The Stream of His Everlasting Self-Giving
A common definition of sin is “missing the mark.” Generally speaking when us religious types talk about sin what we have in mind is falling short (“missing the mark”) regarding a moral standard. In essence, sin is viewed as a moral transgression. Though I acknowledge the validity of all this regarding the nature of sin, I’ve often found such a perspective to be too moralistic, a tad shallow, and perhaps ironically, it misses the mark regarding the full reality of sin, a reality which goes down to our existential roots, and which obtains its content in the light the of grace.
Ultimately, sin is not just turning away from God as lawgiver, it is turning away from God as self-giver, a self-giving most concretely seen in the giving of Jesus, who is Immanuel, God with us. In essence, sin is a turning away from having our being in and through God’s self giving, and instead living our lives as if we are from ourselves and are complete unto ourselves. In short, sin is anti-Immanuel, anti-God-with-us, and is instead God-at-a-distance, or God-not-at-all. The shocking thing about sin is that it functions, even thrives, in religious contexts, but what sin won’t tolerate in such a context is a God who comes so close and gives so completely that all sense of self-sufficiency is undermined, leaving only a naked, dependent, and vulnerable self. Sin will not tolerate this self.
The trespass of law by which people typically define sin is merely a symptom of this deeper alienation from and rejection of God. This is why faith is essential to Christian living and why, as the Scriptures say, it is impossible to please God apart from faith. Faith is the posture that aligns with how God made our being to function. We were made to have our becoming (our living development) and completion in the constant self-giving of God. Faith is that nakedness, that dependence, that vulnerability to God that seeks to have its all in him. It is the appropriate giving of one’s self to the self-giving of God.
In the Garden of Eden, when humanity, through its primordial parents, stretched forth its hand to eat the forbidden fruit, beneath the trespass of “thou shalt not eat,” was a belief that God was holding out, and a corresponding yearning to live a life on the basis of what we could secure for ourselves through that outstretched hand. In modern words, that out stretched hand declares, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” For this reason, it is very fitting that salvation happens when we cease to stretch out our hands to secure our lives, and allow the outstretched hand of God, pierced for our transgressions, to reach down and secure us in the stream of his everlasting self-giving.
