In Nehemiah 8, we encounter the people of Israel that is anew gathered at Jerusalem in the midst of the period of exile. Although those gathered to hear Ezra knew that they were Jews and that they belonged to God’s chosen people, in the turmoil of those long decades of exile, many of the people had forgotten what it meant, concretely, to live out that covenant relationship with God. The traditions had not been handed down to them from their parents, and they had never heard read to them the law that God had given them.
When they gather together and hear the law that Ezra reads from the scroll, they weep. Why? A first answer, not wrong but incomplete, would be guilt. The people realize, upon hearing the law read out, that they have not kept it, nor have their parents or their parents’ parents. In essence, these people realize now what John the Baptist will later proclaim to their descendants: “do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Mt 3:9). It will not suffice to simply say that one is in a beloved covenant relationship with God if one does not reciprocate God’s loving choice by choosing God in return through one’s actions.
There is a deeper sense behind these tears, however. The law expresses God’s love and respect for the people that God has chosen. Through the law, God actually establishes a reciprocal covenant. God treats Israel as a responsible partner that is not only loved and chosen by God, but through its free actions in the keeping of the law, can love and choose God in return. That, too, shines out, and thus what is revealed in the reading out of the law is the love that God has for Israel, and the new invitation for Israel to love in return. What is revealed is not primarily “sin” in the pre-Christian philosophical sense of “missing the mark,” but rather “sin” in its properly covenantal Judeo-Christian sense, as the recognition of the revelation of the love that is offered and how we have not accepted it, together with the merciful possibility of returning to the covenant and finally loving as we ought. For Christians, as Barth and Balthasar rightly point out, our sin is fully revealed at the cross where we realize, as if for the first time, just how much God loves us in Christ, and how capable we are, through that love, of loving in return. Thus, for the Christian, the genuine revelation of sin is always “good news,” because it is the greater revelation of God’s ever-greater love for us and of the life that God’s grace now offers us in that revelation.
At the beginning of every Mass, then, let us no longer confess our “imperfections” which have no relation to love, properly understood, but boldly let the Holy Spirit reveal to us our “sins,” so that we might finally begin to let go of our mediocrity in the light of the genuine love that God truly offers us as our own.