What is sin? This important question on Ash Wednesday goes to the heart of the matter. Words from the Miserere – Psalm 51, a broken and contrite heart O Lord thou shalt not despise, hint at the anxiety that people of conscience have over the morality of their actions and their relationship with God. We need to begin by recognising that sin is not simply wrongdoing or moral failure. What we acknowledge today is that there is an undeniable fracture in our relationship with God, with one another, and with creation itself, which grieves the heart and impels us to renewal. The message of the Scriptures is that the impulse to renew is actually with God and the task of Lent is align ourselves with that will for connection – atonement.
Sin is the turning away of the heart, its distortion and narrowing, so that we no longer see God’s light clearly. It is, as Rowan Williams once observed, not merely the breaking of a rule but the refusal of communion, the refusal to be who we are in God’s image.
“Turn ye even to me with all your heart,” cries the prophet Joel, “and rend your heart, and not your garments.” True repentance is not external theatre but an inward reorientation. Likewise, Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel warns against fasting “to be seen of men,” teaching us that the
penitential life is one of interior truthfulness before the Father who “seeth in secret.”
In the Christian moral tradition, the Church has spoken of venial and mortal sin—not as legal categories but as ways of discerning the seriousness of our estrangement. Mortal sin represents a deliberate, conscious severing of our relationship with God: the will’s turning away from love. Venial sin, though it wounds, does not destroy that relationship, but reveals how fragile and partial our conversion still is. For some as they prepare to make their confession, or use this season to reflect on mortality this is a vital tool to discern the character of what might be troubling them. Yet the purpose of naming sin is never condemnation. The Church names sin so that it may proclaim the greater word: forgiveness.
Repentance, therefore, is not despair but hope. As St. John Chrysostom said, “Repentance is the medicine of the soul.” It is a turning toward the light, a rediscovery of what it means to live freely and joyfully in God. The Church’s absolution is not a human invention but the living assurance that Christ’s victory over sin and death is effective here and now, even in us. When the priest pronounces forgiveness, it is not a permission to forget our sins but a call to live as those who have been found again.
Why then do we need a penitential season such as Lent? It is not for prolonged wallowing in wretchedness. Rather, it
is a season of truth-telling, a time to acknowledge our frailty and to seek the radiance that follows confession. Lent is “a time when we allow ourselves to be seen for what we are, so that God’s grace can be seen for what it is.” The ashes imposed today are not a mark of defeat but of honesty, dust that carries the promise of resurrection.
Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox Theologian I return to often, insists that fasting and repentance are not gloomy duties, but acts of joy. The Lenten fast, he says, is the rediscovery of Eden: a return to the simplicity and harmony of life before sin’s distortion. In fasting, we renounce not the world but the corruption of our desires, and we learn again to receive all things as gift. The Orthodox liturgy sings, “Let us begin the fast with joy,” for penitence rightly understood is liberation.
So, this Lent, let us turn again, not to despair, but to delight. We journey not into darkness but toward dawn. The rending of the heart is the opening through which grace enters. The ashes upon our foreheads are the sign not only of our mortality but of our belonging to the One who can raise even dust to glory.
“Rend your heart, and not your garments.” For where the heart turns, there is home, and where there is repentance, there is joy.