Today’s Scripture readings: Psalm 37.1-18; Deuteronomy 7.6-11; Titus 1.1-16; John 1.29-34

Today’s Writer:  Greg Johnson

“Sin” is unpopular. The word, not the act, I mean. In our pluralistic age, in this time of “tolerance,” condemnation is saved for those who stand by ancient truths, judgment reserved for those who dare parse right from wrong. God is love, after all. Right?

Moses wrote of the “faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments,” but, in the very next clause, wrote, “He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them.”

David continued the theme. “Delight yourself in the Lord and do good and He will give you the desires of your heart,” he wrote in Psalm 37. But he noted later “the arms of the wicked shall be broken.”

And Saint Paul, in his letter to Titus, wrote, “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but even their mind and conscience are defiled.” So narrow. So harsh. So judgmental. Right?

“We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said just days before ascending the throne of Rome as Pope Benedict XVI.

John the Baptist, in today’s Gospel, said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Sin is real, in the world, in our own hearts. Christ came to change both.