A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. This is a continuation of this conversation our lord had with Nicodemus about being reborn. So Jesus said to Nicodemus, the one who and that's a capitalized one in this translation. The one who comes from above is above all. The one who is of earth is earthly, and he speaks on an earthly plane.
The one who comes from heaven who is above all testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever, however, does accept this testimony certifies that god is truthful. For the one whom god has sent speaks the words of god. He does not ration his gift of the spirit. The father loves the son and has given everything over to the son.
Whoever believes in the son has life eternal. Whoever disobeys the son will not see life but must endure the wrath of god. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday and the day before, I have referred to the individuality of personal responsibility for virtue.
The opposite side of that coin is sin. Today, you hear, as I have said several times, you're probably getting tired of hearing it, you hear so much about collective guilt, society's responsibility. We are all responsible. We are all guilty. That's the theme, you know, of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, if my Russian pronunciation is correct.
But you know the book I'm referring to. This is one of the certainly one of the most outstanding books I've ever read. Three times. That's the theme, that we are all responsible. Well, as I've said, if we're all responsible, that that lists responsibility off my soul since I had nothing to do with it maybe.
I just the other night, I think it was before Easter, I just got in on the end of something on TV. It was a news item. I restressed that. It was a news item. When I was shifting around the channels trying to avoid commercials, which of course is impossible.
And I got something like this, that a poll had been taken in France about sin. How many French people believe in sin? The figure I got was something like 90 some percent do not believe in sin anymore. They believe in error. Well, all I can say it's a consoling doctrine.
I wish it were true, but it ain't. Because you can't you cannot possibly, even if you stand on your head, read the New Testament, read our blessed Lord's words, and escape the fact of sin. Now remember, when we use the word sin, we're not talking about error. We are not talking about mistakes. We are not talking about hurting my neighbor.
We are not talking about hurting myself even in a certain sense. We are talking about god. See, sin brings in that is a as a as a Catholic, as a Christian uses the word sin, that word brings in god into the picture. And it isn't that sin changes God anymore than my virtue changes God. Let's get that perfectly straight.
All this talking about God's wrath and all that, God has no emotion. I don't have to tell you that. God is absolutely changeless. I am who am. This anthropomorphic or anthropomorphism of which there is so much in the bible and especially the old testament, but there's a lot of it in the new.
I just read some of it this morning. We've got to try to get rid of that if we can, but we'll never get rid of it since anthropomorphism means making something like to man or human beings. And since we're all human, what are you going to do about that? So the the concept of sin in the Christian sense and in the biblical sense involves god almighty, some kind of a relationship. It isn't mere a matter of hurting somebody or hurting myself at all.
I can go around and and and and and be the cause of hurt to enormous numbers of people and not be guilty of a single sin. The world today wants to eliminate sin. They wanna get rid of sin. They wanna call it an error. Well, see, the definition of an error means that you've made a mistake.
Not intentionally. It's something that you did. Why? I don't know. When you're adding up a column of figures, the purpose of adding up a column of figures, of course we don't do that anymore, you invest $9.95 in a little calculator.
But in the days when we used to count up add figures, the purpose wasn't to get a wrong answer. So when we said, Oh, there's an error in your accounting, we meant, Well, something slipped in there. And we'll go back and we'll correct that. So this idea, you see, of getting rid of the concept of sin is a very comfortable doctrine, believe me, if you can do it. But how can you do it and say you're a Christian when we say Christ came to save us from sin?
You don't find the word error, and the Greeks had a word for error, believe me, or a mistake. That's not the word the the the Latin word is, and we have a very good Latin word error. So believe me, if I don't I don't want to make a lot about the words, but the thing is you you you can't possibly, absolutely, possibly read the New Testament and escape the concept of sin because sin is the opposite side of the coin to virtue. And there's no coin that doesn't have a converse and an overt side any more than you can have a valley without a mountain. And so we come back to this very disquieting truth that there is not only sin in the world, but that I can be a sinner.
A real downright sinner, not just someone who makes mistakes. And you see, this comes back now to a second point. If if this is true, that that the main the main the main ingredient of the concept of sin is not hurting somebody or myself, but breaking some kind of a relationship with god that we've been talking about in the Saint John is being reborn. Remember, when we are were reborn in our baptism, we were given this cloth and the candle as symbols to carry this through our lives. And when you see when you take that little baby here and you you and you baptize it with the water and you give the you cover it with a white garment and you give the candle to the parents, everything is of it.
You know very well if that child is to be 50 years old, that cloth is going to be a little bit solid and that light is going to get a little dim. We all know that. That's why we have the sacrament of penance. Not because I make it of a state or an error, but because I'm I'm a sinner, a good honest to God sinner. That's why I need the sacrament of penance to re to put light back into that candle and to clean up that garment of innocence that the little baby has who is being baptized and that we are told to to carry through our lives.
Let's let's not let's not shy away from the concept of sin anymore than we shy away from the concept of hell. These things are just as as much part of our doctrine as all this talk about joy and peace and love and all that. Just read what we talk about the wrath of God, and that was our blessed god talking. This is not to put fear into our heart. It's simply to give us an insight into truth.
I'm not trying to explain sin. I'm not trying to say how we can commit sin. I'm only saying we do. We do. And anyone who has any kind of self consciousness about it or any sense of reflection or any any concept of what Jesus Christ is all about and his message, we can't possibly avoid this concept of sin and the the the place that it has in our lives and what it can do and what it can undo and destroy.
But the point I wanna come back to is is the one I started with, that sin is a Christian or a scriptural person, Old Testament too, it's a it has to do with God. It does something about me with reference to God, whatever else it does. It does that. And when I sit in that confession and hear these little children come down saying, I'm sorry, and I I won't offend my parents anymore. Who cares about them re offending their parents?
That isn't sin or or not necessarily at all. Not a word about any offense against god. We've got that's right happening here, right in that confessional. Be and yet the essence of sin is what sin does to my relationship with God almighty. And as I have been reborn, as a Saint John is recording this this conversation of our blessed Lord with Nicodemus.
As I have been reborn, so I've I have that responsibility of pursuing virtue. And when I fail, as I'm almost bound to fail, I rise. I am restored. I am recreated in the sacrament of penance. That is the sacrament of our hope.
In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen.