What are we turning from (and toward) in Lent?

These days during Lent we focus on the ways in which we need to turn away from sin. But what exactly is sin anyway? We might say we know it when we see it, for sure. But it might be helpful to propose a working “definition” of it in order to help our reflection together.

Let me suggest that sin is nothing more (and nothing less) than the disruption or breaking of relationship with God. It can be particular in that particular actions on our part can harm or break off to varying degrees, our relationship with God. Or sin can be more fundamental or pervasive in that ongoing attitudes or dispositions of selfishness or desires for isolation from God can rightly be called “sin”.

Recall that in the mass, we pray in the Gloria, “Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin (singular) of the world”. But we also pray at the Agnus Dei, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins (plural) of the world”.

We are conscious every time we celebrate the liturgy that this ruptured relationship between God and us is one characterized by both the particularity of our individual sins, but also by the generality of our collective condition in humanity which is in a state of “sin” broadly understood. Consequently, we need saving as individuals, but we also need saving together. We believe that God wishes to oblige us on both accounts.

Jesus Christ: Kenosis in its Perfection

“Though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-7). The hymn St. Paul refers to so early in his letter to the Philippians is a classic expression of the self-emptying nature of God in Christ. The fact that this was most likely already being used as a kind of formula of faith for believing communities, suggests that the faithful, at some deep level, were able to appropriate very early on this reality of the saving action of God in Christ. Even if it would take centuries to hone the meaning of the Incarnation in terms of the effects of it on Jesus’ humanity and divinity, it seems that almost immediately, there was some substantial degree of assent of faith to the core reality very early on in the history of Christian faith.

Triune Thumbnail

Relationship is at the core of the doctrine of the Trinity. To say that God is Triune is to say that at the heart of who God is, is a set of relationships. In Jesus, Christians believe they are seeing in incarnate or human form, the face of the divine, specifically, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. But notice the intimacy with which he speaks of his relationship with his Father and the Spirit. The intimacy is so profound that there is a oneness or unity which is both the source and aim of these relations. The threeness is one and the oneness is three. There is stability and dynamism at once.
If we turn to our own lives for a moment, we realize that those moments or experiences which carry the greatest meaning are those which somehow are marked by relationship, intimacy and forgetting of self in “the other”. To use a romantic image, the man and woman who fall in love with one another undergo a change in that the focus is no longer on the self, the individual, but on the other. Each “forgets” him or herself in the loving gaze at the other. In the course of the relationship, they solidify that love in marriage and the mutual love and giving away of self results in a third. The child now enters into the picture, the fruit of the love of the two. The love could not be contained simply between the husband and wife. The goodness and beauty of the relationship overflowed, if you will, and the product of that love is another who would now become the object of the love of the parents and over time, as the child becomes cognizant of the love shown by the parents, he or she also actively engages in this dynamic of the loving gaze, toward the mother at one time, toward the father at another and of course a similar, if distinctive gaze is returned by the parents. At their best, each of the three “forgets” him or herself for love of the others.
While this of course is not a constant in the life of the family (the teen-age years do approach inevitably), hopefully there are at least moments of this kind of goodness and beauty. These moments are the truth of our lives. In them, we see our best selves, our true selves. If it is true as Christians and Jews believe, they we are made in the image and likeness of God, then somehow, God is like this. God is expressed in his very nature as relational. In the establishment of the covenant with Israel, that loving gaze is made formal. For Christians, this covenant is brought again into focus in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And through this Jesus and the relationship he attests to with the Father and the Spirit, Christians come to believe that somehow the very nature or essence of God is relationship. As such, he acts always in a relationship of love toward his creation but also in himself, Father, Son and Spirit. To remind ourselves then, what our own true selves look like, Christians do well to consider the mutual love and relationship of the Trinity, both in itself and in the way that Trinity reaches out in love to humanity. At the same time, we come to have some felt experience for what the Triune God is like in so far as we reflect upon the truth, goodness and beauty of our own lives and the experiences of love and intimacy and mutual outpouring we have and recognize in them, glimpses into the very life and heart of God.