Sin is attractive. I have watched a lot of television shows in my life and a lot more commercials, and the one thing I know for certain is that sin is fun, often accompanied by happy young women and men, and there are no, absolutely no, consequences for bad behavior! If you want to be justified in your pathologies, let the pleasure bleed out from the TV screen and wash over you. You will be greeted by an audacity of entitlement for whatever behavior you engage in, secure in the confidence of one who knows that there are no repercussions. This is sin that no longer has the good sense to know what it is.

This experience is not precisely comparable to that of the pharisee in Jesus’ story of the righteous tax collector because the pharisee in the story still had the good moral sense to recognize the reality of sin and the need to honor God. He prayed: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” There is one parallel, though, and that is his blindness to his own sins. Sin was something others did, and he had tired of their sins; but since he did not acknowledge sin in himself, he remained self-satisfied, happy and justified.

This ancient scenario also makes clear that it is not fair to blame Madison Avenue for our sins, our sense of entitlement or our self-righteousness. The attractions of sin, I have it on good authority, are not original to our age. Madison Avenue and the TV networks might commodify our fallen natures and sell them back to us as entertainment, but the vast majority of us conspire with the advertisers and producers in our own downfall. If the media whisper in our ear, they only whisper lies that we delight to repeat to ourselves.

In fact, it is television that has recently put on display for us the effects of sin in as blunt a fashion as possible in the person of Walter White. The main character of the hit series “Breaking Bad” continued to tell himself that what he was doing was for the care of his family, even as he left behind a meth empire and numerous dead bodies and lost souls. But Walter White could not manage the damage of sin, and as his twisted empire crumbled, his family ruined or dead, the reality is presented to us starkly: sin is our attempt to meet our own twisted needs, which from the beginning are perversely turned away from God.

Yet Walter White only did on a larger scale what we all do when we turn away from God. He first convinced himself there was no sin and that, even if there were, it was justified. Jesus offers for our consideration a tax collector, crying out to heaven, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus tells us that the tax collector “went down to his home justified rather than the other,” the pharisee. This is the only occurrence of the verb dikaioô, to justify or make righteous, in all of Luke’s Gospel. It is a perfect participle, which means it might be translated “having been made righteous.” Why is this sinner justified? “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” To move from self-exaltation to humility to justification, you need to acknowledge your sin and you need to get tired of your sin. You need to get sick of the excuses, the lies and the entitlement; you need to come home to God.

We tire of sin when we recognize we are intended for more and when we feel God’s love burning through the lies we tell ourselves. God does not need a Madison Avenue ad agency presenting his pitch: “Tired of sin? Want to get rid of it? You keep scrubbing and scrubbing but those stubborn, persistent stains won’t go? Don’t despair, there’s a God who cares.” All God needs is recognition on the part of the sinner that she is loved. In the presence of God’s love, the reality that sin cannot abide becomes gloriously apparent. This is when the cry emerges, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” The best part of all? God will be.

This article appears in October 21 2013.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.