see the good. I don't see it strong enough to embrace it. So let us let us realize this because you see, how can we deal with the reality of life unless we know what we're dealing with? And I say with Saint Paul that we pray to God that we do understand the deceitfulness sin. It's only an apparent good.
In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.