Ash Wednesday 2018 - The loss of the sense of sin

What is the greatest sin? Murder? Adultery? Sacrilege? Genocide? Back in 1946, speaking to a group of Catholic teachers, the Pope at the time, Pope Pius XII, said, “Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”

“To lose the sense of sin.” What did the Pope mean by that?

The sense of sin is the awareness of the difference between right and wrong, it’s the consciousness that it’s wrong to violate God’s commandments, it certainly involves a consciousness that God has given us commandments in the first place.

Consider Adam and Eve in the garden. They knew that God had commanded them to not eat the forbidden fruit. But the more the dialogued with the serpent, the less they considered the wrongness of the act and the consequences of their sin.

Similarly, the loss of the sense of sin in our own life is the result of a continual and repeated lie one makes to oneself. When one tells oneself that “sin isn’t that bad.”

We lie to ourselves and we begin to believe the lie. “It doesn’t matter if I skip mass”, “it doesn’t matter if I cheat off my classmate or steal from my employer”, “it doesn’t matter If I visit the perverted internet website”, “it doesn’t matter if I gossip about my neighbor, or I’ll just make an exception this time”.

As we lose the sense of sin, sin takes root in our life. Soon, we don’t think twice about skipping mass, gossiping, contracepting, striking a sibling or a spouse. And when will the cycle end?

Today, Ash Wednesday, is such an important day because today is a day that we acknowledge that sin is real, that sin has a real effect in our life, that our sins keep us from being the people God made us to be, they keep us from living in harmony with our neighbor, and the joy of the Gospel.

Today we are marked with ashes, ashes which symbolize the spiritual death which occurs when we disobey God’s commandments. To be marked with ashes is to mark oneself as a sinner, but a sinner with hope. We are marked as sinners who desire God to intervene in our life to save us from our sins. As Pope St. John Paul taught, “Sin is an integral part of the truth about the human person. To recognize oneself as a sinner is the first and essential step in returning to the healing love of God,”

The Gospel warns us of marking our faces simply to appear to be fasting. Receiving ashes can be done vainly, wanting people to notice you simply for having gone to Church. We receive ashes rightly when we do so humbly, desiring with our whole hearts that with God’s help we will put an end to sin in our life.

The 40 days of Lent remind us that Jesus goes out into the desert for 40 days. He fasts and prays and does spiritual battle with the devil. We mark ourselves with ashes today, that we may be united with Jesus, in our fasting, in our prayer, in our own spiritual battle to remove sin and selfishness from our life.

May this great devotion which marks the beginning of Lent, also mark the end of the reign of sin in us, that we may know the life, the peace, the healing, and the joy that comes from faithfulness to God for the glory of God and salvation of souls.