Our Inner Light

When being perfect seems impossible, remember that God created each of us with what he wants to welcome into heaven.

By Mark McDermott

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Many people of faith profess themselves unworthy of salvation or even of God’s love. On the surface, the message of the Bible appears to create this dissonance between a devout life and God’s will. In one reading, the Bible proclaims the body as a temple of the Spirit made in the image and likeness of God; yet in another, the flesh is perishable, the source of doubt, temptation, and sin. Which is it? Are we good or are we evil, and how do we know?

            These questions point towards a more fundamental conflict: the “goodness” of God’s creation and original sin. Original seems so abstract – how does one define a “fallen state” for humanity? How does original sin change us from the state in which God created us? Our unfortunate familiarity sin through our own fallibility can show us the meaning of original sin since all sinfulness stems from that original fall. Original sin is simply the first – the original – separation from God that underlies all sin.

            Contextualizing all sin as separation from God rather than merely another of the innumerable choices in life has deep implications for our relationship with God. It means that our human nature is not itself corrupt – indeed, how could it be? Then it would be impossible to do anything without sin. Mary would have also been corrupted, and even Jesus himself – for they are just as human as we are. Rather, original sin is the denial of our true nature as humans created by God. It is the notion that being human is not enough. It is our mistaken view that God’s work to create each of us is somehow flawed, represented in Adam and Eve’s urge to conceal themselves from God after that original sin. We are imperfect inasmuch as we doubt the perfection of God, in ourselves and in others. Thus, we impose upon ourselves a need to discern what is right and wrong, which is an insurmountable undertaking: how can we possibly assess our impact in the infinite universe, of both our action and inaction?

            Indeed, limitation is not a sin: Jesus did not preach to everyone is his time on Earth as a human, and even he took time away from the crowds to rest and pray. The difference between Christ and us is that Jesus did all of this in the service of the will of God, not for his human self. Jesus’ life shows us how our human nature can be used to relate to God – the antithesis of sin. The human life of Christ was not like ours, where we seek to come closer to God, but rather an act of living in union with God.

            In this way, we do not need to strive to earn God’s love, nor to win salvation for ourselves. This thinking promulgates the notion of sin – that what God created in us is flawed, or that we have the power to save and forgive. God created us out of love, “and what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” All of our suffering, doubt, and uncertainty stems from the events or aspects of our lives in which we reject we reject the good nature God created in us.

            This is what Jesus points out to us when he calls us to “cut off” those parts of us that cause us to sin. Sinfulness is that superfluousness in life with which we vandalize the purity of God’s creation. Holiness is not something we learn, merit, or obtain, but that we uncover from what already exists in ourselves. We already have within us that which God intended for salvation from all eternity. Our sinfulness does not “deserve” salvation, but when we choose what God created us for over our own desires, we accept the salvation Christ won for us.