“Unclean! Unclean!” Those words from the book of Leviticus might hit home for some of us, even if we don’t suffer from leprosy. As a confessor, I have listened to a fair number of penitents over the years begging forgiveness for what they have done or failed to do. Against the backdrop of our conscience, certain sins stand out like blotches or scabs that leave us feeling unclean until we make our peace with God, which the Church urges us to do in the sacrament of reconciliation.
Fortunately, today’s lepers are no longer forced to live physically apart from their family and community, but some sinners find themselves feeling excluded from their faith community. The Church maintains that grave sins, such as murder, fornication, adultery, and apostasy prevent us from fully belonging to our faith community and receiving the grace of Holy Communion. In effect, you could say that grave sins leave us ritually unclean.
Any sin is an offense against reason, truth and right conscience. While any wrong is a sin, not every sin is grave enough to cut us off from God’s love. I think of sin as coming in every shade of gray from a dirty white to nearly black. The darker the gray, the more serious the wrongful act. Any sin that is life threatening to our eternal relationship with God is labeled by the Church as being a mortal sin and rightly so, for mortal sin destroys the loving relationship with God that we need for eternal happiness.
St. Augustine defined sin as being an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law. A sin becomes mortal when we consciously and freely choose to do something gravely wrong against the divine law and contrary to our divine destiny. When we choose to commit a mortal sin, we are opting to reject God’s love and friendship right then and there.
Once the sin has been committed, many sinners are left feeling much like the leper did. Their conscience is troubled. They could grow accustomed to feeling “unclean,” and grow distant from God and the Church, and many do, sometimes oblivious to the harm their stance plays in their lives and the lives of others.
Many sinners rationalize that their act is not all that wrong or even wrong at all. They cling to values that are contrary to what God puts forth in scripture and the teachings of our Catholic faith. For example, many people are convinced that there is nothing wrong with living together or missing Mass on Sundays since others do so, but God’s morality is not based on popular opinion. Even if they are widely accepted by society, immoral values can and do imperil our relationship with God, thus leaving us feeling “unclean.” Our attitude toward sin and its potential impact on us brings to mind a story a friend recently e-mailed me.
A young couple moved into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean,” she said. “She doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.”
Her husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. About one month later, the woman was surprised to see nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: “Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this.”
The husband said, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”
Unlike in the passage from Leviticus, the key word in the gospel is “clean.” The leper came to Jesus and begged, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Out of compassion, Jesus then did the unthinkable. He touched the man and said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Given the chance, Jesus would say that to every sinner. He came into the world so that we could experience divine forgiveness and be cleansed of our wrong doing. He died on the cross to save us from our sins, leaving behind the sacrament of reconciliation as a means for us to hear his words of absolution, spoken by the priest who hears our confession. This is the only way we can be cleansed of our grave sins, thus restored to full communion in the church, but like the leper, we first have to come forth and ask to be made clean.
To experience the fullness of God’s mercy and love, Jesus left us with a blueprint for living, but so often we reject what he tells us to do because we fail to see either the value of what is gained by following his way or the consequences for ignoring God’s moral law. A good confessor often finds himself cleaning the sinner’s limited outlook on the world and God’s mercy.
However long we have been away from this sacrament or however grave our sins are, when we contritely confess our sins, we can be quickly cleansed through the words of absolution and once we are, God’s hope is that we will seek to remain clean. That is what we resolve to do each time we pray the act of contrition. God willing, we then develop an aversion to that which leaves us feeling unclean. Even venial sins can do that. The catechism cautions that deliberate and unrepented venial sin disposes us little by little to commit mortal sin.
Consider the little sins we commit without much thought, from the way we talk to what we say, from what we do or don’t do to what we see. Do they leave us feeling unclean or not? Paul urges us that whatever we do should be done for the glory of God. We avoid becoming unclean when we choose to imitate Christ in what we say and do.