Ferdinand Hodler, The Good Samaritan

Those of us who strive for a radically Jesus-centred approach to Christian faith and life can sometimes seem to be “soft on sin.” After all, following Jesus in the Gospels, we focus on his positive calls to love God by loving others, to show mercy, to forgive, to do good to our enemies, and so on. (It’s no coincidence that Jesus was also thought to be “soft on sin” in some ways.)

We also lean into Jesus’ command not to judge others. However, that command isn’t a blanket call to avoid discernment related to sin. Matthew’s version goes on to say that once we have taken the log of great sin out of our own eye we can help our neighbour remove the speck of small sin in their eye. And Jesus does call us to beware of false teachers, discerning them by the bad fruit of their teaching and their behaviour—their sin, and the sin their teaching produces in others.

Most significantly, Jesus himself was not afraid to speak out against sin. But it’s important then, for those of us who strive to follow Jesus, to ask the question: what exactly did Jesus consider to be sin? Put another way: what kinds of ways of thinking and speaking and acting did Jesus critique?

Here’s a selection of sins, according to Jesus:

• Speaking cruelly of other people, insulting and degrading them.
• Men lusting after women (note: not women dressing immodestly).
• Responding to violence with violence.
• Practicing one’s religion to gain approval by others.
• Judging others for their sin while ignoring one’s own sin.
• Withholding help from those who need it—and justifying this with religion.
• Men divorcing their wives for some trivial reason, exposing them to shame and leaving them potentially destitute.
• Refusing to show hospitality to strangers—especially God’s messengers of peace.
• Despising children, or even “causing them to sin.”
• Accumulating wealth, especially while ignoring the poor.
• Following the violent ways of the world to bring about good, rather than following Jesus’ way of self-giving love.
• Withholding forgiveness from a repentant person who has sinned against you.
• Exploiting others economically—especially in the service of religion.
• Using one’s religion to create barriers for people to come to God.
• Focusing on smaller religious matters while neglecting the bigger ones—justice and mercy and faith.
• Not caring for the most needy among us—the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned.

Many of these, I would suggest, fall under a general umbrella: abusing one’s power—including religious power—to cause harm to those who are relatively powerless.

That’s certainly a focus of his critiques of the wealthy and religious leaders. Through their wealth or their status, they have power over others, and instead of using their power for the good of others they are using their power to harm others, or at least not to help them. Many other sins in the list above, though—including his critiques of lust and divorce, even withholding mercy and forgiveness—are also about people having a kind of power over others, and using that power to harm, or not using that power to help, those without that power.

Related to this, it’s worth noting that Jesus never called out the sins of those without power or those vulnerable to harm. These people—those considered “the least” or “the last” or “the little ones” in society, those considered “lost,” even those considered “sinners,” condemned by the religiously powerful for not measuring up—these people Jesus sought out, he welcomed in, he shared meals with, he loved. This doesn’t mean he ignored their sin—he called sinners of all kinds to repentance—but we never see him publicly calling them out for their sin. Most of them we don’t even know what their sins were.

What does all this suggest related to how we as Jesus-followers should understand sin?

Sin is the opposite of love; sin is that which is not-love.

Love, according to Jesus’ teaching, is meeting the real-life needs of others as if their needs were our own—our neighbours, those different from us, strangers to us, even enemies of us. Love, according to the example of Jesus, is giving oneself for the good of others, even walking in solidarity with the powerless, even if it means great self-sacrifice.

Sin, then, is the opposite of this love. It is causing real-world harm to our neighbours, through our attitudes, words, actions—or even inaction. In this Paul was exactly right when he said that “Love does no harm to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law” (Rom 13:10).

And the sins we need especially to pay attention to are those where people with some kind of power over others—through their wealth, their status, their influence, their gender, their race, whatever it may be—use their power to harm those without that power, or do not use their power to help those without that power. It’s for this reason that radically Jesus-centred Christians are known for pursuing social justice and economic justice, even seeing this as what Jesus meant when he said, “Seek first God’s reign and God’s justice” (Matt 6:33).

It’s worth noting that some of Jesus’ strongest critiques were for those who used their religion to justify their abuse of power over others, for causing harm to those most vulnerable in society—economically exploiting them in the service of religion, creating barriers for them in coming to God, refusing to show mercy to them on the basis of religion. May we who are religious—especially those claiming to be Christians—take this warning to heart.