Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 22
Passion Sunday.
The Malice of Sin.
"Jesus said to the multitude of the Jews, Which of you shall convince Me of sin? " — John viii. 46.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex. : I. Christ's usual aspect. II. On defensive to-day. III. Why?
I. Nature: 1. Definition. 2. The intention. 3. Mortal and venial.
II. Malice : 1. Heaven and hell. 2. God's dignity. 3. Supreme good and evil.
III. History : 1. Fall of angels. 2. Fall of man. 3. Deluge, and Sodom and Gomorrha.
IV. Effects on soul : 1. Suicide. 2. Saint's vision. 3. Cure of sin is death of Christ.
Per. : 1. The innocent. 2. Penitents. 3. Sinners.
SERMON.
Brethren, Jesus Christ is presented to us to-day under a most unusual aspect. It was not the custom of the meek and humble Saviour to stand on the defensive — to repel a calumny, howsoever vile; an insult, howsoever gross; an injury, howsoever unjust. In the strength of His righteousness, He ignored alike the fawning tempter and the snarls of the world. In the hour of His deepest degradation He opened not His mouth. To Pilate and his perjured accusers He answered never a word, and even on the march to Calvary He allowed Himself to be led as a lamb to the slaughter. No wonder such sublime submissiveness impressed the beholders — touched even Pilate's stony heart, and converted Longinus and the dying thief. Yet passive though He was under wrong, there was one accusation, one calumny He never allowed to go unchallenged. " Do we not say well that Thou hast a devil? " the Jews demanded, and prompt and sharp came His indignant reply: " I have not a devil, for which of you shall convince Me of sin? " To my mind no other incident in the life of Our Lord more strongly emphasizes the detestable nature of sin. So repugnant was it that the mere imputation was sufficient to draw an indignant protest even from the long-suffering Saviour.
Brethren, sin is an offence in thought, word, deed, or omission against the law of God. It is an act of rebellion on the part of His child against the most indulgent of Fathers. It is an offence against Him who reads the reins and the hearts, and who consequently takes account not only of external transgressions, but also of interior thoughts and desires. Its guilt is founded especially on the accompanying thought, intention or advertence which gives to the sinful act its human character. Sin interrupts the friendly relations between God and the soul; turns their love into hate, and puts an end to that interchange of gifts which love entails. And since to serve God and in return to be revivified with His grace is the very life of the soul, therefore when this exchange has once been interrupted by sin, the unrepentant soul is thenceforth wounded or dead according as its sin was venial or mortal. Hence the truth of St. Paul's words where he says that: "by one man sin entered into the world and by sin death," for the wages of sin, be it original or actual, is death.
Brethren, let us try for a moment to realize the malice of one mortal sin. " Who can measure the height of heaven," says Ecclesiasticus, " or who can measure the depth of the abyss?" And if the distance from earth to heaven or to hell be so inconceivable, who, I ask, can hope to measure the double space from the lowest circle of Gehenna to the top of heaven's dome? Yet, Brethren, that infinite distance is the measure by which we will have to compute the malice of one mortal sin. It can be said without exaggeration that the malice of such a sin is infinite. For the grievousness of an insult is measured by the difference in dignity between the offender and the one offended. An affront offered by one man to another socially his equal may be a matter of little moment, but an outrage perpetrated by a vagrant against the person of his king calls for the heaviest penalties. Now what King so high as God, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords? Or what pauper so poor and miserable before his sovereign as man before his Creator? God is a being of infinite dignity, and hence mortal sin is an infinite offence calling for an infinite punishment. Sin, in fact, is the direct opposite of God — mortal sin is the supreme evil, just as God is the supreme Good. But not all the minds of angels and men can ever comprehend the infinite goodness of God. Neither, therefore, hath eye seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man, to conceive the full extent of the malice of one mortal sin.
