Ezekiel 18: 1-3, Matthew 21: 23-32

The blame game

Do you ever play the blame game? Does anybody ever do so with you?  Just the fact that there is an expression “the blame game” shows that it is a common thing.  The prophet Ezekiel steps right into the middle of this old game.  Ezekiel speaks critically for God and the people respond defensively:”It’s not our fault. The problems we face is because our parents.  That’s most likely what the words of the text mean:”The parents eat sour grapes and the childrens’ teeth are set on edge.”  Jesus too has to deal with people who are blameless.  The chiefs and elders in Matthew want to pin Him down by asking questions about His authority.  Jesus cannot be seen as being called on the carpet. So He comes up with a question of His own:” By what authority did John baptize? Now they are on the defensive. If it’s human authority the people will be angry at them, if is God’s, then why have they themselves excluded themselves?”  So they say they don’t know. But that’s not honest, because they refused John’s baptism because they did not want to appear sinful. As experts and leaders they had to appear blameless.

Blame has been around forever. It started with Adam’s story and all other earliest humans. “There is enough blame to go around” is really a saying, because most of us don’t practice it.  Blame always belongs most heavily to someone else.

Friends, to give blame can often feel good. To receive blame is endlessly painful. Humans are one with hating the label “to blame” when it is assigned to them.  Much of our lives are spent assigning the blame to others and avoiding it for ourselves.  Just two weeks or so ago in Pretoria, South Africa Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius was convicted of culpable manslaughter in the death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.  The defense tried to find ways to not make him to blame, that somehow he could get a pass. That didn’t work, although he avoided the worst charge.  That was perhaps one of the most

blatant efforts in escaping blame, especially since no one denied he fired the guns with the bullets that killed his girlfriend. In that same South Africa a decade or so before that the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” held hearings in which perpetrators of crimes by the Apartheid regime were to tell of those crimes in front of the relatives of the murdered and in return for their honesty and shame and acceptance of blame, they would not be tried and convicted.  Church officials were the drivers behind this unprecedented trial without trial.  It was very Christian: true repentance is enough and you will be forgiven.  But it did not heal the deep anger that existed in South Africa of the rich and the powerful who killed the poor and frustrated at random?  It was idealistic and raw and beautiful and awful.  But was it justice?   It perhaps was better than the pitiful way the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were accounted or the crimes of so many occupying countries.  The people of Rwanda seem to have learned the lessons and people are allowed to take their time to find solace. They are not asked to rush through their grief and rage.  There is an acknowledgement that the injustice done is so deep and traumatizing that you to assign and accept blame is not enough.

Of course friends, these are the excesses of human sin we describe.  Most of the things in life that people assign and receive blame for are a lot more simple and not as heinous.  As our lives become longer we have the chance to blame lots of people : we can blame our parents and we do, we can blame our teachers and we do, we can blame our siblings and we do, we can blame our politicians and we do that with abandon, we can play our pastors, no please don’t!  Yes pastors need to be blamed sometimes too.  But there is something God knows that in the relatively short lives of humans to live with blame, either as one who hands it out or who gets blamed, we cannot be fulfilled when we live under the shadow of blame. It will cripple us and warp all our relationships.  So God came up with a solution that is as weird and strange as it is beautiful: :”Shift the blame to Me. Let Me be the fall ‘guy.’” That is how we get the cross.  That’s is what dying for our sins means, friends.  We are allowed to deflect the blame.  By being forgiven in an act of true forgiveness we can forgive ourselves.  We can liberate ourselves from that crippling sense of blame.   As a result our blaming of others should become less.  The forgiven should forgive. But no one can tell another human being who has suffered deeply to let go of their anger and resentment or tell them when or how to do this.  You can’t force healing.  Emotional pain is too personal to be removed by prescription.  May God help us all.