Romans
5:12-17
The ancient Greek land of Phrygia
had been caught up in all kinds of struggles and wars for many years when its
council met to choose a new king. Legend
had it that one day a good ruler would come to them riding in an oxcart, and it
just happened that as they were in session a poor man named Midas (yes, that
Midas – the one with the golden touch and the muffler company) rode into town
in just such a cart, so naturally they made him king. In gratitude, and to symbolize the end of his
wanderings and the end of constant policy changes among the Phrygians, he
dedicated his oxcart to Zeus and tied it to a pole in the city’s central
area. He used an unusual kind of knot that
left no ends exposed, and the rope was made of bark that hardened and shrank as
it dried. He prophesied, as a way of
reassuring the city of political stability, that no one would become conqueror
of that country who could not undo the knot.
It became known as the “Gordian Knot”, named after Midas’s father, and
it stumped people for centuries. Then,
in 333 B.C., a Macedonian named Alexander came into the city, took out his
sword, chopped through the knot, and went on to conquer Greece and Egypt and
Asia.
From the beginning of time, human beings
had been trying to, as the saying goes, untie the Gordian Knot of sin. It would only be when God took direct action
through Jesus that it would be solved.
We tend to think of sin as something
that we do or fail to do. There are sins
of commission – when someone steals or murders, for instance – and sins of
omission – as when they choose not to help someone in danger or not to feed the
hungry. There are sins of thought, word,
and deed. Classical Christian theology
divides all of this into mortal sins – those that are freely chosen despite an
awareness of their sinfulness and that they have grave consequences – and
venial sins – those that are done unthinkingly and have lesser effect versus
those that are done deliberately and with greater effect. On the other hand, there is also a school of
thought that says that sin is sin – that you may go over the speed limit by ten
or forty miles per hour and either way you are speeding.
While all of these are valid and
practical ways of being aware of what we do and keeping watch over our
consciences, the mere admission that we all sin mindlessly from time to time
points to a much deeper problem.
Individual instances of sin may be chosen, but sin itself may be more
like a pervasive force in human nature itself.
Just like the Gordian Knot that became more solid and tighter with time,
once released into the world sin becomes more intractable as it becomes
embedded in the systems and expectations of our lives.
Consider advertisements. They’re all around us every day. Advertising tries to convince us that one
item is better than another, although they may be produced in the same plant
and just packaged or labeled differently.
But do we really believe that Bounty is better than Brawny or that
Charmin is better than Scott’s? Or do we
generally check out the price and go with that?
We accept that ads are going to be out there, that they will try to
convince us to buy what we don’t need, and that they will make exaggerated
claims about how happy the right frozen pizza will make us. Sometimes it even works. Doesn’t that amount to creating a false
version of reality, though? And isn’t creating
or knowingly living in a false reality an accurate description of sin?
When Paul talks about sin in his
letter to the Romans, his language becomes all convoluted because he’s talking
about a condition that is all tangled up and that tangles us up in its various
strands until the good and the bad are so mixed up we don’t always know which
is which. Something might be wrong and
we don’t even know it unless somebody points it out.
“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and
death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—sin
was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is
no law.” [Romans 5:12-13]
Think
about the whole business of tipping in restaurants. Food service workers are payed at a lower
rate than other hourly workers. When a
restaurant decides that the fair thing to do is to offer a decent wage and then
to forgo tipping, they have to put prices up and that puts customers off, even
though they may actually pay less in the long run. So in order to stay in business a restaurant
will have to pay an unfair wage and in order to remain employed the staff will
have to accept a large degree of uncertainty in their income. In order to keep things going smoothly, we
just all sort of agree not to confront the system.
It’s the Gordian Knot: look and try
to figure it out or do something about it, but nothing works because you cannot
find the beginning or the end.
That’s why God sent Jesus to cut
through it.
Jesus was the one person who managed
never to become entangled in sin. He was
human, yes, and tempted like the rest of us.
He got hungry and tired. He had
friends who just didn’t get him, and enemies who did. He knew what it was to have people turn their
backs on him, to have his name maligned by people who had never even met him,
and to be held in suspicion because of the good that he did. He was also divine, though, and the will of
God – which is the opposite of sin – was always at work within him, even to the
core of his being where the intentions of the heart are found. He never even sinned by thought, let alone
word or deed.
That made him the one person ever
who could see and judge sin clearly in all of its disguises. That also made him the one person who could
forgive sin without any taint of excusing it out of self-interest or fear of
hypocrisy. And he forgave freely. He forgives freely even now, cutting through
the guilt and the shame and everything else that death brings with it and wraps
around us.
“But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many
died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and
the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the
effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgement following one trespass brought
condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass,
death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who
receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise
dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.” [Romans 5:15-17]
So we do fall into sin, over and
over and over again. We do not, however,
have to stay there. Instead of the
Gordian Knot it once was, with the grace of God it’s more like what happens
when I’m walking the dogs and stop paying attention long enough for their
leashes to get all mixed up and wrapped around my legs and theirs until we can
figure it and then move on, hoping nobody (of course) was watching.
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