Temptations to Sin

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today confront a common attitude to sin where we depend on the infinite mercy in our relationship with the Divine to “fix up” those transgressions which we habitually fall into. It is possible that these are areas of addictive behaviour and that we have great difficulty in withdrawing our human self from the temporal pleasure or satisfaction which we deeply enjoy. The debate over the nature of sin is given some benchmarks in the Gospel of Mark today. The so called ‘personal sin’ is often argued to be victimless. The Evangelist echoes Jesus caution that our example not be an obstacle to the intimacy with the Divine sought by others. In education, we often set the disruption of the education of others in the group as the bar which differentiates some disruptive behaviour from some engaged activity. The line from Mark 9:48 “where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched” paints an image of desperate consequences of sin. The separation from the intimate contact with the Divine is an expected consequence of turning away from the relationship. The co-existence of Good and Evil is a mystery which requires the diminishing of one as the other increases. Farley Mowatt( No Birds Sang) wrote of his experience in the Italian campaign of WWII using the text from Mark to describe the “hell” of war. The psalmist offers a choice to the wanderer on the spiritual journey to choose the company which feeds the Good of our nature. The wisdom literature of the Book of Sirach reveals the observation of seekers that God is both mercy and wrath. A rabbi, Harold Gushner, commenting on the 23rd psalm suggests that the ‘staff and the rod’ of the Divine are not only necessary but the relationship with humanity requires that God be just and ‘deliver justice’.