Aug. 12, 2007
Background Scripture: 2 Kings 25:1-2,5-7; Lamentations: 3:25-33,55-58
Devotional Reading: Psalms 23
Accepting responsibility and blame for our words and acts has never been one of humankind’s favorite activities.
This has always been true, and I think it is even truer today.
Caught redhanded, public figures today often make apologies that are not really apologies.
They do not accept responsibility so much as “share” it with others.
Recently, a politician publicly announced that if someone interpreted his remarks as bigoted, he was sorry they had been taken in that sense. That kind of apology really is an attempt to escape responsibility, because it indicates that if there was injury of any kind, the responsibility lay with the victim, not the victimizer.
The conflict between the sense of corporate and individual guilt is an extremely current topic. The government of Japan has consistently refused to accept corporate responsibility for World War II Japan’s despicable use of captured women as “comfort ladies” – a euphemism for making enslaved prostitutes of captured civilian women.
As I understand Japan’s refusal, it is that these were the acts of a small number of men, not the policy of Japan itself.
Where the buck stops Last week I read in the newspaper a report indicating that a state legislator in our Deep South was waging a campaign against a state bill that would apologize to African-Americans for the state’s complicity in the institution of slavery.
The legislator protested that he could not be held accountable because he was not of the generation that practiced human slavery.
I’ve heard other people say much the same thing about compensating Native Americans for the lands that were confiscated from them by violent force. Where does the “buck stop?”
In the early eras of Old Testament times, the emphasis was on the corporate sin of the whole people.
Much of this was based upon the provision in the second of the Ten Commandments: “… for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the fourth and fifth generation …” (Exodus 20:5; also 34:7).
During the period of Israel’s exile in Babylon, Ezekiel proclaimed that each Jew was responsible for his or her own sins, but not those of either a forebear or descendent.
“What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge?’ As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel” (Ezekiel 18:2,3). (See also Jeremiah 31:29,30; and Deuteronomy 24;16).
Corporate vs. individual Does this mean that Ezekiel is contradicting Exodus 20 or that the prophet is more authoritative than Moses?
I do not think so.
Both of these concepts – corporate and personal responsibility – are valid, and we cannot afford to forget either of them. The second commandment is correct in warning that sins often have consequences that inflict hardship on innocent others and subsequent generations.
In the 1950s and 1960s, our society paid heavily for the sins against African-Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although I was not yet born during those eras, I shared a sense of responsibility for the sins of generations past.
At the same time, we need to have a strong sense of personal responsibility for our sins. God will not hold me responsible for the acts of my forebears, nor will he inflict my guilt upon my children.
He will hold me responsible for my sins – and that will be quite enough.
Ezekiel 18 is a call for repentance. The best way to handle guilt is to repent, and repentance means more than saying the right words. Marvin Richard Vincent says, “Mere sorrow, which weeps and sits still, is not repentance. Repentance is sorrow converted into action; into a movement toward a new and better life.”
Here’s to a new and better life.
This farm news was published in the Aug. 8, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
