The publican, in contrast, confessed saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus added: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.” Self-justification makes virtue just as sinful as vice, and perhaps more dangerous. The publican, in this parable, drew the line between good and evil and placed him- self on the evil side. This is what made God’s justification of him remarkable.
Luther spoke dramatically about
Adam and Eve in Genesis, he wasn’t overly upset that they ate the fruit with the knowledge of good and evil. No. What bothered him was that Adam and Eve hid themselves behind the bushes so God couldn’t see what they had done. When God quizzed them about the forbidden fruit, Adam blamed Eve and Eve in turn blamed the serpent who had beguiled her. Because God was the creator of the serpent, indirectly God became responsible for their sin. The line between good and evil was drawn, and God was placed on the evil side. Adam and Eve were justifying themselves so passion- ately that they chose to blame God rather than themselves. What makes this matter gro- tesque is that all of us, when plan- ning violence, preemptively justify ourselves. We decide that the future victim of our violence is unworthy, stupid, ugly, immoral or, most fre- quently, evil. Whenever a U.S. president pre- pares us to go to war, he describes the new enemy as someone dan- gerous or evil. This then justifies our military action and our ridding the world of our enemy. We would never approve of violent action in
the name of injustice, but only in the name of justice. We draw the line between good and evil, and we place ourselves on the good side. Some- times? No. Every time. One of the best images that
Luther used to describe this per- nicious self-delusion is “the self curved in upon itself.” Our original state, so to speak, includes such extreme self-absorption that the self becomes the center of the universe— displacing God, shoving aside the neighbor and completely ignoring creation as a whole. What matters is me—my interests, my needs and my desires—and everyone and everything else is instrumentalized to serve me. It’s an ugly, lonely, des- perate way to live. The only way we can stand it is to pile more lies upon lies to convince ourselves that we are good, that we are happy, that we are right.
It is this confounding feature of human sin that Jesus tried to uncover with his word “hypocrisy.” Jesus pointed out that the most virtuous among us are also sinners. In his parable of the pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:10-14), the pharisee could brag that he had lived a righteous life. Goody, goody.
God’s passion for breaking through our self-deceit, which empowers us to turn from sin to grace. One of the primary ways in which God does this is via a reversal: when we draw the line between good and evil, God comes in the form of Jesus Christ to stand with those we have con- demned to occupy the evil side. In his eating with prostitutes, befriend- ing outcasts and dying with crimi- nals, Christ became sin, says Luther in a shocking way. This means that when we look from our “good” side over to the “evil” side, there we see the incarnate Son of God, stand- ing with those we have judged and sentenced. So, like it or not, we must pause and say, “What?!”
And, for this reason, “sin” is an important theological category that continues to be relevant no matter how much contemporary society tries to convince us that it’s an out- moded, old-fashioned idea—a relic of another era. The simple fact of our own sinfulness reminds us to be cautious before assuming that we are right or that our motives are pure. It demands that we resist passing judg- ment on another too quickly. And, most importantly of all, it calls us in humility and repentance back to God, in whom our only true free- dom, true happiness and true justifi- cation can be found. M
February 2012 19
GETTY IMAGES/JEFFREY COOLIDGE
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