Sin And Error

It is interesting, (a neutral word, more fitted to the cocktail hour perhaps than serious discussion) that the ancient Hebrews just as the ancient Greeks found a similar concept at the heart of wrong doing.  The words are chet or chait in the Hebrew and hamartia in the Greek.  These words both evoke the scene of shooting at a target and missing the mark.  We who are raised in the Christian tradition, whether believers or not, have embedded into out thinking the notion of sin.  The English language word very specifically refers to ego action of one sort or another, its root cognate with that for "to be."  In other words sin defines the act of someone willful, demanding recognition, "here I am, " so to speak.  Some translate sin as the knowing transgression of the laws of god, probably a pretty powerful rendition of knowing transgression, just as putting out a cigarette on the White House upholstery before being ushered into the Oval Office to meet the President is, too.  In any case, the Greek word hamartia describes someone aiming at a goal and missing it, in other words, a mistake, an error.  This is a very different construct posing a frail person not altogether in control of his actions.  Missing the mark is tragic.  Oedipus moved heaven and earth to escape the oracular pronouncement that he was doomed to murder his father and marry his mother, but in the end as he was trying to escape his doom and flee Corinth and went on the road, killed this old guy at the crossroads after which he went on into Thebes and married the newly widowed queen.  We the onlookers put two and two together and you have to ask why didn't Oedipus.  And we have to cry out in sympathy for a guy trying so hard to escape his doom to the extent that it came up and hit him in the face.  The target hit him in the face, really.  Altogether different from Adam and Eve who were specifically told to avoid the fruit of the Tree in the Garden of Eden and then followed the seductive advice of the serpent and ate the apple.  They were told not to, and then they did it anyway.  That is the delicious thrill of sin; it's not a mistake, it's a deliberate act.  There is something so exciting and sexy about the willful disobedience of the laws of god that those who surrender to the fatal intoxication of a misreading of the signs on the ground will never know.