TODAY, many of us have difficulties thinking of ourselves as “miserable [pitiable] sinners”. We don’t want to be pitied by God. Jesus dying “for our sins” is an affront to our sense of self-worth. If our life brings unhappiness, we want God to say “It’s not your fault.”

Yet the gospel has much more to say about forgiveness than self-affirmation. The result is that we are unclear about what it means to acknowledge fault and receive forgiveness. It does not help that the Western Church has developed a highly forensic view of sin. I am either guilty, or not guilty, of particular sins. If I am guilty, I repent and receive forgiveness. If not, what then?

In pastoral practice, I have often found that it is the least guilty people who often feel most guilt. People seek relief in the confessional for a sense of shame or hurt, when “It is not your fault” seems the only wise response; and yet this does not always meet the need.

The difficult truth is that people who have been ashamed, belittled, and abused sometimes look to be cleansed and liberated, just as those who have consciously committed sin are meant to do. In fact, the nervous and the sad are sometimes more likely to feel sinful than those who actually and obviously commit sin. “It’s not your fault” may come as a relief, but it is not the whole answer.

The liturgical texts of Holy Week and Easter remind us that, whether we think of ourselves primarily as sinners or as people who are sinned against (and we are all both, of course), what is wrong with us is a fault or flaw of primeval origin. We have a grim solidarity in the fall of Adam, just as we have a liberating solidarity in the redemption brought by Christ. Evangelical Christianity reminds us that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Experience also shows us that sinner and sinned against are often bound together in a destructive intimacy that needs to be broken. The Easter liturgy announces that the sinner is forgiven, the broken are healed, and the prisoners are set free.

We need to hear this. One of the more oppressive sins of our particular age is the sin of self-righteousness. We find fault with people of whose opinions we disapprove. We accept the sneering half-apology that begins “If”, and blames anyone (who is picky enough to be offended) for being offended. And all the time “It’s not my/your fault” lurks in the background.

Easter recasts our self-righteousness and invites us to solidarity in Christ, because, in the end, the fault that we dread in our deepest being is felix culpa: a “happy fault”. Sinner or sinned against, the Easter Christ meets us, risen from the tomb.