December 21, 2004

“Love the sinner, but hate the sin” – a simple but difficult recipe. Christians are called to manifest the love of God to others, and yet also bear witness to the truth that sets us free. No one can escape the necessity of evaluating the moral quality of certain actions. It’s holding the two together that presents the challenge. And yet, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, it’s something that we all do with relative ease regarding at least one person: ourselves. In the depths of our own subjectivity we know that there’s a difference between ourselves and our sins.

Perhaps that’s where we can start with others. A person is always more than the sum of their sins. Rather, as Pope John Paul II has pointed out, we are the sum of God’s love for us. There is a “core value” to each human person that is derived from the fact that they are created individually by God in His own image, and that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for them personally. Perhaps that’s why Jesus, in Luke 15, prefers to speak of a lost sheep, a lost coin and above all a lost son, to remind us of the ineradicable value of every sinner.

The other thing that’s important to remember is that there is always more to our relationship with God than just keeping the rules, even the moral rules – as important as they are. There are certain other qualities of the heart that recommend a person to God: faith, humility, gratitude and compassion for others. Maybe that’s why Jesus likes to highlight unexpected examples like a humble tax collector begging for mercy, compassionate and grateful Samaritans, and faith-filled pagans – to remind us that we can never reduce our relationship to God, or anyone else’s, to an equation.

Fr. Herald J. Brock, CFR
Local Servant, Convento San Serafin, Comayagua, Honduras ________________________________________________________________________________

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