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We know that our sins must be forgiven if we hope to get to heaven. But what about original sin? How can original sin have to be forgiven if all of humanity after Adam and Eve didn’t commit the actual sin?
The Catholic Church teaches that it is impossible for one person to be guilty of the personal sin of another. That is metaphysically absurd, as well as contrary to Scripture (see Ezek. 18:19-20, CCC 2056).
The Church teaches that Adam and Eve—and only they—committed the personal sin that we call original sin. All the rest of mankind inherits the sin of Adam, and as such is guilty of a real and proper sin, even though it is in its own category (CCC 402-406). This is a mystery, but what the Church makes clear is this that we inherit from Adam is “a state, not an act” (404). And as such, this fallen state represents a “sin” by analogy—a <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canons_and_Decrees_of_the_Council_of_Trent/Session_V/Original_Sin">real sin</a>, but not a personal sin.
Some people wrongly believe that we Catholics mean that original sin is not “real” when we say it is not “personal.” But “personal” sin is a category of sins that differs from “original sin,” as it relates to the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Personal sin means an actual sin committed by the individual person. Original sin, with regard to all of humanity after Adam, represents the effects of the personal sin of Adam, inherited by all of humanity via propagation. It represents, then, not a personal sin. Rather, it is a fallen state of being.
The easiest way to understand it is as the Church teaches in paragraph 404 of the Catechism:
<blockquote>How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam &#8220;as one body of one man.&#8221; By this &#8220;unity of the human race&#8221; all men are implicated in Adam&#8217;s sin, as all are implicated in Christ&#8217;s justice.
Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind—that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice.
And that is why original sin is called &#8220;sin&#8221; only in an analogical sense: it is a sin &#8220;contracted&#8221; and not &#8220;committed&#8221;—a state and not an act.</blockquote>
Now that we have made the crucial distinction between the original sin committed by Adam and Eve and the original sin inherited by the rest of humanity, we have to make another distinction between the reality that is “original sin,” often called “the stain of original sin,” that dwells in all men from conception (Ps. 51:5), and the concupiscence that remains even after the sin or stain of original sin is remitted through faith and baptism (see CCC 508, 403, etc.). The first is a true and proper sin, even though, again, it is in its own category—“a state and not an act,” as we saw in the Catechism above.
Romans 5:12 is perhaps the clearest text of Scripture that teaches the heart of the doctrine: “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.”
Again, it is a sin (real), but only by analogy. All of mankind is “implicated” in Adam’s sin, as the Catechism says above, but in a mysterious way we do not fully understand. As St. Paul says in Romans 5:18-19,
<blockquote>As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.</blockquote>
Concupiscence represents a proclivity toward sin inherited by the Fall, but it is not itself sin at all, properly speaking, even though Paul calls it “sin” in Romans 7. He calls it “sin that dwells in me,” because it represents the fomes peccati, or “tendency to sin,” that dwells in all of us due to the fall of Adam. In this instance, it is not even “sin” by analogy, as original sin is. It is as the Council of Trent, Session Five, On Original Sin, says:
<blockquote>This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.</blockquote>
In summary, notice that “original sin” is a true and proper sin, but it is very different when considering Adam versus the rest of humanity. For Adam alone (and Eve), original sin was a personal sin. For all the rest, original sin was and is also a true and proper sin, but not a personal sin. It was and is a sin by analogy, and as such, it is owned by each and every one of us as a true “sin,” but it is such as a state of being, not an act. And because it is a true and proper sin owned by each and every one of us, it must be cleansed through baptism.
Concupiscence, on the other hand, is not a sin at all. It does not have to be “forgiven.” It will be healed at the time of death. In other words, there will be no concupiscence in heaven. And this healing will be full and complete at the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Paul calls this “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23).
But concupiscence does not need to be “forgiven” as if it were a personal fault, or even a sin at all, because it is not.
Redeemed? Perfected? Yes.
“Forgiven”? That’s impossible. There is nothing to forgive.

Is It a Sin to Want to Sin?

