In the opening Canto of the Divine Comedy, Dante encounters three ferocious animals: the leopard, the lion and the wolf. They symbolize the major categories of sin: incontinence, violence and fraud. Or as they are more commonly called – lust, pride and avarice. In her commentary, Dorothy L. Sayers explains that these categories of sin were associated with the three stages of life – lust with youth, pride (self-conceit) with the middle years and avarice with old age. Of course, they can attack a person at any time of his life.

When John the Baptist preached, the people responded by “acknowledging their sins.” I will publicly acknowledge mine – not in a specific way (best to save that for confession) but in a general way. I have not always fought off the attack of the leopard, the lion and the wolf. Within the last week, possibly within the last day, I have fallen into some degrees of lust, self-conceit and greed. Perhaps I have not done so in an egregious manner, but that it is not the point. All of us should reflect on these words of Blessed John Newman:

“The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul . . . should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”

On a natural level it does not make sense to me that the lie I told is a worse disaster than the AIDS epidemic. However, from a spiritual, eternal point of view there is no way around it. The worst evil, the only ultimate evil is sin - the knowing and deliberate violation of God's law.

Sin knows how to sell itself. It arrives beautifully packaged and seems irresistible. Everywhere we look, lust, violence, and greed dominate our world. To become a cynic requires no effort. John the Baptist did not fall into that trap. For sure he denounced sin, but more importantly he proclaimed a solid hope. The dominion of sin, he says, is coming to an end. The kingdom of God is at hand. What is that kingdom? Today’s Old Testament reading describes it poetically: