Understanding Sin

Reflection on Sin and Reconciliation: A Journey Home

In this episode, Fr Richard Healey delves into the themes of sin, reconciliation, and the invitation to return to God, using the parable of the Prodigal Son as a focal point. He explains the multifaceted nature of sin through Hebrew terms like khata (missing the mark), avon (crookedness), and pasha (breach of trust). Fr Richard highlights the boundless love of God, who eagerly awaits our return, no matter how far we’ve strayed. As we journey through Lent, he encourages us to reflect, seek reconciliation, and deepen our relationship with God.

00:00:00 So Jesus is accused of eating with sinners. Being someone that keeps company with the people that normally the Pharisees, the scribes, the religious ones wouldn’t associate with. And yet, Jesus seems quite happy to mix with people who society says are sinners. We are generally pretty good at knowing who the sinners are. After all, you know, we all have our categories of people that don’t quite measure up, people that we are able to identify as sinners. And yet it’s quite clear in Scripture, quite clear in the teaching of the church that all of us are sinners. All of us were invited on Ash Wednesday to turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel. So we’re invited during this season of lent to come back home, to return to the way of God. To allow the Lord to invite us into this journey of reconciliation. This gift of the new creation, Paul says in our second reading today. What does that mean? What does this word sin even mean? When we look at the scriptures in the Old Testament.

00:01:23 For example, there are three main words that we find that describe different aspects of sin. The first and the most common is what we normally just simply translate as sin. In Hebrew, it’s the word Khata, and it’s that sense of just failure. Something didn’t go right. We missed the mark. So if you’re training like King David to be great at the slingshot, you want to be able to experience that thrill of whatever target you aim for, that you’re able to hit with that stone when you sling it, and David became quite good at that. He very rarely Carter. He very rarely missed the mark. So if we’re invited to hit the mark, well, what does that mean? What’s the mark? What are we invited into? Well, the beginning of the story. Back in Genesis, at the story of creation, we were told that we were invited to be the image bearers of God. We were. We have this capacity to be in the very presence of God, to be in a friendship, a relationship with God, that he invites us into that experience of love.

00:02:37 So to miss the mark in that context is to fail to love, to not be the kind of people that God has called us to be. A second word that we hear in the scriptures is translated into English as iniquity. And that’s the word Avon. It’s more about the sense, the experience of something that isn’t the way that we want it to be, something that’s a bit crooked. You know, if you’re driving along a country road and they pretty much just put the road where the old farmer’s used to to simply drive the horse and buggy around the side of the hill. You know, you get those old dirt tracks that just wind their way around the hill. They go down into the valleys. They climb up on the top of the hill. There’s no cuttings. There’s very few bridges. There’s very few kind of filling ins of the gullies. And so that would be this experience of something that is Ivan, something that is crooked. That’s not the way that it’s meant to be. And so we want things to be better.

00:03:43 We called into a life that perfects things and makes things better than they currently are. A third experience refers to a sense of friendship, a relationship with other people. So when you have a neighbor or a friend or a relation, or when two countries have made a treaty with each other, then someone breaches that trust, something that is established and built up, but there’s been a breach of that. That’s this experience in Hebrew that’s called Pasha. That experience of something where we want the trust to be there. A husband has been unfaithful to his wife. All of those experiences of breaching the trust. So if you go on holidays and someone breaks into your house and steals something from you, well, the word in in Hebrew to describe that is simply robbery. But if it’s your next door neighbor who knows that you’ve gone away on holidays, and they’re the one who breaks into the house and steals something, you don’t call that robbery. You call that this breach of trust because you expect to be able to trust your neighbor.

00:04:54 You expect to be able to rely on them. And so that’s this experience of, of pressure that this breach of trust. All of these were, of course, were able to recognize, perhaps within our own lives, these experiences of missing the mark, of not being true to who we were called to be, a breaching the trust that other people have placed within us. And we see all of them worked out in the parable that Jesus tells today of this son who was obviously fed up with the rule of his father. He’s had enough, and he wanted the freedom of so many young men want to have. And so he begs. His father makes this pleading father, can I have the share of my estate? Essentially he’s saying, father, I wish you were dead. It’s an awful thing for the youngest son to say, because the father would have to liquidate some property, have to sell what he could to get one third of the estate. That was the due of the younger son. The older son would have got two thirds of the estate if there are only the two sons, and so the younger son takes what he has.

00:06:00 Goes off to a distant land into exile, and begins to spread broadly, and begins to to waste the money. That’s where we get the word prodigal, that someone who is wasteful with the resources that he has. And in the midst of that, when the money runs out and the land is now coming to a state of famine, there’s not the food available to feed him, and there’s this hunger that enters into him as he hits rock bottom and he realizes, hey, even the servants back home have it better than I do right now. And so he begins to think about the journey home, begins to come up with an excuse of how he might beg and plead for the possibility of being a servant and the house of his father. He never anticipates, never expects that the father will reconcile with him, never anticipates that the father will be there searching for him, longing for him to return the best he can imagine. This is the oldest son. The best that he can imagine. Is that the father might give him a scrawny goat to eat with his friends.

00:07:04 Both of them clearly don’t have this vivid sense of who the father truly is. And yet, as the younger son makes his way back, the father is there, scanning the horizon, looking out, longing for the son to return. Wanting him to come back home. And when he sees him. You know that moment of anticipation. Could that possibly be. He’s got the shape. He’s got the silhouette of my son. And the son begins to draw closer. And he realizes, yes, that’s my son. And he begins to to run wildly towards the youngest son and everyone who who is who heard this story when Jesus told it would have been like, oh, come on. There’s no way that a patriarch, no way that someone in that situation or position would run in public. No one would ever do that. It wasn’t fitting of the dignity and honor of his role. And think that’s precisely what the the father does to run, to embrace his son, to call to the servants, to come, put the ring on his finger, put sandals on his feet, clothe him in the cloak that is the right of the inheritance, the right of the son, and all of this sense of restoration and renewal.

00:08:14 Now the father is often imagined as a a God like figure, but we see lots of faults in the father’s actions as well. The fact that the son chose to rebel in the first place is a sign that the relationship wasn’t quite right. The fact that he doesn’t go in this moment and call the older brother to come, come and experience the joy of your brother returning home, he doesn’t do that. And so there is this sense of neglect that we have in the actions of the father. It’s important to to recognize and to identify that. But as the family, as the night draws on, as the party celebrates the. it’s. The older brother begins to come and is bamboozled by all of the actions that are unfolding around them. We’re invited into that experience of where are we in this situation? How have we responded to God’s call to be free from all of those experiences of sin, a transgression of iniquity, all the ways that our relationships have been hurt by the wound of sin, that we carry all the ways that we have chosen not to love, not to respond, not to hit the mark of God’s life, what he’s called us to be.

00:09:26 As we reach the halfway point of the season of lent. Let’s renew our desire and our efforts to respond to his love, to let God call us more deeply into his friendship. Let’s take that invitation to come on home and to find the new creation of life. As we reconcile ourselves with God, and as we turn to the Lord and experience his friendship and his freedom, calling us into peace and calling us back home to the house of the father.