(Disclaimer: This brief meditation is intended for those whom the religious establishment has written off as too fringe and misfitting to be considered welcome among the piously faithful. If you find yourself among the marginalized, by all means read on. But if you feel comfortable within American Christianity, perhaps it would be better to move along. Nothing to see here.)
Now that that’s out of the way. . . .
“Sin is lawlessness” (I John 3:4).
“For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Gal. 5:14).
“Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10).
When the topic of “sin” is discussed among religious folk (excuse me, among those who have “a personal relationship with Jesus”), the focus is usually upon the violation of a set of laws — the Ten Commandments, the tenets of the GOP platform, whatever. The underlying assumption is, as the apostle John writes above, that sinning is tantamount to breaking God’s Law.
But perhaps we’re not seeing the whole picture?
If “sin is lawlessness,” full stop, then sure, sinning means violating some prohibition or command: When you worship Allah, you’re sinning; when you have sex outside of marriage, you’re sinning; when you accept the gays and their deviant lifestyle, you’re sinning. You get the idea.
But what is the point of the law, and what does it mean to keep it?
If the New Testament teaches us anything, it should be that the entire legal system — what is sometimes referred to as “the Law and the Prophets” — is not fulfilled by a literal keeping of its various and sundry commands, but finds its fulfillment instead in the love that we show toward our neighbor, the Other, and even our enemy.
Therefore all the pious sanctimony in the world matters not if love is absent, and the strictest obedience to the Bible’s demands, without love of neighbor, carries zero weight.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (I Cor. 13:1-3).
Law-keeping, therefore, means loving others. And correspondingly, sinning means failing to do so.
So if you’re the kind of person who is prone to “confess your sins” (whether to God or to a priest), try an experiment: Instead of wringing your hands and mea culpa-ing over looking at boobies on the Internet, seek forgiveness for the times you silently derided welfare mothers for their laziness or subtly wondered whether that college coed in the short skirt was kind of “asking for it” when attending that party.
Because if there is such thing as a “Judgment Day” (whatever that may look like), many of us may be surprised when it turns out that our entire pious pedigree amounts to little more than a big ol’ pile of shit (Phil. 3:8).
