Robin Hood Alone was Sinless

Or "How we all miss the mark, because it isn't clear where to aim."

SIN. Few words inspire such intense emotions in the discussion of religion, which is already a charged topic. These days sin is seen as a sort of discrete unit of evil. In church parlance, sinning can mean anything from eating too many chips to a black sacrament performed on a pagan altar. It remains an open question how many extra chips is equal to a single dark sacrifice.

While not entirely wrong, a more accurate understanding can be found from the ancient Greeks. Hamartia was the word used in the original new testament. It meant “To miss the mark.” Originally it was an archery term before it was adopted by the early church. You can miss the mark a little or a lot, even when you are doing your best to aim at the mark. You shoot an arrow and miss the bullseye, you have sinned against Robin Hood. You aim your soul in the wrong direction, you have sinned against God.

Of all the claims about Jesus’ rather unbelievable life, the least believable to me is the idea that he lived a sinless life. Most of us sin six times before breakfast, then sin again by failing to eat breakfast when we know we should. There have been many virtuous teachers in history, but nobody has ever claimed they were perfect. That claim seems unique to Christians. Interestingly, nobody ever debunks it by looking at the accounts of the life of Jesus.

In a world of brutal oppression and unchecked warfare, here was a man saying to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. They hated him for it. They killed him when all he’d ever done was persuade, preach and pray.

The fact that it didn’t seem to stick is the reason we who call ourselves Christians believed him when he said he was God. A bit of theologizing by the men and women who knew Jesus later and we had developed a few ideas. The first was that Jesus was the way God beat sin. There’s a variety of theories about the precise way that unfolded, but every stripe of Christianity agrees on that. Sin was a problem, and Jesus fixed that problem.

Where did this sin come from? Everyone. You, me and Hitler. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Hopefully even the most stalwart of atheists can admit that. As a wise video game once said “Either you have an enviable memory, or a pitiable life, to know nothing of regret.”

When you reach this revelation, it’s like joining boot camp in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. We are all equally worthless. It does not matter if you’re black or white, now you’re a sinner saved by grace.

For this admission to be real, it must HURT. If you treat the admission that you are a sinner saved by grace as some credit to your character you are the greatest of fools. The depressed and drunken druggie and the prideful pandering preacher are both drowning in sin. The addict at least might have the integrity to admit it. God can use him.

If we can be like that brave addict and not like that false priest, we may then access the truth I call the divine irony. This is the narrow door, but it is a door to a palace. The hardest and most necessary transition I ever made was from seeing myself as a sinner saved by grace to seeing myself as a new creation, holy and pure because of what Jesus had done for me. When I believed myself a sinner, I sinned by faith. Now that sinner is dead and Jesus is alive in me. With God on my side, I hope to crucify that dead man to Jesus’ cross a little more every day.

Sin used to torment me, now it’s an annoyance. What once was a roaring dragon is now an angrily squawking raven. By grace, it may eventually be a gnat or a tardigrade. If I have become more virtuous, it’s only because my focus is no longer on the sin that grace saves me from. Now my focus is on the grace, that washes away my sin. When I sin again, it’s only because I’ve forgotten the truth that I am a new creation, made holy in his sight.

We might say that a just God must hold us accountable, but God has a most enviable memory when it comes to us. It isn’t just that our sins are paid for, it’s that the receipts have been burned. It’s gone; ash on the wind and dust in the river. The sins you’ll commit tomorrow too. The worst day of your life is gone. All God sees when he looks at you is his bride, pure as the driven snow, clad in white, fit to marry the king of kings.

Some might say it’s madness to lose focus on our sinfulness. To them, not being a sinner saved by grace is to deny the cleansing power of God’s grace over our sin. I think the far greater madness would be to pretend that the devil still holds any authority over our nature. We are not sinners. We are saints. Jesus was the only being in the universe that could have justly condemned us for our sin, and he didn’t. Instead, he took full responsibility for the whole rotten mess we’d made of things and died so we could live.

God saw us born into this confusing, upside-down world with no concept of which way was up and he took pity on us. He gave us a way forward after we reach adulthood inevitably with some bad programming that causes us to hurt others without meaning to. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Original Sin, the old church called it. That’s why we needed Jesus.

It’s not your fault, Good Will Hunting. God wanted an Earth with humans on it, so here you are with all your childhood trauma and bad credit. You made some mistakes along the way, but God sees that as much as you have failed, you too were failed. We cannot rise above it on our own. We don’t even know where to aim. That’s why we needed Jesus, the Robin Hood of Righteousness. He set the mark. If we aim at it all our lives, maybe we’ll get very very close and the world won’t be quite so dark any more.

A PRAYER FOR SALVATION AND GRACE

God, thank you for your love. I give up my love of sin and offer you my life. I promise to always aim for the mark Jesus set. Let me live in your love, so I may love others like you first loved me.