the futility of trying to weigh our hearts (or, sin, confession, and the soul)

as the word leaves your friends mouth, sending the surrounding air molecules spinning out of control, you have only one response.

dude, what was that for?

what was what for?

uh... was that word really necessary?

dude, calm down. i'm just expressing the emotion of the moment. It's not like i killed somebody! nobody's going to hell for what I just did. i'll just ask for some forgiveness later.

uh-huh. you just kind of let it go as your friend continues ranting about what a crummy day he had, then you sympathize, and go on your merry way. all the while you're plagued by what he just said.

of course, the above is very generalized and stripped down to a cold, impersonal story line. there is little to no emotion, but i must say that this sort of thing has weighed heavy on my heart for some amount of time, now.*

it seems as though, in western american (dare i say "Christian") society that we have gotten really good at being the judges of what is sin and what isn't. we're really good at weighing the hearts of ourselves and everybody else. believe it or not, we're not the first.

AND NOW: A MAGICAL TRIP THROUGH THE HISTORY OF SIN AND CONFESSION**

ANCIENT EGYPT: *** these guys didn't play for peanuts. this sounds like a joke, but it's really intended to provide the backdrop for everything i'm going to say about them. from the day of their births, until several days after their deaths**** these dudes were prepping for the afterlife. imagine a family trip  out to the pyramids to check out how your afterlife home was coming along. sounds like a whole bunch of fun, doesn't it? yeah. not really. basically, on the day they died, the process of preparing the body to be buried began. the most famous step was of course, removing the brain through the deceased's nose. (this may be interesting to note, as we commonly credit our brains to our ability to judge others.) so after the body was wrapped up, stuck in a box and shut inside some sort of tomb, the survivors believed this:

1: the god anubis would take the heart

2: he would weigh it on a scale against a feather*****

3: then, the god Thoth would interview the heart and ask it 40 questions about who it previously resided in.

4: if the heart ended up feeling guilty, it would get eaten by some creature-thing.

5: if it didn't, it went to heaven. hooray.

now obviously, to us western Christian hipsters, we turn up our noses at this idea and prepare a foreign missions team to go minister to these poor lost souls.****** however, this is not what i wish to pull from this. i wish to pull these things from it:

6: the heart is incapable of weighing itself

7: other hearts were incapable of weighing it, making a need for this (nonexistent) deity and his magical feather scale.

JEWS: the chosen people! okay, so backing up, the hebrew people are now out of captivity from the egyptians, charlton heston-er moses, has led the people out of it (with some major help form the Big Man upstairs) and now they are aimlessly milling around the desert because they were too chicken to enter the promised land. so, in this desert they set up this tent that they called the tabernacle. God dwelt in the tabernacle (in the soon-to-be-discussed Most Holy Place) the tabernacle is run by the priests******* who basically are the pipeline to God. the priests have access into the Holy Place, a curtained-off section of the tabernacle, where they can talk to God. the high priest, however is the only one allowed to go into the Most Holy Place. as previously mentioned, this is where God was. later, of course, under the rule of king solomon, the hebrews built a temple for God. now, this is where sin and atonement really come into play (though they were there in the tabernacle too). whenever someone sinned, they had to drag some bleating, hollering animal to the temple, give it to a priest, and let the priest kill it as a sacrifice to God. this was how they said they were sorry back then. why? because of course, the promised Savior hadn't come quite yet.

A.D. 4 or 5 (SOMEWHERE IN THERE): a Baby is born in a shabby little stable in the town of bethlehem. some distance away, a band of angels shows up, scaring the living daylights out of a bunch of shepherds. and even farther away, a giant star shows up in the sky, and leads some learned astronomers for about, oh, two years.

33-34 YEARS LATER: And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. (Matthew 27:50-51)********

THREE DAYS LATER: The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead to Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you." (Matthew 28:5-7)

CATHOLICS: confession, father. according to catholic doctrine, to be forgiven for our sins, we must come in and confess them all to a priest. sound familiar? yes, though the bleating of goats is not heard in catholic churches, these days.

MODERN CHRISTIANITY: and some 2,000 years later, we're sitting around, reading blogs on the internet and wondering what this all means. and here is what it means:

1. we are incapable of judging others. you still have a plank in your eye, man!

2. we need God to weigh our sins

3. God doesn't weigh sins like us. All are equal to him (swearing=murder=homophobia=hypocrisy=grand theft auto=etc...)

4. a man who was so much more, named Jesus took the collective weight of human existence upon his shoulders, and it was finished.

5. the veil was torn and we can now talk directly to God

6. we come to Him for forgiveness.

7. if we are in Christ, the weight of our existence (which is equal to the weight of our sin) has been lifted from us. we are forever forgiven.


*allusion
**along with some soul history (eschatology) hang on kids, it could be a bumpy ride.
***a lot of this information is taken from the fabulous book "everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die" by david crowder and mike hogan. 2006, relevant books. suggested reading if you ever need to know how bluegrass pertains to death and vice versa
****sometimes years
*****note! WEIGH it against a feather
******you know, give them a future of forestry or sufjan stevens cd or something
*******a tradition that will carry all the way up 'till now, both in jewish and catholic beliefs. more on the catholics in a few...
********also, at that moment several holy people arose from their tombs and started appearing to people after JesusÕ Resurrection  which is pretty cool. it's like... good zombies or something like that. which makes one really want to listen to that family force 5 song...

i apologize if this got really heady and intellectual, but i'm all for backing up my points. this reflects exactly what i believe. please feel free to draw your own conclusions to it.

note: the egyptians are noted to show that other religions (other than Judaism or Christianity) also believe that the heart cannot weigh itself.

note 2: heart and soul can sometimes be used interchangeably.