Dec 10, 2023; Mark 1:1-8 — “They Acknowledged Their Sins”

“They Acknowledged Their Sins”

MK 1:1-8

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.”

John the Baptist appeared in the desert
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
People of the whole Judean countryside
and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
were going out to him
and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River
as they acknowledged their sins.
John was clothed in camel’s hair,
with a leather belt around his waist.
He fed on locusts and wild honey.
And this is what he proclaimed:
“One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water;
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Christianity starts begins with a clear understanding of our original fallen sinful state (original sin) — that we are born turned away from God and thus prone to both deliberate and not as deliberate errors and wrongdoing — and our need to repent — to turn (metanoia) our entire being (heart, mind, soul, flesh) away from sin and from ourselves (our ego) and to turn with our entire being back to God.

This world is divided between those, on the one hand, who realize that they are sinful and make mistakes out of fear and pride, and sometimes even deliberately do wrong — cheat, lie, hurt and harm others, et cetera — and thus need forgiveness, and those, on the other hand, who reject the idea that they make mistakes or deliberately do wrong or have any need to seek forgiveness or make amends or fundamentally change their life direction and orientation.

And these two types of people do not mix; they are like sheep and wolves, saints and geese.

In the second reading (2 Peter 3:8-14), St. Peter asks that since

“the day of the Lord will come like a thief,
and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar, and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out, [and] … everything is to be dissolved in this way”

Then what sort of persons ought we be?

Should we conduct yourselves “in holiness and devotion, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God,” and “come to repentance” so we not “perish?”

Or should we continue living for ourselves and our bucket list and fulfilling a self that will perish because it has turned away from God and sees/feels/thinks it has no need or repentance and forgiveness?

This very day, and likely several times this very day, we will fail to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we would want from other people towards us.

And there will be all sorts of excuses we will make for ourselves.

— And I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Moral Law very well. And the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm.

The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, the Moral Law has been baked into us. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, then why should we be so anxious to make excuses for our not having behaved decently?

The truth is, we believe in decency so much— we feel the Moral Law pressing on us so much — that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we come up with all of these excuses. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry or anxious; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way — and they cannot really get rid of this idea. Furthermore, they do not in fact behave in that way. We know the Moral Law; we break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

— C. S. Lewis, from “Mere Christianity,” chapter 1, (my abridgement and arrangement, with my edits and slight.modifications)