In Lent, Morning Prayer begins with “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
It’s the kind of verse that rolls off the tongue, that you can say without thinking about it too much. It’s an important verse to have wedged in your mind if you ever want to talk to someone about Jesus, about the need of each person to admit that he himself can’t just carry on as if everything is ok, as if there is no terrible problem between him and God. It often is heard from the pulpit at Good Shepherd, and in class, because you can’t understand anything about what everyone is wandering around doing if you don’t have this single truth embedded in your heart, mind, and soul.
Trouble is, most of the time, we are all trying to quietly say to ourselves that we, in point of fact, actually have no sin. It’s not usually a conscious, defiant choice to say, “I have no sin”. It’s not like we wake up and say, “I have no sin”. Most of us don’t give it much thought. No, it’s the regular order of life and the frustrations that go with it that bear out the belief most of us have in our own goodness. If I am constantly irritated with other people, that irritation flows from a wellspring of belief that I am good, and everybody else is doing bad things to me. If I am offended, well, who are you to injure me? I do not deserve to be injured or treated unfairly. If I hold myself to some impossible standard, it is because I believe that, being good, I can meet it. I might not say with my lips, “I have no sin” but my life is a testimony my heartfelt embrace of that belief.
So, along comes the bible, or morning prayer if you’re an Anglican, and you hear or say the words, ‘if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us’, and, if we are honest, which we really can’t be, we will admit that the verse itself produces a war. ‘Well,’ you might mutter, ‘I haven’t said I have no sin.’ And really, what is sin?
And yes, that is a good question. What is sin? When Jesus stood mute before Caiaphas, at the beginning of his long ordeal of saving the world from sin, Caiaphas played the part of the judge. He asked the questions. He tore his robe. He looked at the very perfection of God and so utterly and completely deceived himself that he condemned God rather than himself. That is what sin is. It is looking at God, and then at yourself, and concluding that you’re not the one that needs to change anything. Every small, inconsequential sin is a recapitulation of you being right, and God being wrong, and the deceit of that lie being clung to ever more tightly.
So for a human person to read the words, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” and mean them, or believe them, or even want to believe them, some kind of miraculous revolution has to take place. The mountains have to fall down and be thrown into the sea. Your entire self has to topple over and be broken open. And you can’t do that yourself. You can’t say these words and mean them by yourself. Your lips might say them, your mind might grope toward them, but as soon as you walk away to do the next thing, your heart and flesh and being will carry on living as if they are not and could never be true.
The man standing there before Caiaphas, accused of blasphemy, the only perfect man, the only guileless and deceit-less man, he didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to go forward step by step into death. He could have gone away and decided we deserve what we get. But his extraordinary love kept him fixed there, enduring the mockery of the sinner, the lying of self justification, so that those very lies could be their own undoing. Jesus, very man and very God, bore within himself the due penalty of sin, and effected the necessary miraculous revolution on the human will. It was impossible, for you, but with God, even this thing was possible.
Therefore, if we confess our sins, if we stop in the middle of our deceitfulness and try to say that we are wrong and we are sorry, God doesn’t stint on forgiveness. He doesn’t stand there like Caiaphas the judge, quick to condemn. He leaps up, hikes up his robe, and takes off down the path to grab you. He takes off your filthy clothes and gives you himself to wear, a mantel about your shoulders. He himself removes all the unrighteousness and stain, he feeds you and rejoices over you, and gives you something to drink. He doesn’t wait for you to get rid of the sin, or undo its effects, or fix yourself up and make it all better. No, as soon as you, embarrassed and tired, mutter the crumbled, defeated words that you in fact are wrong, and God in fact is right, he himself removes the sin and cleanses you. You stand there, or rather kneel there, maybe in church, maybe not even really kneeling, maybe just sort of perched on the pew with your knees pointing down so that it looks like you’re kneeling, wishing that you could be good on your own, and you mumble the words, ‘I am a sinner, I am the offender,’ God, who is faithful And just, will cleanse you from all unrighteousness.
And we wander away and wish it could have been a flashier miracle. But that single confession is the most catastrophic revolution that the human person can ever endure. The mountain of the self is toppled, fallen, picked up and made straight and sure by a God whose faithfulness never ceases, never forgets, never flinches, never falls short.
A blessed Palm Sunday to you all.
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