‘Tied in knots by sin’—this need not be the believer’s circumstance
By Mark A. Taylor
One morning when an atheist attending our Bible study had enough of our talk about sin, he lashed out (as I wrote last week), accusing us Christians of being obsessed with the topic. I can’t help but wonder what he’d think of some sentences about sin in a 2013 movie my wife and I watched on Netflix this month.
The story
The sin in this case was sex before marriage. When the main character becomes pregnant as an unmarried 18-year-old in 1950s Ireland, her parents send her to a convent to have the baby. She was forced to “pay her debt” for the delivery and her care by working four years at the convent. While she was there, the nuns without warning placed her son for adoption (sold him, actually) to a wealthy couple from America.
The woman named Philomena (masterfully portrayed by Judi Dench in the film by the same name), now a widowed senior citizen, shows her only picture of her toddler son to her adult daughter. She’s finally decided, 50 years later, she wants to find him. The daughter connects with a journalist who agrees to write Philomena’s story, and the movie tells the heartbreaking account of all they discovered. (The film is based on a story that actually happened. See The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, now available simply as Philomena, by Martin Sixsmith.)
The conversation
As the writer builds his relationship with Philomena, we discover he’s an avowed atheist and she has remained a devout Catholic. It occurs to him one day to ask her why she kept her secret for fifty years.
“What I’d done was a sin,” Philomena replies, “and I kept it all hidden away. And then I thought to myself, keeping it all hidden away was also a sin because I was lying to everybody. And as it went on, I tied myself up in knots, worrying which was the worst sin of the two, having the baby or lying. In the end, I couldn’t make up my mind.”
The journalist can only reply with a frustrated sigh, not unlike what I saw from our atheist Bible-study friend.
In this case, I don’t blame him, precisely because of the conclusion I reached in last week’s post. Sin need not be something we fear. While we must confront our sin, and regret it rather than reveling in it, I believe it will be easier to walk away from sin if we’re not shamed by it.
Not surprising
It occurs to me that God is not surprised when we sin; he knew we would sin—that's why he sent Jesus. Look at the way Jesus reacted to the sin of the broken people around him. He didn't lash out; he simply moved to heal and help. He even seems matter-of-fact about the imminent betrayals of Judas and Peter.
We face our failures as if they're (1) unique and (2) unforgivable. But God anticipated our sins, even the worst of them, even the sin you’ve kept hidden for 50 years. Not only that sin, but all the shortcomings you never even see in yourself—they’re all in the same basket. God’s taken care of them all.
There’s no middle ground here. We can distrust what Christ accomplished on the cross and give up in despair. Or we can believe the gospel and live on in joy with the understanding that we can't be good enough to earn God's favor or bad enough to lose his love.
But Philomena, like too many other believers like her, believed she needed to earn redemption. What a hopeless struggle.
Not hopeless
Evan Welcher mused on Twitter this week about those who confront their shortcomings and decide, “I’m no longer worthy of God’s love!”
“You never were,” he replies, “that’s the beauty of mercy and grace. That’s the beauty of atonement. That’s the beauty of Jesus Christ. Don’t kick yourself out of Christ when He hasn’t!”
“When we try to follow Jesus, grace always meets us when we fall off the wagon,” Bob Goff wrote. [Note: Not if, but when.} “No matter how far we fall, God is there to take us back the moment we turn to Him. We don’t have to give a long acceptance speech to receive His grace. We don’t even need to get our act together first—He scoops us into His arms when we’re still covered in mud from head to toe and calls us beautifully His. Is this fair? Heck no. Don’t worry about it.”
Something else
This dare not, of course, make us cavalier about transgressions. The power of confession grows from the soil of sorrow. But I’m sticking with the picture of repentance I tried to paint in last week’s post. When we walk away from sin and toward something—Someone!—so much better, we will thrive.
Commenting on that post, Michael Plank wrote, “What if in God’s love, Christ grieves with us and remains present in us and patiently waits for us to come to the conclusion that something else will bring us wholeness?”
Indeed. And that something else is available to all of us every day.
“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:16).
“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16).
Photos by Sharon McCutcheon and by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash and by Lukáš Vaňátko from Pexels
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