Free from Sin
The case for defining sin as illusion, not sin as disobedience against God
CW: assault, rape, abuse
“God loves you so much that he will burn you up for not loving him back. And it’s pretty simple, actually, because he created you as a sinner ‘cause he loves you and he hates sin, okay? So, he decided what was a sin and then put it inside you, and then you gotta get it out, right? So he said, I’ll send my son and kill him because the sin I put in you I hate it, and I’ll burn you up for it. And so he sent his son and then killed him, so he could get rid of the sin that he put in you because he hates it. But, but listen. It’s because he loves you…” ~QueenErin The1st
Growing up in evangelical land, I learned that sin meant being bad by disobeying God. One time in youth group someone said that the Hebrew word for sin came from a term used in the sport of archery, which means missing the mark. We always assumed that the mark toward which we aimed referred to God’s will, rules, or character. We conveniently excluded the character traits of a God who presided over genocide, infanticide, and torture. We assumed he had the right to bad behavior, but we didn’t because we were the wretches. We settled this inconsistency by telling ourselves God was perfect because he was the omnipotent authority.
Sin included the obvious no-nos taken directly from the Ten Commandments: stealing, lying, idolatry, adultery, murder, etc., but sin also included all the things the church people thought were bad: cussing, drinking, smoking, dancing, secular music, tarot cards, sneaking out at night, women pastors, and voting for Democrats. So, vote for Obama and you’ve missed the mark. Listen to Def Leppard and you’ve gravely missed the mark. Mutter a little, “well damn,” and you better start confessing that bad behavior to God as soon as you get home. You better be asking for his forgiveness and reminding yourself that Jesus died because you just did that. How could you. You’re better than that. As a Christian you’re morally superior, remember? Jesus came into this God-forsaken world to save you from your sin. Stop it.
Here’s how it went. Disobey God, fess up, tell God you’re sorry, reassure God you love him and you believe that Jesus died to save you from this bad thing, accept God’s grace, and just stop doing the bad thing. Then you’ll be free from sin. Start acting right again. This was our canon.
I’m no theologian, but viewing sin as bad behavior that people need to stop doing doesn’t align with how Jesus talked about it.
“Sin no more”
Because part of evangelical salvation required us to try our darnedest to stop breaking God’s rules, I was a bit surprised to find that Jesus says to stop sinning only twice in the Bible.
Wait a dang minute.
You. mean. to. tell. me. that all of that Jesus-said-go-and-sin-no-more stuff was based on Jesus’ words to two people? Out of the dozens of stories of him interacting with the big ugly sinners, he told only two of them to stop it?
I was even more surprised to find which two stories contained Jesus’ admonition to sin no more. Get this. In both stories Jesus is the one who broke the rules, rules that would have been considered “God’s rules.” Therefore, in both stories Jesus sinned according to the notion of sin as disobedience against God.
You mean to tell me.
A Man Healed at the Pool of Divided Selves
The first time Jesus says, “Go and sin no more,” he had just healed a paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda, a ritual bath near the temple. It had two basins with five porticoes, and it was near the Sheep Gate, an archway through which sacrificial sheep were brought.
Jesus asked the man if he wanted to get well, and the man didn’t respond with a yes or no, but rather, “I have no one to help me.” The man explained that he kept waiting for his opportunity to get into the healing waters, but he couldn’t get in fast enough on his own. For 38 years he was stuck, completely reliant on others’ goodwill. Like the sheep, he was vulnerable, dependent, and profoundly innocent. He had done nothing wrong, that is, until he got up, took his mat, and walked like Jesus told him to. Later Jesus encountered him again in the temple and said, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse will happen to you.”
Telling this innocent man that he should stop behaving badly makes zero sense. Such a sentiment would be cruel, in fact.
Not only that but also Jesus told the man to break God’s rules, and Jesus broke the rules himself. Healing on the Sabbath was considered work, as was carrying your mat. According to the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath is supposed to be a day of rest, and thus any degree of work wasn’t allowed. These were God’s rules. According to evangelicals’ own definition of sin, Jesus sinned in this story.
“But Amy, not healing on the Sabbath and not carrying a mat weren’t God’s rules, they were manmade interpretations of the rules.” And your version of the rules aren’t?
I vehemently reject any interpretation of this story that says it’s about disabled people needing a savior to come along and cure them. Enough of ableist theology. Plus, it’s antisemitic to claim that the moral of the story is to be wary of pagan superstitions about water initiations while also practicing baptisms. Enough of Christian elitist theology.
I can’t help but wonder whether the whole point of the story is that a paradigm in which the self is divided creates immobility and dependency. The only way out of such a state is to enact your autonomy. Healing requires breaking the rules.
I read this story as an allegory for the soul, one that tells of the process of liberation. Allegories don’t always mean fictionalized, so I’m not saying it didn’t happen in a literal sense. The magic of this life is that material reality holds deep symbolism. Archeological evidence points to the spiritual meaning of this story. Five porticoes around a pool seemed strange to readers until fairly recent archeological discoveries of the ritual baths in the area. The Bethesda Pool was divided into two basins, separated by a wall with portico between them. The divided self. The man was stuck in a place with access to only one of the basins. Unintegrated binaries. The pool was near the Sheep Gate. Sheep, the symbol of dependency, vulnerability, innocence, conformity, needing external guidance. It had five porticoes. Five, a number of transition. Portico, a portal to the water, consciousness.
