Every day at Mass we echo John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.” Jesus as the one who forgives sin is a consistent theme in the Bible and in the preaching of the Church. One of the first scandals Jesus caused arose when he forgave the sins of the paralytic: “Who but God alone can forgive sins?” One of the purposes of baptism in the life of faith is to make us dead to the power of sin. The problem for contemporary people is that sin is not a major category in our lives. (Notice that going to confession is not a big part of how most Catholics practice the faith.) Oh, we know we mess up but we don’t think of that in terms of sin, something offensive to God. As a result the importance of Jesus for modern Christians is not that he “saves us from our sins.” To recover a sense of ourselves as sinners we must do away with thinking of sin as a violation of a rule or law but as the repturing of a relationship. Jesus takes away our sins by restoring us into a union with God.