In the older version of today’s feast of Christ the King—and, to be clear, we’re not talking about a huge gap here, just between 1925 and 1970—the Gospel read is the Lord’s conversation with Pilate, before his Passion, about his kingship, which is “not of this world.” We get that in Year B. In Year A, we get the Matthew 25 warning about the sheep and the goats.
I point this out both because it is interesting and because it gives a little hint as to the multifaceted aspect of this feast. When Pope Pius XI instituted it, as a statement of sorts against modernism and, really, the full dissolution of Christendom after the First World War, it was a moment of asserting the enduring primacy of Christ’s lordship in the face of what was more and more the lack of substantial temporal power of the Church. That trend has continued.
When Paul VI moved the feast to the end of the liturgical year, he explicitly intended to enhance the eschatological emphasis, embedded here at the end of the Church year and the start of Advent, on the end of the world and the Second Coming. Between the three Gospels in the new cycle, we hear notes on Christ’s kingship as otherworldly mystery; as judgment on the powers of this world; and finally, today in Year C, as the truest kind of power.
Not that it’s up to me, but I think if I had to choose from among the three, I would choose this one. The most superficial reason for its inclusion is that small line showing the label atop the cross: “This is the King of the Jews.” But the deeper reason is that it is from the throne of the cross that Jesus shows the nature of his reign.
This is not what the soldiers who made the sign had in mind. The label was a mockery, a point of irony. Hardly anyone there at the scene could really imagine that this man was a king. He was <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jesus-was-crucified-naked">stripped naked</a>, nailed on a cross for all to see, a sign of humiliation and suffering, the complete opposite of any power or authority.
This little detail about the sign, shared, with a little variance, in all four Gospels, is a remarkable sign of their authenticity. It is one of those many, many things that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jesus-heals-the-deaf-mute">would have been removed</a> had the Gospel writers, and those transmitting their work, been engaged in some sort of mass hysteria or conspiracy. In that strange fantasy, favored by the modern skeptic, where the apostles fabricate a set of narratives to support their idea of a God-man, surely this detail would have been removed. But it remains in all its shame.
Why? Because the attempted irony of the label veiled a profound truth—that this moment of weakness and suffering was, as Peter Kreeft puts it, “the most powerful thing anyone ever did,” because this act of weakness and vulnerability and pain was the only thing capable of defeating sin and death and hell.
The greatest power was this act of love. This act reflects the supernal love of the triune God in his own eternal being, for God’s power, the power that transcends all created being, has in it nothing of the grasping need of human and earthly power. God’s power is his goodness, and his goodness is his truth, and his truth is his being and his essence, and no situation in history, no bodily suffering, no matter how severe, can affect him in any way, change who he is and what he has chosen to do in his absolute and sovereign will.
This is the true form of kingship. Earthly forms can mimic, in small ways, the display of power and might and sovereign will. But these earthly forms will always be vulnerable in the way that the vulnerability of Christ is not. Kings and empires rise and fall; powers wax and wane. God remains God. And God remains man, in Jesus Christ.
Somehow the dying thief sees all this in a flash of clarity. While the crowd mocks the Lord’s kingship, he prays: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” But here again we receive a surprise, for the Lord’s kingdom is already come. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” The radical act of faith receives a radical act of acceptance and grace.
We should remember all of this scene when we encounter that strange monarchical tendency of our age, where powerful men and women are called “kings” and “queens.” No doubt it is sometimes good to celebrate strength and power, especially when that strength overcomes adversity for something good. But there is no true strength in worldly power. Many have noted the phenomenon of young men flocking to traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, drawn at least in part to a more robust and masculine expression of faith values than we find in mainstream American life. In many ways, I think this a good thing. But it is dangerous if it equates traditional Christianity with strength for its own sake; the strength and clarity of Christian doctrine is a weapon against vice and sin, not against unbelievers or our political enemies.
To ascend the thrones promised us as sons and daughters of the king means to ascend the cross. John Bergsma writes candidly, “We only rule from the cross in this life.” Or, as the Catechism puts it, quoting St. Ambrose, “That man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and, by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul, for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself” (908).
The other kingly figure in our Gospel, then, is once again the penitent thief. Kreeft makes this point rather sharply: “This man’s life was more successful, more glorious, more happy, more worth living than yours if at the point of your death you do not hear from Jesus Christ the words that he heard: ‘Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.’” The penitent thief knows at the end of his life that none of his striving meant anything if he could not end up a loyal subject of the true king. He saw on the cross strength veiled in weakness, but he also saw that his life could be worth something, finally, in the service of the king.
The sooner we come to that same conclusion and decision, the better—for this king is the only one who can reconcile us to God and to one another. He is the only one who can bring us to paradise.

