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Leviticus 5:14-15. "The Lord said to Moses, 'If anyone commits a breach of faith and sins unwittingly in any of the holy things of the Lord, he shall bring, as his guilt offering to the Lord, a ram without blemish out of the flock ... it is a guilt offering.'"

 

"Sins unwittingly" sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? It seems we should have to know what we are doing is sinful for it to be a sin, but that is not what God is saying here. Notice that before the "unwitting" sin came a "breach of faith." I think our culpability for sinning unwittingly stems from those breaches of faith.

 

God has written the truth in our hearts, we know what is right and wrong. But God also knows the darkness of this world can tend to blind us to what we are born knowing, so He has revealed His ways and His laws to us, even going so far as to send His Son. He has given us everything we need to shine a light in the darkness and nurture what He has put in our hearts. This is our faith, a tremendous gift that we should never spurn.

 

It is when we commit a breach of faith that we can unwittingly sin. When we fail to nurture the truth in our hearts, when we turn from God to the lies of the world, even for a short time, that is when we can do something very wrong without thinking that it is wrong. Yesterday I wrote about how we have let the spirit of evil control much of our lives and world lately. This evil crept in due to fear, fear that was purposely crafted and nurtured by those who have much to gain from it. The innocent faithful who allowed themselves to get swept up in the fear often forgot about the teachings of our faith, if only briefly (it didn't help that they were prohibited from receiving the Eucharist at the same time - what a perfect storm the devil concocted for us!).

 

Our faith tells us to "be not afraid." We know that God is in charge, and we know that God loves us, and wants us to treat each other with love and dignity. Many people pushed that all of that aside in their fear and, unwittingly, contributed to global inhumanity to our fellow man. This was sinful, not because they meant for people to suffer, necessarily, but because they committed a breach of faith, and that allowed fear to overcome reason, charity, and good will.

 

The truth is, whether we mean to or not, sin affects the world, it is an offense against truth and reality, an offense against God. All sin, whether done with full knowledge or not, is an affront to justice, and therefore demands justice from the sinner. This is not God being mean to us or unreasonable, it is God being God. God is perfect justice, He is truth, He created reality. If we choose to try to negate those things, we will pay a price, because they cannot be negated. It may be a relatively small price that we pay, like one unblemished ram, but it must be paid to restore right order.

 

This is why repentance is so important - we can't pay the price until we know it has to be paid, and we are much better off paying it here than in purgatory. So thank God for this opportunity to repent and atone, to offer our guilt offerings! Otherwise, there would be no hope of us ever gaining heaven, and no hope of setting our very fallen world right again.