Praised be to Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's first reading from the Letter to the Romans. St. Paul speaks of how the lives of the faithful in Rome had changed. He says, "For just as you presented the parts of your body as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness for lawlessness, so now present them as slaves to righteousness for sanctification." Romans 6:19.
So they moved from a life of sin to a life of sanctification. It was a smart move on their part.
There are different reasons why people commit sin. Some commit sins out of malice, which means that they have full knowledge and deliberate intent to do evil. It's a premeditated sin chosen to harm and act against God's will. There's a sense of power and a perverse sense of pleasure that's often associated with sins of malice. Think of the devil, right? He's powerful, perverse, and malicious all at the same time.
Other people commit sins out of weakness. These are sins committed because of passion or frailty when we succumb to a temptation due to emotional impulses or lack of strength or lack of vigilance or because our wills are compromised in some way. Typically people who commit sins of weakness don't deliberately intend to defy God even though they still offend Him with their choices.
There are also sins of ignorance. People commit sin and they truly don't know it's sin because their conscience has not been properly formed. Some people even commit sin out of hurt and anger, angry at God or other people, and they make choices based out of a place of hurt and frustration.
Whatever the nature of the sin, typically we sin because we're trying to get our desires or our needs met, specifically the needs for love, significance, or security. So we're aiming usually at something good, but we're just not hitting the target.
The word sin in Greek is amartano. It means to miss the mark. In Hebrew, the verb is hatah, which means to miss a goal or way or to go wrong. So when we sin, we miss the goal of our life, which is Christlikeness, becoming like the one by whom and for whom we were created, as the Apostle says in Colossians 1:16.
As St. Paul notes, humanity in its present state is inclined to evil, and we're inclined to, as he says, present the parts of our bodies as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, because after the fall, our bent is to try to get our own needs and desires met without help or guidance or instruction from God. And the world often encourages us in that direction. Obviously, the devil always does, right? You can do it without God. That's the refrain that they chant to us seemingly each and every day.
What we don't often realize is that in our sin, when we live in our sin, as St. Paul says here, when we live in impurity and lawlessness, when we do that, we are alienating, we are estranging ourselves from who we really are. It's like a self-induced amnesia. We are like the prodigal son living in a foreign land, heedless of our loving Father, squandering our inheritance on things which don't last and ultimately don't satisfy, and it becomes a form of slavery.
Albert Camus was a famous 20th century existential philosopher. He wrote in his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote, he was grappling with what he believed was life's lack of meaning. He wrote very succinctly, he said, "Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. It's the fruit of a way of seeing life and a way of living which is severed from God. It's no wonder then, in a culture like ours, that people can no longer agree on what it means to be a person, or what it means to be a man or a woman, or if human life has any special value in respect to other forms of life. It's the fruit of this alienation from God which is also an alienation from who we really are.
In Pauline terms, the antidote to sin's slavery is becoming a slave to God or a servant to God. He says, "Now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefits that you have leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life," Romans 6:22.
Certainly the word slave in our culture always has a negative connotation, but the nature of slavery is all about whom you will serve. Everyone serves something or someone. Will you serve God or will you serve yourself, which is essentially serving sin and lawlessness? If we choose to serve God, it leads to finding our true identity, embracing our true dignity as children of God, and it leads, as St. Paul says, to sanctification and eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, says St. Paul, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, Romans 6:23.
So for those who we know are still living sinful lives, as long as we are praying for them, offering up our sufferings and sacrifices, making sacrifices for them, there's hope for them. There's hope for them because we are interceding for them, so we should never be discouraged. We need to trust that the Lord will act in their lives and have confidence in His love for them, too, so that they, too, one day will move from that life of sin to that life of sanctification.
So let's ask Our Lady today for that grace, one, to embrace our own identity as God's beloved children, and two, that those who are immersed in impurity and lawlessness, as St. Paul says, will discover and embrace their own true identity as beloved children of God.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.