Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year B
Exodus 20.1-17 Psalm 19 1 Corinthians 1.22-25 John 2.13-25
Almost exactly two years ago, a fire destroyed St. Anne Catholic Church in New Castle, Indiana. The fire was a result of arson, set after a theft gone wrong. Just recently, the arsonist confessed and was sentenced. Last weekend, a pastor was shot and killed during Sunday services at a church in Maryville, Illinois. Just two days later, eleven people died in a shooting rampage in Alabama. And on Thursday, the man behind a multi-billion dollar financial scam was convicted of fraud and perjury and sentenced to jail. We understand crime – we may not understand why people commit crime, but we do understand that certain actions violate laws, take away other people’s rights and property, and cause harm to the good of both individuals and society. And today, as we listen to the Ten Commandments God gave to Moses, it’s easy to equate many of these commandments with crime – to take another’s life, to steal, to lie under oath. But that’s just the surface. The Ten Commandments are not really about crime, they’re about sin – and it’s much harder for us to understand sin.
The textbook definition of sin is that it is a turning away from God; a thought, action, or inaction that separates us from the image of Christ that is within us. A sin is different from a crime in terms of whom it affects: crimes affect people and property, while sin can affect people and property, but sin first and foremost always affects God. There are major sins, like intentionally killing an innocent human being, or deliberate and vocal hatred of a group of people; actions like rape and child molestation. But most of us are caught up in the smaller sins – the daily sins that we can so easily fall into. We fail to truly honor our parents or other authority figures. We do not observe a day of worship and rest on Sundays. We participate in new ways of stealing, like pirating music or software or violating copyright laws. We spread gossip easily and readily, making our stories about other people more and more colorful and less and less truthful as we tell them. We dishonor the truth about someone’s life by judging them, and telling everyone we know what we think. We lust with the eyes, we covet with our minds – even if we never go beyond our thoughts. And perhaps more than any other sin, we trust in ourselves more than we trust in God.
And the thing is – we all do it; we all sin. There is not a single person in this church today who does not sin. But that doesn’t mean that we can just accept our sinfulness and move on. At the other end of the spectrum, we can’t just put the entire human race in prison. At the very end of today’s gospel, St. John tells us that Jesus understood the human nature very well (John 2.25). Jesus knows what we are like, he knows that we are sinners; but he also knows that we have the divine image within us, he knows that we can be so much better, so much more like him than we are. Does he get angry when we sin? Sure he does, because he knows we can do better. But deeper than any anger is a pure love and forgiveness, a recognition that with God’s grace and wisdom, we can overcome sin, we can become more like God.
None of us are perfect; we are human, and we sin. But God is perfect, and God can help us to sin less and to be more like him. That’s the journey of Lent, the journey out of oneself and toward the cross and resurrection. It’s the journey made possible through the Sacraments, especially Reconciliation and Eucharist. It’s the journey that is strengthened and nourished each time we gather together as a community of sinners to pray to our God. In our weakness, all we need to do is look to God, whose own weakness “is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1.25).
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