What Today's Gospel Says about Sin

The Sin of Scandal

          Today’s Gospel [https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111025.cfm ] says three things about sin.  Let’s consider them.

Scandal: Scandal is a sin by which one’s words or actions harm another spiritually.  Bad example is always wrong, but scandal tends to add to the evil by turning the other person against the good.  The other person has some sense of right and wrong, which scandal offends.  It offends because the person committing scandal is one looked up to, seen as a role model or good example – and turns out to have clay feet.

We are all sinners.  But that’s not an excuse.  We also need to remember that sin is social: all our sins affect others.  Even the most private and hidden of our sins affect others because they deprive us of the grace for us to be fully alive in Christ as we should be. 

At the same time, some of us have particular responsibilities.  Public sins by priests or religious are particularly scandalous because, by virtue of their office and state of life, more is expected of them morally.  That's why lancing the clerical sexual abuse scandal must be a priority.  But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook.  The ancients reveled in the dignity of being called “Christians” and – well, noblesse oblige.  Vatican II makes it clear that Christians who don’t live as Christians can also be responsible for atheism – for causing people not to believe in God – when their lives contradict what a Christian life should be.

Correction: The Gospel clearly considers moral correction of a sinner a Christian obligation.  It’s not discretionary.  The Christian tradition even calls it a “spiritual work of mercy.”  Our world, which is afraid to call good good or evil evil, might imagine that’s “judgmental.”  But being enlightened by Christ means recognizing there is good and there is evil – and the twain doesn’t meet.

That doesn’t mean running around and making one’s self insufferable, especially when one might have one’s own moral baggage: Jesus also warned about trying to extract specks from a brother’s eye when one’s approach is barred by the beam in one’s own (Mt 7:5).  But that doesn’t mean ignoring the other side of the ledger: that, sometimes, people need to hear the word that “what you’re doing isn’t right.”  Perhaps they have not thought about it.  Perhaps they have but are struggling with temptation.  Perhaps they’ve drifted from the Church.  A word for the good, spoken at the right time and place, can be salvific.

Forgiveness: Our goal is not to “judge” another but to support each other in repenting and believing the Gospel (Mk 1:15).  All too often, however, people cling to their “rights” and refuse to “forgive,” judging the sincerity of the other even when he asks for forgiveness.  One should not be naïve.  Neither, however, should one hide behind supposed “clear-sightedness” as one’s own way to nurse grievances and offenses, especially about the past that – like it or not – cannot be changed.  One can choose to live a new life in the future or to try to import the past to poison it in an ongoing way.  The Gospel is clear which is the Christian way.