Humanity stinks

At the denouement of one of the most emotionally searing Foyle's War: "Bad Blood" an old friend (DCS David Fielding) remarks to Foyle, as they reflect on the outcome of an investigation that included a murder and death from Anthrax poisoning:

Look around you Christopher, there's so much evil, so much bad blood; humanity stinks...

He speaks to Christopher, 'Christ bearer', about that which Christ dealt with as he reflects on the horrors of chemical and germ warfare and its effects on his comrades in the Great War and on a few civilians in the story.

With this in mind, and recent events of my experience, I see so well how sin weighs down on us, both as man and as mankind: each of us and all of us .

Sin...often regarded as isolated, if frequent, actions that are 'a sin', that 'break God's law'. If only we knew: Isaiah 64:6 tells the full story!

Sin is hamartia, 'missing the mark'.

We've all missed the mark. Not in individual acts, but in our un-God-like-ness. The sin that crushes us; squeezes out of us our intended humanity, scars us with the frustration of destruction and decay, our communion with our maker stifled as we reap its wages.

Christ took our sin, swallowed its crushing power over us on the cross; then showed in his resurrection that he has freed us from that power, he has crushed it, restoring us to the glorious state of eternal communion with God our Father.

As I was thinking this, Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem: God's Grandeur, came to mind:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

 [words from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur]