Fourth Sunday of Lent
In this weekend’s first reading, we recount the people of Israel reaping the harvest of their iniquity. Before Jerusalem’s fall to the armies of Babylon, they gave themselves and their nation to sin: “infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations […] they mocked the messengers of God, despised His warnings and scoffed at His prophets.” The people had hardened their hearts to the Law of God and turned away from their relationship with Him.
It is only fitting and natural that when you close yourself off from He from Whom all blessings flow, only calamity and a broken society rife with sin and injustice ensue. In the gospel, John makes clear that this rejection of God and His grace can apply just as much to us as to the Israelites: “the light came into the world, but people preferred the darkness to light.”
He doesn’t say why people chose to live in the darkness rather than the light and there could be any number of reasons: Pride, Envy, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Vanity, and certainly Fear. Sin is a “personal act,” and each person might find themselves more moved by a few of these more the others (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 1868).
Regardless, in each of these sins and temptations, the human heart does a wonderful job of turning itself inside-out, turning itself away from God and its neighbor and pointing it inward towards itself. In sin, the heart closes itself off, sacrificing all, to protect itself from any danger or harm, from being challenged or used, from hearing the command to place concern for another above concern for oneself.
Such is sin and none of us are wholly free of its effects. Even worse though is that “sin creates a proclivity to sin […] which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself” (CCC., para. 1865). So, if we “make peace with sin” (“Oh, doing can’t be so bad.”) and allow it to have any hold in our lives, we are also allowing for its growth in our lives.
This dynamic of sin, as seen in the example of the people of Israel, can go far beyond just the scope and scale of the individual. We are not only responsible for our own personal actions, but “we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them […] by participating directly and voluntarily in them […] by ordering, advising, praising, or approving them,” by not obstructing them when we are called to, or by protecting those in their sin (CCC., para. 1868).
Sin goes even further, not only in our own personal actions or in our cooperation with the sins of others, but in how just an individual’s sin begin to shape the world and society around them. For example, in the context of the Church, there is no such thing as private sin: the Church is the Body of Christ and a sickness in one of its members is a sickness in the Body, a sickness which tends to spread.
Looking upon the fruits of personal sin in society as a whole, we can see how, “Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. "Structures of sin" are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a ‘social sin’” (CCC., para. 1869).
St. John Paul II spoke many times about structures of sin, having witnessed and survived a number of cultures and societies fitting the description. He understood these as cultures, laws, or institutions which, through their disposition, made it easier for man to sin and requiring perhaps even heroic virtue to accomplish even a simple upright act. Individual sins are the seed and as the “systemic” harvest, they praise what is evil in the eyes of God and condemn what is good; they teach what is false and they ignore or silence Truth.
Among many such examples, we can recognize such a structure as a society which would claim the right to another man’s life and freedom, not because of any crime he committed, but solely because he looks different, he’s not from here, and he’s not one of us. A society that has made peace with its sin can have a lot of momentum, which makes changing things to the right direction a slow process, but it starts on the level of me and you and whether we’ll harden our hearts against each other.
Families:
Pick one reading from this weekend (available here) and read through it together (before or after Mass)
Ask your children if they have any vocabulary questions. If there is a place name mentioned consider looking it up on a map (google maps is great!) and ask older children to briefly re-tell the story to see if they understood the basics of the message/reading.
As a parent whose youngest child is afraid of the dark I am struck by John’s observation that darkness is preferred to light. God made us to live in the light of his love. But this original friendship with God was corrupted by sin.
During the season of Lent, we try to fight this tendency by remembering God’s great mercy and the salvation that we have received through Jesus. We do not fear confessing our sins, knowing that God forgives us, and so, during Lent, we seek out opportunities to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
After your family gathers, sit for a time in darkness, then light a candle. Invite everyone to take turns talking about what it felt like to be in the darkness and to compare that to their feelings when the candle was lit. What are we able to see by the limited glow of the candlelight that we couldn’t see when we were sitting in darkness?
When a sin affects one person in our family, whether it’s anger, or racism, or lying, it affects the entire family. It’s the same with the world-wide Catholic Church and the United States of America. What affects one of us, affects all of us somehow. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Conclude in prayer together, thanking God for the great gift of forgiveness we have received through Jesus.
Pray together the Act of Contrition.
(adapted from Loyola Press, Sunday Connection)