The commonality of sin and the goodness of Jesus Christ

Picture by Jenny McHenry

Adultery, fornication and homosexual sex have a lot in common. For one thing none of them are against the law although most Christians consider them sin.

All three have always been important fodder for literature as well as movies. Here I am thinking of such stories as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair,” Someone once wrote, I don’t remember who, that it is often the sin in human existence that holds our interest. More people read Dante’s Inferno then his Paradiso .

But I believe it is instead the drama of God seeking the sinner that gives greatness to the story. It is God’s story, the God man, grabbing us with his bloody embrace in the midst of our awfulness that takes away our breath.

In the old 1955 version of the movie, taken from the novel, The End of the Affair, Sarah, played by Deborah Kerr, is distraught because God has answered her prayer and given life back to her lover. She had promised to be good and leave her adulterous affair if God answered, now she is obligated.

She knows it is God and keeps seeking some way to disbelieve his reality. Sarah encounters a priest as she sets in church. She is lamenting her miraculous answer to prayer.

The priest tells her, “When we seek God it means we have already found him.”

Sarah counters, “But I don’t want him and what does he want with me? What can I offer him but a shabby second best!

The Priest replies, “He’s used to that.”

Sarah a bit sarcastically but with a deeper meaning says, “How sad for him,” and beyond and above her one sees a stature of Christ standing over her.

It doesn’t matter, adultery, fornication, homosexual sex, greed, hate, etc., it is sad for Jesus Christ because he carried our sin to the cross. It is sad as he intercedes for us before the Father. And it is often sad for us as we begin to walk in his new life, allowing him to put away our obsessive sin. But he gives us his goodness instead.

So there is another common trait that all sin shares. Not just sexual sin but all sin was taken care of at the cross where Jesus shed his blood.

“If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. For he was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” (1 Peter 1:17-21)