Sin, Love, and Forgiveness
George Herbert, in his poem “The Agonie”, says that mankind is driven to measure and to understand all manner of things: mountains, seas, states, and kings. The geography of the created order and the arrangements of mankind’s affairs work upon our curiosity, our imagination, and our desire for knowledge and order, and are subjects of perennial interest. Herbert goes on, however, to say that there are two “vast, spacious things” which we ought to work to understand, but which mankind perennially neglects. These are “Sinne and Love”.
It’s fashionable to deride our Christian ancestors, especially those who lived in the “Dark Ages” (a time whose boundaries seem infinitely elastic, depending on the needs of the speaker) with a preoccupation with sin, and with sin’s unshakeable companion, guilt. Such folks would probably say that our culture has made too much of a study of sin, and that we’re better off concentrating on love. Love, after all, doesn’t care about sin, but only about the person. Our religious culture (what there is left of it) tells us that when we abandon the straightjacket categories of sin and its accompanying guilt, we show that we really care about people - that we really love them.
But Herbert isn’t concerned to pay the piper of this age (or even of his own - something his biographers have all noted), or to hear those tunes. His ear was trained upon the voice of his Lord, his eye upon the face of his Lord, and he knew that one of the basic tricks of the enemy is to divide the Lord from His Body, the Church, and from the Church’s consistent teaching regarding the Lord. Herbert was a priest, and as such he knew that our Lord’s voice is discerned in the consensus of His Body through time.
In that consensus our Lord teaches us that sin isn’t understood by looking at sin, or by enquiring about sin, or even, in the end, by studying sin (though these activities have their place). Sin isn’t anything positive; it has no being. It is, to use a very good “King James Bible word”, naughtiness — nothingness. Sin is a lack, an emptiness, a void - sin is the black hole of the spiritual cosmos into which everything — even being itself — tends to disappear. That is why Father Herbert could describe sin as a “vast, spacious” thing, and it is a mark of his poetical genius that he used the same words to describe both sin and love, though the rest of the poem shows that what at first seems a comparison is actually a dis-similarity. Sin’s vast spaciousness is all empty, devoid of light and life and being. Love’s vast spaciousness is a plenitude, full of everything sin lacks. Sin blinds us to love’s plenitude, just as being very ill deprives us of energy and liveliness. And the first thing sin tends to blind us to is the fact of our sin. So we don’t see ourselves accurately and we don’t seek healing.
In fact, it is only by looking at Love that sin can be shown, as if in relief. Love is the real thing; sin is the shadow. Love has length, and breadth, and height, and depth; sin is flat and ultimately unreal. But we come to know these things about sin only by looking at Love, and of course for Herbert, Love is not an emotion or a thought, but a Person: Jesus Christ. If we want to understand sin, we must look at our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the hours that follow. There we will see “a man so wrung with pains, that all his hair, / His skinne, his garments bloudie be”. This is what happens when Love encounters the naughtiness of sin, when Love enters the black hole at the center of the fallen universe. We understand sin best when we see what it does to our Lord, who undertook to destroy it from within. If you want to know all you need to know about sin, then look at this bloody Man in Gethsemane, bloody from Love’s battle with sin before ever a scourge bit his skin or a nail fixed him to a wooden beam.
But the same sight shows us all we need to know about Love. Our Lord suffers and dies and rises again for us; then, perhaps more surprisingly, he gives us his very crucified Body and his spilled Blood to feed his life within us. Herbert describes this truth in startlingly original lines: “Love is that liquor sweet, and most divine, / which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine”. The Way of the Cross teaches us all we need to know about sin, and about Love; about God, and about ourselves; everything about everything is found here, for the Passion is the heart of it all.
It does us well to remember that all of this is because of us. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent; but the psalmist speaks more wisely when he cries, “For I acknowledge my faults, and my sin is ever before me. Against thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51:3-4). But we also must remember that we should never see sin without seeing Love. Love doesn’t excuse sin; Love forgives sin, and then Love makes provision for our growth in holiness. Love provides the Medicine of Immortality and the full course of treatment that alone can heal us.
Never look at sin without looking at Love: we’re happy enough to apply this Good News to ourselves (though we must acknowledge that this is a struggle for some), but we must also apply it to those who sin, or seem to sin, against us. Our Lord tells us explicitly that we will not be forgiven unless we forgive. How much should we forgive? Remember that Love doesn’t excuse sin (in ourselves or in others), but fully forgives it. The Way of the Cross is the Way of Full Forgiveness for everyone, for everything, forever.
Of course, we can’t achieve this kind of forgiveness on our own. As with everything, our Lord must do this work within us. But something is required of us: the act of will, even if very weak and unwilling, which cries out, “Lord, give me grace to forgive those who trespass against me”. And then a generous cooperation with that grace in letting go of all resentment, bitterness, anger, wrath — in short, of all the things that threaten to drag us away from Christ and into the black hole of nothingness. Nothing sends us back to our sickbed as quickly as a grievance nursed!
Forgive everyone for everything. This is the Way of the Cross, the Way of Forgiveness. This will teach us all we need to know about sin and Love, and will set us on the Way of Life.