Maybe with Jesus’ prompting, “Do you want to be well,” the man finally considered that something within him was scared of being healed, scared of having the agency to go places. Perhaps he was waiting for others to help him into the waters as an excuse to evade the real issue, his fear of freedom. Like Brooks in Shawshank Redemption, perhaps the man by the pool knew he would experience difficulty adjusting to the outside world, so he clung to the security of familiarity within the tight borders that confined him. There’s safety in being a sheep. Decisions can be terrifying because then you’re responsible for them. Change is unsettling. The power to move about the world on your own terms is risky. Leaving the flock comes with a high exit cost, unbearable grief for the stuck years you can never get back.
I think the healing that occurred was simply in Jesus telling the guy that things aren’t as they seem, like, “You have mobility, my man. A divided consciousness keeps you trapped in either-ors. No one is coming to save you. You got this, just get up and walk.” Then later when Jesus tells him to stop sinning, I think he meant, “See, you are well again. Stop deluding yourself about your agency or something worse might happen.”
I deeply relate to this man. My sense of self was divided for 38 years because I believed I could only enter one of two water basins, the one that was right and good. An outsourced will rendered me paralyzed, stuck in a belief system that said I am dependent on a male God outside of me to be made well. I believed I should act in sheepish deference to and reliance on others, rendering me immobile on my own. I had to break the rules to experience my internal authority. In breaking the rules I realized all the ways I had been taught to live in illusions, due to a binary consciousness. Breaking the rules freed me.
The Woman Caught in Patriarchy
The second time Jesus tells someone to sin no more, he is addressing the infamous woman caught in adultery, the worst transgression against patriarchy imaginable. Shame of all shame. According to the Law of Moses, aka God’s rules, the woman was supposed to be stoned for this. We all know that no one ends up throwing stones, so here again, because of Jesus, God’s rules were not followed. And here again, it just doesn’t add up that Jesus would tell someone to stop breaking God’s rules while breaking God’s rules.
“But Amy, the people of that time made the rules and claimed they were from God.” Take a clue, Chad.
Everyone seems to assume that John 8:1-11 is a story about Jesus being compassionate enough to decry capital punishment but authoritative enough to tell the woman to stop being a slut. No one, in my church at least, explored how every patriarchal society builds its foundation on denying women’s sovereignty over their own bodies. No one talked about how the adulteress would not have consented to the act in which she was caught because women had zero sexual autonomy. Women’s consent to sex was unfathomable. She wouldn’t have been afforded the opportunity to consent nor would she have known how, and thus, no one talked about how this was a story of Jesus stopping murderous men from punishing the victim of sexual assault.
Stories about violence against women in the Hebrew Bible sometimes signify impending societal collapse, but also violence against women was codified in laws and social codes, culturally normalized. Grown men would lay claim to little girls. Marital rape was legal of course. An Israelite woman’s womb belonged first to her father as a bride price and then to her husband as the factory which produces the man’s lineage. Adultery was only a problem because women were men’s chattel. Married men could - and did - sleep with enslaved women and sex workers with no accusation of adultery or sexual immorality of any kind. It was also legal for men to have multiple wives or sex slaves, but sleeping with another man’s wife was considered a property crime against the man. Parts of the Deuteronomist laws say raped women should be blamed and punished, even to the death, because now they’re damaged goods, see. Then thanks to Greco Roman attempts at parity, there’s that horrible verse in 1 Corinthians about wives’ bodies belonging to their husbands and husbands’ bodies belonging to their wives. This is rape culture.
Some dang Bible scribe out there knew about this social context in which it was normal for men to own, control, coerce, rape, and even kill women, and then he *dared* to title this story The Woman Caught in Adultery. Sir. I’m gonna say this real slow for you: Kick. Rocks. You could have gone with The Woman Caught in Patriarchy, or When Women are Property, or The Audacity of Victim Blaming, or Jesus and the Murderous Men. I recently heard two progressive biblical scholars (men, of course) ignorantly refer to sexual encounters seeped in patriarchal coercion as adultery, like David sending his messengers to get Bathsheba. That’s called assault, sirs, even if she complied. I hate it here.
I like to think that Jesus hated it here too.
I like to think Jesus knew that the woman’s entire life was marked by denials of her consent. He knew the rape culture into which she was socialized, given that others dictated her sexual activity for her. He knew she never had a say over her very own body because the church people took her candy as their own. He knew how rapey it was for them to tell her that her body belonged to her future husband, rather than affirm that her body is hers and hers alone. He knew she was part of a society that normalized assault and punished women’s sexual autonomy.
