Who's Responsible Here?
From today's readings: "Therefore I
will judge you, house of Israel,
each one according to his ways, says the Lord GOD.... Create a clean heart in
me, O God.... Suffer the little children to come to Me...."
Another hallmark of Ezekiel is his insistence and clarification
of personal responsibility. Elsewhere in the Bible, the collective consequences
of sin are explicitly affirmed, e.g., Exodus 20:3, that part of the First
Commandment where God explains, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the
fourth generation of those who hate Me." A pessimistic and fatalist
misapplication of this principle led to the proverb quoted today, "Fathers
have eaten green grapes, thus their children's teeth are on edge,"
suggesting that even a bit of imprudence (eating green grapes) leads to a
vindictive aftermath for the succeeding generation (crooked teeth).
People were conveniently blaming all their woes on the previous
generation, something not totally unheard of in our own day! While not denying
the obvious truth that ill-effects of parents' sins are felt by their innocent
children, Ezekiel attacks the abusive appeal to this principle as a cop-out.
Instead, he clearly explains that each individual is ultimately responsible for
his own sins.
Remember though, Ezekiel was himself saddled with the inequitable
burden of communal responsibility - while many had engaged in idolatry and
other sins which led to the divine chastisement of Jerusalem at the hands of
the Babylonians, Ezekiel himself presumably was not guilty, even though he too
was suffering exile. But doesn't that contradict what Ezekiel insists about
personal responsibility?
No, because Ezekiel's strong emphasis on personal
responsibility / culpability (found throughout his book but especially in Chapter
Eighteen) was needed to correct the prevalent overemphasis on collective
(ancestral) responsibility. Essentially, though, Ezekiel's position is
completely compatible with the Christian distinction of personal sin vs. social
sin - the former is the more fundamental reality (and where the emphasis
clearly belongs!); the latter is a derivative phenomenon, certainly not to be
denied, but neither to ever be so overemphasized as to extenuate accountability
for personal sin.