Guilt is a peculiar thing. Like fire, it fascinates us at a distance, but we quickly draw our hand away when it gets too close.
Our biblical introduction to guilt speaks clearly to our human instincts. When God confronts the Man and the Woman in the Garden, they rush to exonerate themselves. Instead of asking why the fruit was forbidden, or exploring any of the serpent’s rationales for questioning the rule’s justness, Adam and Eve acknowledge the presence of wrongdoing by insisting on blaming others.
We continue to do the same. When bad things happen, we hurry to assign culpability. If only we could be as zealous in mending sin’s damage as we are in fixing fault and proposing punishment.
While the particular misdeeds – our sins du jour – vary on either side of the political aisle, the style of their critics remains the same. We’re always quite sure that people who “act this way” deserve our repudiation.
People often accuse the “religious” of being obsessed with guilt, but it’s really a universal human instinct – at least to note the guilt of others. Something inside us has to cry out against evils done.
And God agrees with us. Wrong has to be accounted for.
The problem, Jesus reminds us, is that it’s so much easier to see the sawdust in our neighbor’s eye and ignore the plank in our own (Matthew 7:3).
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