As a religion nerd, I was excited to discover that Brides of Christ is now available to watch on the streaming service Stan. When my Grandma died, my family inherited a set of DVDs of the ABC miniseries and I remember watching it during long school holidays. I rewatched the whole series again last week, and delighted in the impish naughtiness of Sister Paul, the demure wisdom of Mother Ambrose, the intellectual combativeness of Sister Katherine and the rigid severity of Sister Agnes. Plus, it has both a young Philip Quast and a young Russell Crowe in supporting roles. It’s iconic.
There’s a scene that stood out to me, and normally I would describe it to you – but today the magic of the internet and the blessing of the lockdown mean I can share a short clip. So here’s Sister Agnes being asked about the grave sin of divorce.
Sister Agnes gave an account of the Western Christian view of sin, as it had evolved by the mid-twentieth century. The Roman mission has evolved particular nuances about mortal and venial sins, that we in the English dispensation don’t share – but the basic thrust is there. We are born inherently sinful, we then engage in sinful behaviour, and the antidote to all of that is baptism, faith and repentance. If you can hit that trifecta, then you go to the good place when you die. If you don’t, you don’t.
The trouble with the formula is, who defines what is sin and what isn’t? Some cases are open and shut – if you go out and wilfully murder someone for no reason, then we don’t have much to debate. But what if you neglect a child’s welfare because you yourself are carrying trauma from your own childhood that incapacitates you? Is that sin? What if you exploit your employees because you’ve been taught that profit is the primary aim of life, or because you want the best possible future for your kids? What if you lash out at someone not just because you hate them, but because you’ve absorbed so much unkindness for yourself it just has to go there? And what if, to use the example raised by those bright schoolgirls to Sister Agnes, you get divorced not because you are traitor to vows or out of selfishness, or to defy God, but because your marriage is no longer a safe place?
As a priest, people often ask me to arbitrate the severity of particular sins. I did such and such, is that a sin? How bad of a sin? Does it help that there were extenuating circumstances? I’m not particularly sorry – does that matter? Of course, I try not to get involved in the practice of categorising and ranking sins – but it doesn’t stop people asking!
Through the great fifty days of Easter, we are exploring the first letter of John. Two weeks ago, the first sermon in this series dealt with a bit of the context. 1 John is a letter from an unnamed person that we call The Elder, who is writing to a group of churches in a network. There has been some disharmony, so The Elder is writing to restate their purpose. In particular, there is a group labelled antichristus, against Christ, who have been dividing the communities.
In last week’s reading, we heard the following phrases ‘Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness… You know that Christ was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.’
The thing is, we use the word ‘sin’ all the time, as though its meaning is self-evident. But the word The Elder uses is hamartia which derives from the verb ‘to miss’ as in ‘to miss the mark’. The word was used in the ancient Greek-speaking world to refer to the fatal flaw in a hero that leads to their downfall. In the Christian scriptures, the term takes on some extra nuance – it’s not just particular acts or behaviours, but the inherent state of humanity. But The Elder doesn’t just use hamartia in a general sense to say ‘we are all sinners’, but to emphasise that there are particular acts that arise out of hamartia. So in English we say ‘committing a sin’ as opposed to simply being sinful.
In today’s reading, which follows straight on, The Elder contrasts sin with love. It’s not completely explicit, but structurally it is clear that, having outlined the dangers of hamartia, The Elder wants to show the correct way. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death… we know love by this, that Christ laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
There’s a couple of key points here.
Firstly, this message is directed at those who have ‘passed from death to life’. Instead of inhabiting a body which is going to decay in the ground, they inhabit a body which will be resurrected into the new creation. Part of the evidence, or one of the indicators for this new life they inhabit, is that the old rivalries and selfishness can be extinguished, and replaced by mutual affection and kindness. In fact, The Elder makes clear, if you are baptised and you say that you believe, but don’t love others, you are still living in the old world of death. The love that he is talking about, he clarifies, is not romantic love or familial love or even particularly liking other people and wanting to spend time with them – the love The Elder is talking about is laying down one’s life for others. And then he clarifies even further, just so no one is in any doubt, that God’s love is evident when we have something, see someone in need, and help them.
This all brings me back to this question of assessing and categorising sinfulness. The institutional church, in her inestimable wisdom, has over time sought to provide lists and guidelines to help the faithful to discern right conduct. The trouble is, that the lists are usually made by men with a warped view of sex, and the guidelines are usually written by boffins whose relationship to the real world is a little skewed.
So I would suggest that we can learn a little from The Elder and their first letter. Rather than rigidly defining and tightly listing all the possible sins, The Elder takes it as a given that we all know when we mess up. Because, for the most part, we do. He gives us a picture of what doing good looks like, to help us work out what doing bad looks like.
Perhaps it’s helpful to think of like ice dancing.
The Risen Christ has created a beautiful routine, a stunning set of steps with cool spinny bits and razzle dazzle hands and big sweeping loops and all that. When we are baptised and come to new faith, we start out kind of hanging on the edges of the ice rink, staggering along, falling over, taking our first tentative steps. We might look at Christ and think, I can never do that. I can never be so free and strong and full of energy. But the Christ is persistent, helping us, little by little, to soar. It’s a life’s work, and actually most of die before we get the triple whatsie turny thingo right – but the thing is, we know how it goes, and even if it is imperfect, we know the bliss that comes when we are in sync with the dancer and the dance, and we long for the day when everyone is invited to do the same choreography.
Once we grasp that true love is to be in sync with Jesus, and sin is to be out of step, it makes the path of discernment a little easier. Of course, it makes the work of actually being a Christian a heck of a lot harder. But the Risen Christ hasn’t called us to a happy, contented, warmly successful life – Christ has called us to a life of sacrificial love.
Christ is Risen, Alleluia Alleluia