A Cheap Imitation of a King

<blockquote>In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (Gen. 1:1-5).</blockquote>
Last week we saw, in the waters of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-is-in-the-water">baptism</a>, the way the Incarnate Son stepped into the base materials of creation in his quest to remake us. In the beginning was water—for creation itself, for us, and for the new life of Christ’s Church. What follows the water is light.
From the face of the waters the word of the Lord says, “Let there be light.” And from the waters of the Jordan emerges, countless ages later, the one who will say, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).
We don’t see that particular claim in our Gospel for the day, though in this season after the Epiphany that theme remains in constantly in mind, following our proper preface, which speaks of how the “mystery of the Word made flesh” has “caused a new light to shine in our hearts.” That is, in older forms of the Roman Rite, the preface of Christmas, where at Epiphany we hear further of how the revelation of Christ in the substance of our nature has “restored us by the light of his own immortality” (nova nos immortalitatis suæ luce reparavit). The newer ordinary form of the preface shifts the light language to emphasize that Christ is the “light of the nations.” (The mixing and matching of these different prefaces in different missals over time is a subject for another day!) And this time after the Epiphany, when the Lord’s identity and purpose was first revealed to the Gentiles, is filled with stories of light, if we’re willing to see it, culminating in another few weeks at Candlemas, when Simeon prophetically names Christ the “light to lighten the Gentiles” and “the glory of thy people, Israel.”
In today’s Gospel, one of the themes that John begins to unravel is exactly the importance of seeing. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s not that often that we say “behold” in modern English—it does seem a little dramatic for everyday conversation—but I think that is exactly what John the Baptist has in mind. Making dramatic statements is very much the goal of John the Baptist.
Why is he so insistent that we “behold” Jesus? To answer this, we might pose the question on another level, which is, why does St. John the Evangelist, our Gospel writer, want us to “behold” Jesus? None of the other Gospels puts this word in the Baptist’s mouth. It is, in fact, a very Johannine thing to say. The Greek word is ide, and, though it is not an uncommon word in the New Testament, John seems to have a special fondness for it. He uses it nineteen times—more than the entire rest of the New Testament combined. “Behold the lamb of God.”
The “sight” theme continues later in John with the instruction, which is repeated a few times (showing upon this Sunday next year), to “come and see.” This instruction comes first from the mouth of Jesus and later from one of the disciples. The meaning is the same: it’s seeing Jesus that communicates something, not just knowing information about him.
What do we see when we look? John’s proclamation is an invitation to see something more than a rabbi with a following on the rise, more even than just “the Son of God.” Behold, John says, the Lamb of God. Behold the one who takes away the sins of the world.
What John invites us to see is not, surprisingly, the light of the world—not the Son of God in all his glory. John invites us to behold Jesus in his darkest and most disturbing aspect, to see him as the sacrificial victim whose blood will wash away sin.
It’s interesting that this description of Jesus comes very near the beginning of John’s Gospel, only a few short verses after John’s wonderful opening passage on the incarnation of the Word, what we know well as the Last Gospel, on the way that the light has shined in the darkness, showing us the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father.
Already, before John has even shown us the Passion, he asks us to think about it. This Jesus, being the light, also reveals darkness. Bright light, in the natural world, makes the shadows deeper, and so it is in the Gospel story, and in the liturgical year, where the bright light of the Epiphany already starts to show us things we’d rather not think about.
So it is also in the creation story. The creation of light means that the absence of light now has a name: night. And the night, because it has no positive definition apart from the day, is always waiting for the day, always leaning toward it.
Sin and evil are, in the classic definition, nothing. That is, evil is always a corruption or an absence of the good. Even if this absence or corruption has a palpable presence and reality, its being is entirely derivative, entirely dependent on the good from which it is distinguished.
And so what we are meant to see in the Lamb of God, in this man Jesus, is the one who takes nothingness and converts it to substance, who takes corruption and turns it to health, who takes absence and transforms it to presence. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” This means that for a little while, the darkness thickens, but come the dawn, darkness will remain only a memory made more beautiful by its shining with the true light.
In other words, it gets darker before it gets lighter.
That is a sobering thought. I say it to suggest not anxiety or panic, but hope. Jesus is the Lamb of God, and our hope is that his light will overcome the darkness of a world ruled by sin. This hope has a firm basis in his resurrection from the dead and his ascension to glory, not to mention the countless witnesses of his resurrection that history has known in the saints. The light of the world went out, it seemed, on the cross. But the darkness did not understand it; the darkness could not overcome it, and so, behold, light springs again from darkness, because the darkness could not overcome it.
Whatever our darkness today, in this long night of history before the final dawn, whatever our wounded dreams, corrupted bodies, and fractured souls, whatever darkness we have inflicted on others—the light of the world can overcome it, because the light of the world is the Lamb of God whose death is not defeat, but triumph; not an end, but a beginning for all.
Let us then behold that light of the world, that Lamb of God, in his body the Church, in his body the Blessed Sacrament, in the hope of his future kingdom. Let us behold him and open our eyes to his presence, so that we can say to others, like those first disciples, “Come and see.” And so we will pass the night until the dawn.

It’s No Good If You Don’t See Him

Tim Staples gives a crash course in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/trinity">Trinitarian</a> theology for beginners, using one analogy to illustrate the idea of multiple relations in one being and another analogy to explain multiple beings with one nature.