St. Paul and discovering that sin is ‘missing the mark’

Utterly life-changing was the day I learned that the Hebrew word most frequently used for “sin” (hhatah) is understood by scholars to mean “missing the mark.”

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? If God is central to our lives, and our desire is to live fully “through him, in him and with him,” then our spiritual aim, like an archer’s, is to direct all our thoughts and best efforts toward hitting the “bullseye,” which is that place of perfect unity with not just what is “true” but the All-Truth which is Christ-in-God.

Only rarely do our arrows manage to penetrate that dead-center place; more often, we feel lucky to come close. Despite our best intentions, our tries veer left or right, high or low, too often away from the goal by a little or a lot. Sometimes we thoughtlessly let fly and miss the target altogether, with potentially serious consequences to ourselves and others.

In the King James and Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible, St. Paul seems to be directly referencing “hhatah” as he writes, “I press TOWARD THE MARK for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:14, KJV).

The former Pharisee, who turned to Christ after unjustly persecuting his followers, hoped never to shoot wide of the mark, thus threatening his union with the Savior.

We all should hope likewise, for when we miss our shot, we find ourselves stranded in the lonely, valueless outer boundaries of “nothingness” — the heaven-exempt place where God-is-not. We land there through our worst sins and reckless choices, the self-harming spiritual indifference that slaps a cold distance between us and the good, the beautiful and the true center, where Christ resides.

Whether by venial centimeters or mortal full yards, a missed mark is a missed mark; it is an expanse between us and God which, like the Prodigal Son, we ourselves have created.

So, then — like attentive spiritual marksmen and women — we must recognize the metaphysical voids we’ve created and adjust accordingly. We must admit our bad pulls and then correct our mechanics, reworking our stance and examining our equipment through confession, prayer and spiritual direction.
We empty our quivers throughout each day; missing out on perfection doesn’t mean we’re bad. It does not mean we’re evil. It also doesn’t mean we should regard weak shots as good-enough.

What “missing the mark” does mean is that we are human, still carrying within ourselves the broken effect of Original Sin. Even the saints have struggled to overcome their worst impulses; even their arrows sometimes shushed past the bullseye in graceless near misses.

“I do not understand my own actions,” wrote St. Paul, “for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do (Rom 7:15, 19).

For the entirety of our lives, we will wrestle with our brokenness; we will “press toward the mark,” our efforts occasionally soaring straight and true, but more often landing within the same old sins and spaces we keep trying to escape. Like St. Paul, we may never know why.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The self is more distant than any star.” It is good to remember that none of us know why we do the things we do. Though we’ve diligently examined our consciences, bought the self-help books and even done the work of therapy, our self-knowledge remains insufficient. This side of Heaven, we really do only see ourselves “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12).

Humans have free will and personal agency — indeed, we put great store by the latter — and yet we are the products of all we have experienced, good and bad, and our arrows sail forth, both consciously and unconsciously, from that reality.

Beyond “hhatah,” there are other Hebrew words for sin worth knowing, and we’ll cover them in subsequent columns. Here, it’s enough to consider this: We remain mysteries to ourselves, but not to the Holy One. He comprehends us completely, knows exactly what circumstances have been permitted to occur in our lives (and why), and how those events impact our trajectories, arrow by arrow.

The Triune God views us within the true totality of our beings. He sees our “missed marks” and our lifelong corrections with a fullness of understanding that transcends our own, while we live. Thankfully, he watches from the Mercy Seat (Ex 25:22).

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