I like to imagine that Jesus knew that that the adulteress had been assaulted and was going along with it because appeasement is her safest bet with men who impose themselves. He knew that she was conditioned from childhood to please men who threatened her. Deep in her bones was an understanding that saying no to people more powerful than she brought violence upon her. She contorted herself to survive. Jesus knew that she had never learned about consent because she was taught that her body existed for others and that she couldn’t trust herself. Worse, she was taught that she was responsible for stopping men’s uncontrollable urges, so I like to imagine that Jesus knew that she had been groomed from a young age to take the blame for being raped. He knew her options were to cope with men’s power over her by falling in love with her assaulters, or be stoned to death. She chose coping. He knew that if she had ever claimed her candy for herself, that which was rightfully hers, she would experience retribution, punishment, and condemnation. He knew that her will in this situation was anything but free.
I like to imagine that Jesus knew the adulteress was innocent.
The reason Jesus didn’t condemn the adulteress isn’t because he was so forgiving. It’s because she wasn’t to blame for what men did to her. In my mind’s eye the men put down their stones after Jesus exposed the cruelty of their patriarchal system. They can get on outta here with that mess, and she can wake up to it.
When Jesus then told her to go and sin no more, I think he was telling her to stop living in the illusion that she has no authority over herself. The social, cultural, legal, and spiritual abuse against her was of course very real. The rape culture was real. The assaults were real, but just like the paralyzed man by the pool, her lack of agency was a distortion of reality. I think Jesus was saying, “Wake up to the truth that you are coping with men’s violence by telling yourself you love them. Start to see how you betray your truth when you believe the church people’s lies that your body belongs to a man. Your actions will align with your value system when you learn to trust yourself to freely decide with whom you share your candy.”
There is no sin. It’s an illusion.
I’m free from interpreting Jesus’ “sin no more” as a declaration to stop disobeying God’s rules. In both stories Jesus disobeyed them. I think he was instead telling the man by the pool and the woman caught in patriarchy to go live in your truth. Realize when you’re telling yourself lies about who you are and what you can do. You can walk, my dude. You have sovereignty over your body, dear woman.
If you’re willing take the gospel of Mary seriously, you might wonder why in that text Jesus says, “There is no sin.” Mary 3:1-9 states:
Peter said, “What is the sin of the world?”
The Savior said, “there is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin. That is why the Good came into your midst, coming to the good which belongs to every nature in order to restore it to its root. This is why you become sick and die for you love what deceives you. One who understands, let him understand!”
If sin means rebellion against God, then we’d have to assume Jesus was lying when he says there is no sin. I mean, just read any ancient text or just turn on the news. Because “the Good came into your midst, coming to the good which belongs to every nature in order to restore it to its root,” that means the root of humanity is good, not inherently rebellious against God like Augustine said.
Sin means living in an illusion. That’s why there is no sin; sin is that which doesn’t exist. But you “make sin when you do things that are the nature of adultery,” betraying the Christ within you. In other words, sin is missing the mark of one’s truest self.
Notice how the notion that the wages of sin is death shows up in this passage, but in the place of the word sin is the phrase, “for you love what deceives you.” Illusions. The payment for illusions is death. Loving what deceives you is an act of adultery because you’ve betrayed the deepest truth at your root. When Jesus tells the Pharisees they will die in their sins in John 8:21, I get it. I’ve died in my illusions, too. Every time I’ve experienced some kind of death or ending in my life, the process involved waking up to some distortion about myself or my reality. The part of me that had been deluding myself to cope with my situation had to die.
A low-vulnerability example is that I tend to agree to more than I have the capacity for. It’s hard for me to tell people no, ahem, thanks to patriarchy and Christian values of service to others. When I say I am available when I truly am not, I am enacting a distortion. I am betraying myself and therefore betraying others. I eventually burn out, and I’m left asking, “How did I get here, dead to this situation?” I got here because I was acting from an illusion. I loved what deceived me, which was the false sense of acceptance I felt from being who others wanted me to be.
The idea of sin as bad behavior doesn’t account for how humans actually behave. It doesn’t account for how people cope with trauma, freezing like the man by the pool and fawning like the woman caught in patriarchy. It doesn't account for being socialized into a world of divided selves, beholden to systems that say people have to contort themselves into one way of being and not the other as if they have no internal authority. Sin as bad behavior doesn’t account the role of unmet needs, abuse, the nervous system, how our brains lie to us to keep us alive, or how we gravitate toward the familiar and tend to fear change. It doesn’t account for the ways people’s decisions become clouded during times of imposition, duress, or deceit from others. It doesn’t account for a collective completely uneducated about mental health and the fact that all of us need therapy. Most importantly, sin as bad behavior doesn’t account for societal structures of power and control. It doesn’t account for the ways people become forced to survive the horrors of oppression, nor for the fact that we’re all connected. Speaking against the dominance of empire was Jesus’ whole damn thing. It was his mother’s thing too. She wanted God to send the rich away empty.
If Jesus represents the truth made manifest into the world, then believing that you can birth your truth in its physical form is your salvation, not believing the dogma that “Jesus died because you’re so bad.” Jesus died because the empire killed him. He threatened the social order of authoritarianism by empowering people with the task of lifting veils of distortions. This was his apocalyptic teaching. Sinning no more means waking up to the lifetime of messages about how the world works, who you’re supposed to be, and what rules you’re supposed to follow. It means believing that there’s a loving Christ - your truth - within you, which will set you free.