Brethren, let us read the history of sin from the beginning, and judge of its nature from its awful effects. What have been the effects of sin in heaven? We go back in spirit to the time prior to this earth's creation, when naught existed but God and His angels. We see in paradise those millions and billions of angelic spirits, second to God alone in the beauty of their natures, reflecting in their glorious attributes the perfections of the Divinity, basking in the full splendor of the beatific vision, and inconceivably happy in the possession of the All-Good. Ah ! we see them as in a vision, and we seem to hear their heavenly voices chanting: " Sanctus, Sanctus," and intoning: " Glory to God in the highest " — but alas! even as we gaze, the voices, like an interrupted chorus, suddenly cease, and as when a thunder-cloud crosses the face of the sun, so the heavenly vision disappears. What has happened? Mortal sin hath entered heaven and blasted the glory thereof. Lucifer and his followers have given for an instant to their own splendor the homage due to God alone, and immediately glorious angels become loathsome devils. God smites His own fair creation, and like a thunderbolt Satan and his rebel comrades fall into the everlasting fire God's justice has prepared for them. Behold the first mortal sin; see its effect. For one mortal sin that lasted but a moment, one sin of thought without previous example or warning, for one such sin did God condemn whole legions of His beloved angels to an eternity of excruciating torments. Oh, was not their punishment excessive — greater than their crime? Did not God act rashly and in anger? No, for our God is a just God. He punished them less than they deserved, for our God is a merciful God. He hath done and He will never repent, for our God is a wise God. Had they cried back to Him as they fell: "Father, give us but one moment for repentance, and we will serve Thee with an eternity of love and do penance with an eternity of sorrow," He would have answered them: " No, it is too late. You have sinned, you must undergo the penalty, for I am the Lord and I have sworn and I will never repent." Oh, Sin! what a monster thou art! to dare to enter into even God's own heaven; to blight the fairest work of His hands; to rob Him of His beloved angels; to populate with them the miserable hell you and you alone have created.
Brethren, turn you now to God's second creation. Baffled in His first merciful design to make creatures happy in the enjoyment of Himself, He determines on another trial, and so He creates the earth and man. To His own image and likeness He makes him; a little less than the angels He created him. He places him in an earthly paradise, and He gives him absolute dominion over his own animal nature and over the entire animal kingdom. There man would have lived a long life in the peaceful enjoyment of all imaginable blessings — no troubles from within, no care from without; no labor, no war, no famine, or pestilence, no sickness, no death, but a life of happy contentment here, and then in God's good time a flight, soul and body, from the earthly heaven to the heaven of God. Oh! who can contemplate that ideal life without feeling his heart swell with gratitude for God's bounty, and sink with vain regret that it is lost to us forever, and burn with fierce hatred against the monster — mortal sin — that has come between us and our birthright? For, no sooner had man begun to enjoy it,. than once more the insidious serpent crept in and ruined all. God commanded; man disobeyed. Why, O man, did you eat the forbidden fruit? Because the woman tempted me. Why, O woman, did you disobey your God? Because the demon deceived me. Aye, the demon — mortal sin — is again the destroyer, and against it again bursts forth God's hatred. " Cursed be the earth," He cries, " thorns and thistles shall it produce. I will multiply your sorrows. In the sweat of your brow you shall earn your bread, and at last, as dust you are, into dust you shall return." Look at our stricken parents as they fly from the face of God's anger out into the dreary world, and let their wailings be your answer to the question: What is the malice of a mortal sin? Let the clanging of the bolts and bars of heaven's gate as it closes, not to be reopened for four thousand years, be an answer to that question. Let the difference between the harmony in man's soul and in nature before sin- and the disorder there after sin proclaim sin's malice* For man's rebellion against God was immediately followed by an uprising on the part of all nature against man. His flesh is no longer subject to his reason and will; his appetites become inordinate, his inclinations, evil. The beasts of the field and the birds of the air array themselves against him. Earth, water, fire and air conspire for his destruction by the thousand and one dangers peculiar to each. See our exiled parents crushed under this avalanche of woes, hear them wailing like lost souls over the body of murdered Abel; behold the fleeing Cain, with the brand upon his brow, an outcast on the face of the earth— consider all these miseries and the numberless times that history has repeated itself since then, and let the whole be an answer to your question: What is the malice of one mortal sin?
Brethren, history has repeated itself. Consider the Deluge. " All flesh," says the Scripture, " had corrupted its way upon the earth and the whole earth was filled with iniquity." What a breach of filial respect would that be that could cause a fond father to regret ever having given being to his child! "Yet God," says the Scripture, "repented Him of ever having made man, and proceeded to destroy him." Imagine that awful scene. At the beginning of the forty days' downpour men looked on with indifference, then with surprise, then with horror. Presently there was a mad rush and struggle for the highest places, but slowly the water envelops even the highest. The mother dies holding aloft her babe; the lover perishes in a vain effort to save his beloved; the family clasps hands, sobs farewell and is gone, until the last stifled cry of the last human being had rung out over the dreary waste. And over all the scene of horror who presides? God? Merciful Father, is this your work? No, no; He is a God of mercy still. This is not His, this is the work of mortal sin.
Again consider the two fair cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, with all their hundreds and thousands of inhabitants. What was it that made God send a storm of fire and brimstone from heaven to destroy these cities and make their very sites uninhabitable forever? It was that their sin had become exceeding great — it was mortal sin. Stand over against these cities with a light on your face and the smoke whirling about you, and listen to the roar of the flames and the shrieks of the victims and judge from its effects the awful malice of mortal sin. Alas! human history is for the most part a history of woes because it is a history of sin, whereas if sin had never entered the world, man would still be in the enjoyment of his original innocence with all its accompanying blessings. Therefore every calamity that has befallen or will befall the human race; every misery, past, present or future of our own lives are all directly or indirectly the effects of mortal sin.
