Jesus tells us that to love God and neighbor is the sum of the law. When someone asks him to clarify his teaching, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. In it the one who loves is the Samaritan; those who fail to love – the priest and Levity – are sinners. Surprisingly we may notice that while Jesus has indicted (implicitly) the latter, he does not lead the listener to consider the wrongdoing of those who beat up the poor man on that famous road to Jericho. In fact, throughout the Gospels, sin is not attributed to obvious wrongdoers, but consistently to those who don’t bother to love.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus, for example, tells of a man who never bothered to notice his brother at the gate and who is punished for his negligence with hell fire. Similarly, the guest who fails to bother with the proper wedding garment is cast out to gnash his teeth. Matthews last Judgment separates the sheep from the goats, those who bothered to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned from those who did not bother and are condemned. Sin in the Gospels is always about not bothering to love. Most people are able to recognize their own wrongdoing.
We know, can easily name, ND confess when we bad-mouth someone, indulge in an obsession, let our anger fly, or act irresponsibly. But we don’t so easily recognize our failures to love. In the Gospels, the sinner is usually blind to the sinning. The rich man didn’t realize his sinning. The “goats” ask where and when they had sinned. And even the famous Pharisee, standing in the Temple with the breast-beating Publican, is clueless to his own sinfulness. NOT BOTHERING TO LOVE Certainly one reason we are blind to our sinfulness is that for centuries we have held an overly simplistic view of sin: anything wrong that we did, we called sin.
The very thing Christians are so familiar with we understand poorly. Were Jesus to return today, the parables he would tell about sinfulness would likely be the very same ones en told two thousand years ago, tort like Jesus’ contemporaries we, too, believe that sin is about wrongdoing and not about not bothering to love. The other reason is that it is the nature of sin to blind us, to dull our senses. While causing harm may be easy to recognize, it is difficult to spot a cold or uninterested heart. When our hearts are cold, dull, or lukewarm they can’t tell us much.
Like the oats, the rich man, the Levity, or the Pharisee, the hearts of sinners have not been “bothered” or “unsettled”; they are content, complacent, resting assured. A German moral theologian Franz Buckle argues in what appears to be reverse order that until we confess our sinfulness, we are blind to it. By confessing, we are illuminated; by actually naming where we did not bother to love we begin to see how deeply we sinned. The confession of sin is itself, Buckle writes, “effective. ” It lets me the sinner know that I have sinned and how deeply. But if I don’t confess, then I am like the Pharisee, thanking God that I am no Publican.
The German moral theologian, Josef Fuchs, once made a wonderful distinction between regret and repentance. When people love and err they experience regret. Like parent’s who make simple mistakes – the wrong turn, the wrong date, the wrong shirt size – they usually regret the error more than anyone affected by it. Likewise, students who told painful stories about their parent’s were able to see how strongly their parent’s loved them precisely by the depth of their parent’s’ regret for the harm they had caused. They saw in their parent’s’ faces or heard in their words of apology, he depth of love that prompted their regret.
Loving people regret the harm their shortcomings cause. Repentance, though, is different. Unlike regret, which comes from within the loving person, repentance usually comes as a summon from without. It challenges us to see where we did not bother to strive, to love, to grow. Unlike regret that usually comes precisely from those areas where we are weak, repentance addresses those areas of our lives where we are strong ? namely, where we could have bothered, where we were able. In those areas of our lives the call to repentance asks, could we have tried more or better?
Too easily we associate sin with weakness, but in the Gospel sin occurs precisely where one is strong. The rich man could have shared his riches, the priest and the Levity could have taken care of the wounded man, the “goats” could have responded to the neighbor in need. Most of us try our hardest precisely where we are weakest, but the story of sin, like the call to repentance, concerns those areas of our lives where we could have tried harder, precisely because we were so able. Christ Judges not the weak heart that struggles, but rather the strong one that does not bother. In the last analysis, we sin out of strength, not weakness.
