The tradition speaks of sin as a “contagion”. We are so used
to thinking of sin as individual transgression, that we miss the point. As
individual transgressors, we ARE all forgiven. That is what for-giveness means. Any debt we think
we have incurred by our immoral actions has been forgiven before we were born.
The Sin that is “contagious” is a condition – like a disease – that infects us
all.
This is why
Sin seems – in some mysterious sense – to be external to ourselves (“The good
that I would I do not, the evil that I would not, that I do”). Tradition calls
it The Evil One. It is the “Evil’,
from which our Lord taught is to pray for deliverance: not a person, like us,
but a mysterious fact about us, which Augustine called the mysterium iniquitatis. It is what causes people to do things they
never thought they would or even could do. It takes over completely in the
chaos of war, when perfectly decent men and women do indescribable things. It
is manifest in blood-lust, rape, and torture. But it is present, in principle,
whenever one group defines another as alien, whenever one person judges
another, whenever an unkind word is spoken, whenever a thought less than
charitable is entertained. The difference between these “little sins” and the
Nazi annihilation camps is only a difference of degree.
In the face of this horror we have
some choice: we can excuse ourselves. “It wasn’t me; I wasn’t in my right mind”.
In other words, “the devil made me do it”. And, in a sense, we are right. “The
devil” is the condition in which we all
participate, whether we want to or not. Or
we can also seek to justify ourselves, which is worse: “they had it coming”. [This
kind of thinking still dominates the American narrative concerning Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.]
But there is another choice. Not
every soldier becomes a rapist. Not every injured person seeks revenge. We do
not have to return evil for evil. In fact Christians are commanded not to do
so, and, rather, to love our enemies. As human beings, our life is communal. If
we damage another, we damage ourselves; if we condemn another, we condemn ourselves;
if we bless and forgive another, we bless and forgive ourselves. Not to do so
is to acquiesce in slavery to the mysterium
iniquitatis.
Our
Divine Savior has broken the hold of evil on us. When He forgave his
executioners, He destroyed the power of the mystery of evil. He also added that
the soldiers “(knew) not what they (did)”. They did it, but “the devil made
them do it”. They had been forgiven from
before the foundation of the world. The Lord’s prayer for the soldiers was for
our edification. Forgiveness of real injury may seem superhuman, but that’s
just an excuse – especially for those who look to the Cross for salvation. The
Godman’s victory over the Evil One enables us to forgive as He forgave.
And
forgive we must if we are to be delivered from the Evil One – because
forgiveness – our forgiveness of our enemies – IS deliverance from evil. That
is why the petition for deliverance follows the petition for forgiveness. One leads
to the other. In the act of forgiving those who sin against us, we are
delivered from the power of evil.* And right after we say the Lord’s Prayer we
receive the Blood “which was shed for you and for all, that sins may be
forgiven”. By taking Christ’s Death into ourselves in Holy Communion, we
receive not God’s forgiveness of our own sins, but the power to forgive those
who sin against us. And that divine power destroys the power of evil.
*[NOTE: Hebrew poetry, as in the
psalms, relied on repetition and paraphrase. To say “thy will be done” is to
say “thy Kingdom come” in another way. Perhaps also, to say “deliver us from
evil” is to repeat the petition about forgiveness.]