Brethren, let us look at a soul in the state of mortal sin. What, O soul! is mortal sin to thee? Thou hast burst God's bonds, thou hast cast off His yoke, thou hast said: "I will not serve." An abandoned waif, God adopted, enriched and exalted thee, but thou hast despised Him, flung back His favors in His face, and turned thee to the service of His archenemy— the devil. And now — now thou art the slave of sin, whereas before thou wert free with the freedom of the children of God. Nay, thou art worse than a slave — thou art dead. For sin when completed begetteth death. Oh! how unreasonable we are! When the body of a beloved dies we wail and lament, but when the soul dies in sin we shed never a tear. Yet what so dreadful as spiritual death! Natural death is sad, murder deplorable, but suicide worst of all, and the soul that sins commits spiritual suicide. One day a man jumped from an immense height, and landed almost at my feet. Bend with me over his shattered body, and see there a faint picture of a soul in mortal sin. A bruised and hideous mass; an expression on the face to make the stoutest heart quail. However comely that body may have been once it has lost all its beauty now. And his soul? Oh it was once innocent, adorned perhaps with many beautiful virtues, the cause maybe of bringing innumerable souls to God and worthy of a high place among the saints, but now there is no beauty in it — all is lost. See the passing school-children fly in terror from that body; so fly the angels from his soul. See the dogs fighting for his blood on the pavement; so the demons squabble over his poor lost spirit. Had he repented, his past merits would indeed have revived, but not now, for his sin lasts and will last forever. Behold that body, cold and stiff, the eyes staring but seeing not, the mouth gaping wide, the voiceless tongue lolling out, and the hands and feet, manacled by death, without power to help himself or others. So, too, a soul in mortal sin lies helpless on the way to heaven, a stumbling-block and a scandal to those who would fain pass on. Hour by hour it grows livid and putrefies and charges the air with deadly infection. The officers of the law take the ghastly body and consign it to earth, and the ministers of God's justice, the devils, take the putrid, sinful soul and bury it in hell.
Brethren, a poor picture this of a soul in sin. It was once granted a great saint to see such a soul as God sees it, and he afterwards declared that he would rather endure any earthly torment than again behold so horrible a sight. " It were better/' says St. Anselm, " to suffer hell innocent rather than enter heaven in sin, for innocence would be a comfort, even in hell, but guilt would be a torture, even in heaven." What, therefore, shall we say of an habitual sinner? His soul has died and is corrupting within him. He goes through life chained to a corpse. He lies down at night and clasps in a close embrace that horrid, putrid thing. Faugh! it is too horrible to think of. Let us pray God that should our souls ever unfortunately contract the hideous leprosy of sin we may quickly turn to Him for a cure.
The cure of sin! Ah, Brethren, here again we see that sin's malice is infinite, for it requires an infinite atonement. If the whole court of heaven with all the living saints and the holy souls in purgatory were to unite in an act of reparation for one mortal sin, that act would fall infinitely short of satisfying God's outraged justice. Hence it was that to atone for man's sins the Word of God Himself was, if I may say so, obliged to come down from heaven and become man and suffer and die — as man, because man had sinned, and as God, because God only could cancel an infinite offence. Every drop of His bloody sweat in Gethsemani declares the malice of mortal sin — every stroke of the scourge, every thorn of His crown, every fall on Calvary's slope, the five nails that held Him on the cross. The frantic grief of Magdalen, Mary's heartbroken sobs and the moans of the dying Saviour, all proclaim the malice of mortal sin. Sin, and sin alone, reduced an ineffable God to the condition of the Man of sorrows, for His blood was poured out for many unto the remission of their sins.
Brethren, in your upturned faces to-night, I discern three classes — those who have never sinned mortally, those who have so sinned and repented, and those on whose souls grievous sin yet remains. Thank God there are some who, standing on their life's record, can demand defiantly of the world: "Which of you shall convince me of mortal sin? " Blessed be God that so many, though having wandered afar and miserably fallen, have yet been enabled by His grace to arise and return to their Father. Would to God that the conversion of even one sin-laden soul here to-night might gladden the Father's heart, and give joy to the angels of heaven. O sinful soul, however deplorable thy condition, be not cast down, for with the Lord there is mercy and with Him plentiful redemption. His patient forbearance with thee in the past is a guarantee that with Him there is forgiveness. From the depths of your misery, from the bottom of your heart cry to Him and He will hearken to thee, for He wishes not the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live. Let the hatred of sin drive thee, let the love of God draw thee. There is forgiveness, there is forgiveness, if you will only repent, for " an humble and contrite heart the merciful Lord will never despise."