The Bible talks about sin in a variety of ways. No single comparison describes sin in all the ways we need to understand it. One of the common ways of understanding sin uses the sport of archery. Whenever we sin, we miss the target. Perhaps this idea lies behind Paul’s statement that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”¹ An archer whose arrow plunks into the ground in front of the target falls short. 

            Another way to understand sin compares sin to a debt we cannot pay. This idea lies behind Jesus’ brief parable about two creditors. One owed 500 denarii, the other fifty.² The bigger the debt forgiven, the greater the gratitude. 

            The author of Hebrews compares sin to dirt. If we have ever looked at a piece of furniture a few days after dusting it, we come close to understanding his point. Nothing ever stays clean. Our author here takes his understanding of sin seriously. Just as dirt finds its way into the hardest-to-clean places, so sin has managed to settle into the heavenly temple. We may need to ponder the idea that heavenly things need a good cleaning, but just before our passage starts, the author seems to say just that: “Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things need better sacrifices than these.”³ We might hear this as saying that, even though we take responsibility for our own sin, the impurity reaches into all creation. The cleansing must be thorough. 

            Underlying all these understandings of sin we find the most prominent one: a broken relationship. We can see how some of the other understandings of sin support the larger understanding of it as a broken relationship. If we fall short of someone’s expectations, we might worry that we have disappointed that person. Don’t all the exper

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