At All Saints services the church praises the Lamb who dwells among the blessed dead. The church has sung countless odes proclaiming His supreme power to take away the sin of the world, including the much loved Agnus Dei, "Lamb of God." The church's certainty about the ultimate rest of the blessed dead is indicative of her faith that this Lamb is the One who has paid for the sins of the world. Our certainty that the faithful are with the Lamb around His throne is a confession not of the greatness of the saints, but a confession of the greatness of the Lamb. If the Lamb does not take away every sin, if there remain yet sins for which the faithful themselves must atone, then we ought not have any decisive certainty that the faithful dead are beholding the Lamb on the throne.

This is why the medieval church began to multiply the structures for dealing with the unatoned sin that was presumed to apply to Christian folk, who had not provided sufficient penances for their transgressions or who failed to live up to the high standards of piety supposedly performed by the truly religious, such as monks, friars and priests. The evangelical counsels, as outlined by Jesus in the Beatitudes, were the absolute standard that was required of all persons, but only to be competently performed by the professional religious. Purgatory was a way to work off in the next life what had not been taken care of in this life. Soon the transference of human merit by masses for the dead, or works of supererogation by the really super-pious were applied to the needs of ordinary Christians like us, who seemed to be stuck in purgatorial suffering for millions of years. All this had to be done because there was little confidence that Christ is the Lamb who took away the sins of the world.

Today, people tend to despair that their sin and guilt could be taken care of by a holy other. Humans today tend to race headlong into self destructive behavior as a way of anesthetizing their psyche, whether in substance abuse or a mad chase after what the world calls pleasure. In their vague, but controlling, experience of guilt they can't see how the problem can be solved from outside themselves. This is reinforced by our cultural prejudices in favor of interiority: "as long as it feels good do it," "if you didn't mean any harm, it's not your fault." We are coaxed and cajoled into looking inward all the time. When we do, we are overwhelmed by the flood of guilt that spews forth from a fully examined conscience. Then we fall into other great shame and vice, because we can see no help from within our experience. We are being led in the wrong direction entirely by the preachers of interiority because our help comes from the Lamb, not from us. The problem is on the inside, and not the solution. The solution, even ab-solution, is from outside of us. The Bible's consistent message is that the "Wholly Other" has been our holy Other, who wholly took our sin to count us holy. If Christ the Lamb did not take our sin away, either we are not in the world or Christ is incompetent. No, there is no sin for which the Lamb was not slain and which He did not take away; none in all the world.

Jerome of Jerusalem