A Lenten reflection: We cannot escape sin, but we can be delivered

This year is the 80th anniversary of the end of a truly worldwide war that destroyed so much to put an end to the genocidal violence of Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Mar 13, 2025

By William Grimm
This year is the 80th anniversary of the end of a truly worldwide war that destroyed so much to put an end to the genocidal violence of Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Celebrations will point out the atrocities of the losers. Praise, much of it deserved, will be given to the noble sacrifices and bravery of the victors.

However, even though the victors’ aims were laudable, not all the means they used to achieve them were.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, an American bombing raid on Tokyo was the most destructive and deadliest of World War II, even more so than those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan or of Dresden and Hamburg in Germany. In that one night, at least 100,000 people were killed and more than a million were left homeless, many or most of them injured.

The bombers used incendiary weapons against the lower-class eastern area of the city where houses were built of wood and paper. The result, as was planned, was utter destruction in a sea of flame.

Since many of the men of the area had been drafted into military service and deployed to China, the Pacific, and other parts of Japan, much of the population of the area consisted of noncombatant elderly, disabled, women, and children.

The raid was an indiscriminate attack upon a primarily civilian target with little military value. It was a war crime, as were all the terror bombing campaigns of World War II by all the major belligerents. Ironically, it was largely the Japanese in China and the Germans in Spain who had made terror bombing a regular tool of war.

Celebrations of the end of World War II will probably not, at least in the winning nations, take note of and express grief and remorse for the fact that even the “good guys” were guilty of war crimes.

While serving as the defense attorney for a group of British soldiers on trial in 1770 for killing Americans in the infamous “Boston Massacre,” John Adams, later second president of the United States, said something that reminds us that though we may try to rewrite history, we cannot change it. “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (By the way, the soldiers were acquitted.)

What was done was done. It is a fact. Eighty years later, what lesson is there for us?

It is easy to feel superior to those who went before us, especially since most of them are dead and unable to offer excuses or rationales. But it does not take much reflection to realize that we are not so enlightened or upright as to be incapable of atrocities ourselves.

In fact, we must recognize that we are not only capable of atrocities but are, willy-nilly, even today complicit in them. Our Church, our nations, our communities, our corporations, our schools, our cliques, and even our families are capable of and sometimes guilty of unconscionable behavior.

And we often overlook, condone, or benefit from that behavior. Just as I benefit from the victory won in part by atrocities in World War II, today I benefit from injustices perpetrated against people and the planet, even when I play no direct role in them.

Pollution, environmentally irresponsible resource extraction, unfair trade practices, exploitive labor practices and other immoral acts are all part of filling my wardrobe, furnishing my home and stocking my larder.

And there is no way I can be free of them. I can make my own the lament of Isaiah (6:5): “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!”
In Lent, we tend to focus upon our personal sins and failings, striving to repent of them and to renounce them as we renew our baptismal commitment at Easter. We seldom, if ever, reflect upon our social sins such as racism or environmental pollution.

Even less do we consider the sin-smeared environment in which we live, the sin that we cannot escape even when we recognize it and wish it were otherwise. Perhaps that is part of what we mean when we speak of “original sin.”

As we approach Easter, we should reflect upon the Church’s proclamation that in his death and resurrection Jesus has conquered all sin. That means not only my personal sin or the sins of my society, but also the universal environment of evil in which I live and move and have my being and from which I can neither escape nor from which I cannot cease to benefit.

With this perspective, the words of St. Paul (Rom. 7:18-25) take on a broader significance than even Paul perhaps realized though he recognized the pervasive reality of sin in our lives. They become food for thought in Lent.

“For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that, when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

We cannot escape sin, but we can be delivered from it and have been. Only Christ can and has freed us from all sin and cleansed us for life with God.--ucanews.com