“Peace be with you!”

This greeting on the lips of the risen Jesus sums up the whole purpose of his death and resurrection.

Our world knows only too well the lack of peace, a lack rooted above all in the strife which exists within the soul of each person. God’s solution to that strife was not to destroy humanity, but to heal it from the inside, to redeem it.

And it was for this that Jesus Christ came.

But what is it exactly that causes the soul-sickness of human beings?

Jesus himself tells us that it is sin. Why else would the first thing he charges his apostles to do after his resurrection be to send them out on mission to forgive or retain sins?

The apostles (that is, the bishops) and, with them, the priests, are sent to forgive or retain sins in the name of Jesus and with the power of the Spirit. Not in their own name or power or holiness.

Sickness of soul and, ultimately, all the sicknesses of the human mind and body, are rooted in sin. This truth is part of the Gospel, part of our faith. We cannot accept the Good News of forgiveness if we will not first accept this bad news, which is no news at all really, but an obvious and bitter reality of life.

 Unless sin is admitted it cannot be forgiven.

And since Christ sends his apostles to administer that forgiveness (“whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained”), then it follows logically that we must admit our sins to “the apostles”, i.e. to those marked with the priestly grace of holy orders, so that, through them, the Holy Spirit may heal us and instill deep within us the divine mercy and peace of the Risen Jesus.

But what is sin?

We use the word so easily: do we really understand it?

To understand it, we must first ask: what is the human person?

Again, we use this term very easily. In my years at the UN, there was much talk of the human person; there were many international declarations concerning the human person. Yet not one diplomat I asked could define the human person!

First, the obvious: the human person is body and soul in one. We are neither just angels nor just animals.

The body we know; the soul is essentially made up of reason (or mind or intellect) and will (or freedom).

Reason seeks the truth; the will chooses that truth as the good.

But there is more.

The true good sought by the soul is not some philosophy or material happiness, for these cannot fulfill us. We soon tire of them. We seek a true good which is person-al, i.e. not in the sense of “private”, but in the sense of pertaining to personhood.

The human person can only find fulfillment in other persons.

Yet, even other human persons cannot fulfill us since they are limited like ourselves.

Therefore, the human person can only be fulfilled in the divine persons, in the Three-in-One, the Trinity. God created each one of us to find our ultimate truth and goodness in an eternal communion with all other human persons in the life and love of the Trinity.

That communion is constitutive of the human person and is his or her ultimate meaning.

But now, alas, enter sin.

Sin is the deliberate refusal of the human person to seek the truth with reason and to choose it with freedom. Truth is forfeited to lies; the good to evil. Both lies and evil can appear true and good (who would choose them if their evil could be seen as evil?), but essentially they distort them, as parasites will eventually distort their victim beyond recognition.

Sin occurs when a person shifts the basis of their judgment both of reason and of freedom of choice from what is objective or “out there” to what is subjective or “in here.”

Sin is the deliberate refusal to seek the truth as the truth, or to choose the good as the good, and, instead, to invent a self-centered pseudo-truth and pseudo-good which suit one’s own likes or dislikes.

Because sin is self-centered, it is by definition not other-centered, that other being one’s fellow human being or God.

Sin is a Copernican revolution in reverse: not God, but I am the center of the universe. Not God, but I am the source and creator of truth and good, of right and wrong.

Sin locks the sinner in on himself. It isolates him in solitude and alienation.

Even should one’s sin involve other people, they are not involved for their own sakes but because they serve the pleasure of the sinner.

Sin also frustrates and sabotages the mind’s search for the truth and the will’s search for the good. That is, it frustrates and sabotages the human person’s most basic structure, most basic need: to be loved in truth and thus to find and to love the truth.

While mortal sin, such as murder and adultery, takes that frustration and sabotage to its most lethal level, venial sin, too, such as lying and stealing, weaken one’s openness to truth and good.

It is a matter of degree, usually, if not checked by mercy, of an increasingly serious degree, since sin is never static. By degrees, sin alienates man from God, from others and even from his true self: the other becomes a threat to my self-appointed godhead. He must be side-lined if not eliminated.

Here we are in the logic of exclusion, division, hatred, violence and murder; here is the root of all the personal, family and social ills we lament.

The ills of each of us are not necessarily the results of our own personal sins, but can also be the damaging and cumulative effects of the sins of others.

Are not our mental institutions, doctors’ and psychologists’ surgeries, our prisons and our places of vice filled with poor souls seeking some kind of healing or comfort from the ravages of sin in the beauty of their souls?

Sin destroys the human person and the human family. We must never underestimate its seriousness.

Sin put the Son of God to death, and will we tarry in its dubious shade as if it were nothing, blindly supposing that it will not also kill us?

When we understand better what sin is, then we will also understand better the magnificence and magnitude of the Divine Mercy.

We will understand the need, the urgent, need for the sacrament of confession, for the regular examination of conscience to spot where evil is at work in us, for prayer and for all the other practices and helps to our weak humanity.

Mercy will only come into us if we first open the door of our sinful solitude and come out to it and tell it all the poison in our souls.

Once we open that door, sin’s power in us is weakened and its days are numbered. Once we open that door, Divine Mercy will ever so gently, yet ever so powerfully, come inside and dispel the evil which we have allowed to torture us with its deceitful glamour and fascination.

The Divine Mercy will again make us transparent and restore reason to reason, to the search for truth as truth, and freedom to freedom, to the search for the true good as the true good.

Divine Mercy reintroduces us with shouts of joy to the communion of life and love with our brethren and with our Triune God.

Divine Mercy restores real hope that we can find anew the true fulfillment of who we really are.

It makes us again breathe easily and deeply in the Holy Spirit; it restores to us that deep peace by which we just know that “all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well,” as St. Julian of Norwich puts it so beautifully.

We cannot truly know the joy of Easter unless we take the confession of sins seriously.

Divine mercy is not a painless amnesty thrown aimlessly at humanity. It cost the Son of God dearly, and, if we truly appreciate that, we will be willing to let confession cost us dearly.

We cannot forever compromise with, justify or ignore sin in our lives and, at the same time, say with sincerity that we love Jesus. Who are we trying to kid?

We can’t say, “I’m okay because I just commit venial sins!” Any sin is an affront to the person of Christ and a heartless neglect of his Cross.

Surely it is true that many people suffer from psychological problems, from the force of habit and from oppressive circumstances which can lead them to perform evil actions.

Of course there are therefore mitigating circumstances which can reduce people’s moral guilt. Any priest can see or hear that in the confessional.

But it would be foolish not to go to the doctor just because I was not fully responsible for getting sick! All those circumstances are all the more reason why we should come to confession, not avoid it.

Does not the grace of Divine Mercy seek the complete healing of the human person?

The psychologist may help us to understand why things go wrong in our psychic life and give us tools to come out of our psychic confusion. And that is surely a good thing! But he cannot give us the Holy Spirit.

People should certainly see psychologists if their condition requires it and God will work through them to help us.

But no expert, however skilled, can substitute for the Creator who alone can re-create us. No expert can infuse us with the Divine Mercy of the Redeemer, for no-one other than the ordained priest has the authority and power of the Risen Christ to do so.

Peace be with us, my dear friends! And it will be with us, if we learn to say with frequency, with humility and with great trust, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

 And if we learn to hear with deep faith and astonishment the priest’s consoling and divinely authoritative response, “I absolve you from all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, April 23^rd, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 11.30 am