The Cross will always remain the final embodiment of a single truth with two faces, each implying and reinforcing the other. It shows us what sin is, but precisely and only because it shows sin’s antithesis, God’s inexhaustible love. Only then was it plain that the secret, dimly avowed aim of sin must always be deicide, the destruction of God. To a love which would draw us out of our egotism, pride and selfish adoration of our own independence, man’s answer is “Crucify him.” But not until Calvary did sin amazedly rub its eyes at finding its Victim at last within reach, not until then could it unleash all its lurking fury. The miracle is that this moment was not the last in human history.
And yet, when man has vented his utmost, when he sees the dead figure on the gibbet as wordless testimony to his hatefulness, just as he is tempted to descend that hill to final despair, the lance thrusts home and there rushes forth blood and water. All the hate we could fling against Him, God had endured, absorbed, outlasted. At the end, our sinful strength is spent, yet His Love still lives. Lives and creates in us a new heart, one that can love with a love that is poured out of His own heart.
Once sin is seen, in the only way a Christian can look at it, against the backdrop of that Crucified Love, a peculiar inversion occurs. The very recognition of our sins brings with it the simultaneous revelation of that same Love. And the Christian sense of sin becomes suffused with a trust, a liberating joy and a response of love that reminds us of St Paul’s word that we live no longer for ourselves but for Him Who loved and died for us. Progressively the Christian is conscious of being, as it were, only secondarily concerned with his own perfection, his own getting to Heaven, himself generally. The final bolt of egotism has been slipped. It is the immense outpouring of God’s love that becomes central for him, it is this which must not go to waste. The Blood that was poured out for our Atonement, to “unite the scattered children of God,” must not have been poured in vain.
—Fr Robert O’Connell, SJ. “The Sense of Sin in the Modern World”, The Mystery of Sin and Forgiveness.
(via signum-crucis)
