A few years ago TV viewers in Britain were horrified to see knife thrower Jayde Hanson ‘nick’ the head of his female assistant while attempting to repeat his world record of one hundred and twenty knives thrown in two minutes. Commenting on his missed aim he told a local newspaper that in eleven years of performing he’d only hit his assistant five times. But I doubt she felt much reassured by that.
His momentary lapse reminds me that the original word for sin in the Bible was the Greek word hamartia, which literally meant missing the mark; and that no matter how good we think we are, we all miss the mark of God’s glorious ideal for us. That’s why the Bible says ‘If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves…but if we admit our sins to God, He’ll forgive us and make us clean again.’