WB Macarius Redux
We often get into murky territory when we talk about sin. Most people think of Christians as people who just point out what’s wrong with everybody else, who use the word “sin” as a way to exclude the people whose sins are somehow worse than the mistakes of the in-crowd. “Sin” as a term is used to bash and batter people into a tremendous weight of guilt, to feel as if their very existence is an abomination to God. “Sin” as a term is used to instill the fear of eternal damnation as a way to scare people into loving God and getting saved.
Baber ident 300
Then there are a tremendous amount of Christians who don’t think this way, who don’t want to be confused with that brand of Christian thinking. There was a sort of pendulum-swing in Christianity away from that understanding of sin, because we saw how damaging it was, but instead of reclaiming the word in its deeper meanings, many in the church have just shied away from “sin” altogether…it’s something we just don’t really talk about. I mean, we’ll say a prayer of confession in the Communion liturgy, but we’d rather stick with an “I’m okay, you’re okay,” all around weak concept of sin.
I’ve always wondered how John Wesley could teach that humanity is both utterly sinful, and yet given a conscience, a moral center, that is actually God’s grace at work in them. In his sermon, On Working Out Your Own Salvation, Wesley says, “No man sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace with he hath” (III.4). God’s grace enables the human will to choose to cooperate with God, or to choose sin. While Wesley was Arminian, Randy Maddox and others hold that Wesley’s understanding of human will come more from early Eastern church fathers such as St. Macarius (great article at this link!).
Wesley referenced Macarius several times as someone worth studying. His writings are now deemed to be written by a follower (Pseudo-Macarius), a Syrian in the early 4th century influential on Gregory of Nyssa’s theology. For Macarius, the human soul is inherently filled with dignity because it is made in the image of God, and the heart (the essence of one’s entire being) is the concrete place where God encounters humanity on earth. While Western thought would move towards an idea that the soul itself is utterly corrupted, Eastern fathers, and especially Macarius, saw sin as an outward invasion on the good soul. He refers to sin allegorically as a sort of invasive, parasitic second soul, or a persistent smog between the inherent dignity of the image of God in us. Because it comes from the outside, we are unable on our own to have victory over sin, it’s like a virus that our body can’t actually eliminate. If we are to be healed to our natural state where we can truly reflect the glory of God, it will take an external antidote, the power of Christ activating the Holy Spirit in our souls. For Macarius, spiritual discipline is highly active, sanctification is the regular choice to cooperate with God’s grace in the fight against personal pride, selfishness, and apathy towards others. (Read the Homilies and a great introduction to his teachings here).
One final note, I wanted to design the Heart Palace in this comic after M.C. Escher’s Concentric Rinds print, which I find utterly fascinating. My hope is that we can have a more robust and honest conversation that holds up both the richness of human dignity and the tragedy of sin, so that all of us would lean more deeply into grace, cooperating with God’s work to better reflect the humility and mercy of Christ with each passing day.