Same Sin, Different Dressing

I’ve written before about my jigsaw puzzle addiction. I spent all of Christmas break and a bit more than a month after doing the same puzzle over and over. It’s a ballerina in an attitude (that’s a bent-leg arabesque, not a bad mood). The thing about this puzzle is that once you’ve got the ballerina in place, the background is all the same color. And there’s a lot of it. So, I spent a lot of time looking closely at the shapes – some of which were very different and unique, which always adds pleasure to the puzzle.

But a week ago, I decided it was time to move on and pulled out a different puzzle. This one is a huge maze on a solid background that flows from one shade of green through all the rainbow colors to another shade of green on the other end. Another one from my childhood. Another one I enjoy.

But I made the most interesting discovery!

Remember those oddly-shaped pieces in my ballerina puzzle? I found those same shapes here. Exactly the same shapes. And they seem to belong in the exact same spot as they did in the other puzzle. The two jigsaws are made by the same company – apparently stamped out in the same machine. The design of the picture makes the pieces look different, but they’re not different. They fit together in the same way. In the many years I’ve been doing these puzzles, I never noticed this until now.

And of course, because I am who I am, I pulled a metaphor from the situation.

We seem to think there are many different kinds of evil in the world. There’s stealing and lying and sexual sin and blasphemy and more. But really, they all boil down to the same basic sins. Pride. Idolatry. Selfishness. At its core, all sin is of the same cut. It just presents itself as different sins because of the way it dresses itself up.

The Old Testament law is a tome devoted to the many variations of sin we see in our world. But Jesus, being God, knew quite well that all sin boils down to the same basic tendencies. And so he boiled the law down also to two basic commands: love God and love each other.

I’m directing a production of The Hiding Place that opens this Friday (thus my late and brief blog post). The horrors of the Holocaust depicted in this story are ghastly. But I continue to be reminded that the roots of that great evil are in my heart as well. Pride. Idolatry. Selfishness. I may not beat a person with a riding crop, but I can beat them with my words if I’m not careful. I may not “worship” a human dictator, but that doesn’t mean I always have God in the place he should be in my life. I may not hate someone because of their race, but I shouldn’t hate anyone at all – nobody!

Love God. Love others. It really is that simple . . . and that profoundly challenging.