March 10, 2024 - Pastor Message
November 21, 2024SIN AND REPENTANCE (cont.)
SIN AND REPENTANCE (cont.)
“The one who knows his brother has committed a sin that is not to death should pray for him and life will be given to him because his sins are not to death. There is sin that is to death; I do not say one should pray for that. All iniquity is sin, but there is sin that is not to death” (1 John 5:16-17).
Continuing our Lenten reflection on sin and repentance, we look this week on the kinds of sins and their severity. All sin is a rejection of God and his will for us, and so we should do all in our power, redeemed and aided by God’s grace, to root all sin out of our lives. However, not all sin is the same. Like a sick person in need of healing for a specific illness, we need to understand our particular sins in order to undergo the proper and necessary treatment. We can differentiate sin according to severity and kind.
As St. John describes above, different sins may be more or less serious, depending on the extent to which they remove us from God and his life-giving grace and bind us to Satan and his eternal death. We traditionally speak of this distinction in terms of mortal and venial sins. Mortal sins are a complete rejection of God’s saving grace. This is why St. John says they are “to death”, because, by rejecting God’s grace, we reject his most gracious offer of eternal life. Venial sins are lesser violations of God’s will that can weaken or distract us from God’s grace but do not reject it.
We cannot accidentally or unintentionally commit mortal sins. By their very nature as a total rejection of God, they require three conditions: knowledge, freedom, and serious matter. By knowledge we mean that we must know what we are doing and that it is a sin. Genuine ignorance of the fact that we are doing something (e.g. an unintentional accident) or of the sinfulness of it can partially or even completely mitigate our responsibility for it. By freedom we mean that we freely choose to commit the sin. Compulsion, either externally (e.g. our boss threatens to fire us if we don’t falsify company records) or internally (e.g. the force of a long-standing habit or psychological illness) can also mitigate our responsibility. The matter of a sin is the action itself (e.g. murder). Only the most serious sins completely reject God. We should also note that, while the matter of a sin may be less serious at first (e.g. calling someone a bad name), frequent repetition with no contrition or repentance can lead that sin to become more serious over time, even to the point of becoming a mortal sin for us.
While there is no exhaustive list, the Church teaches that certain sins are serious enough that, when done knowingly and freely, can be mortal. Violations of the Ten Commandments, as an expression of God’s eternal law, fall under this category, as do the Seven Deadly Sins. As a helpful exercise, I will be reviewing the Seven Deadly Sins over the next few weeks. It is my hope that our reflection on these root sins, which spawn so many others, and on some possible spiritual remedies for them may inspire us all to deeper and lasting repentance this Lent. Stay tuned!
Fr. Marc Stockton
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