Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32; Psalm 25
September 27, 2020
Tatiana Friesen
The idea that bad behaviour leads to literal physical death seems as nonsensical to me as the idea that good behaviour leads to literal physical immortality. I don’t buy it on a word-for-word level, and I’m not convinced that it’s a matter of a sort of karmic afterlife situation either. What makes far more sense to me is an understanding of the words “life” and “death” as qualitative and poetic. If I move beyond literalism, the reading is twice as relatable. We’ve all been in both states; most of us probably many times a day. The feeling of deadness, and the feeling of aliveness, does not have to have much at all to do with the fact that I have a pulse. Deadness, in the poetic sense, is despair, isolation, dread, and defeatism. Aliveness, poetically, is interest, curiosity, community, and change.
Note: when I talk about a feeling of deadness, I don’t mean to equate that with actual mental illness. There is a line between clinical depression and the kind of disconnect resulting from wrong action. Depression should be addressed with appropriate interventions as with any disease, and it’s extremely dangerous to suggest that someone’s mental ill health is due to sin.
Chapter 18 begins with God directing Ezekiel to stop repeating a certain proverb: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.” Or, that sins committed by one generation cannot be contained by the offenders and the consequences thereof pass down to their children, and even to further generations. This thinking gets cited again in Jesus’ time, as when he is asked, regarding a man’s physical distress, whose sins were responsible for the ailment.
It’s easy to see why this idea had a hold on people’s imaginations, and we’re still talking about it today in the form of generational trauma. As I write this homily I’m listening in on an online conference called the Collective Trauma Summit, and what the speakers are saying over there rings very true for me: humanity is currently dealing with not only the consequences of our own individual choices and our personal circumstances but also the inherited and institutionalized pain of our ancestors. I’m definitely not going to try to say all of that is not true.
But even when we talk about generational trauma, we include stories of transforming it, of rewriting the scripts that would have us re-enact patterns of pain. This is what I see going on in this passage. It’s true that we learn about the world and ourselves from the point of view of those that came before us, and we learn the unhealthy patterns along with the healthy ones. But ultimately, we are still personally responsible for our own actions, and we will personally experience the consequences of our choices. We can’t throw the blame back onto our ancestors, any more than we can leave future generations the task of cleaning up after our thoughtless living.
I’m going to put that part in a box and turn to another element of this reading that I find interesting, because it brings up some of the other work I’m trying to do in the direction of antiracism and allyship. In my reading and conversations, I’ve recently realized that I didn’t really understand the concept of identity. I would think and talk about my identity as a Mennonite, as a violist, as an eldest daughter, as an early music specialist, you name it. Of course, these are all things that have shaped my life and my worldview, but I was misusing an important word.
The insidiousness of white supremacy (or straight supremacy, or cis supremacy) is that some humans are being punished for something that cannot be changed. The oppressed person is completely powerless to affect the way they are treated, because the treatment is based not on any choice or action but on inborn characteristics that are quite simply who they are. So, to use a term like identity lightly is to co-opt a very powerful word and lessen its usefulness in service of anti-oppression. This is why claiming the label of “ally” is counterproductive to antiracism work. Allyship is a chosen behaviour, not an inborn identity. There’s another term for those of us who “identify” as allies: white exceptionalism. It’s describing oneself as “one of the good ones” and it’s definitely something I’ve noticed in myself.
The Ezekiel passage references these characters of Righteous Person and Wicked Person, and they and their actions are echoed by Jesus in the parable of the two sons. Both scenarios start out by naming them and allowing us to expect certain behaviours from them, and then they turn around and tell us that a person identified as righteous might fall short of that ideal, and that a person identified as wicked might behave surprisingly well. Jesus also references the tax collectors and prostitutes, speaking to an audience of priests. All over we get this binary of good-person-bad-person, and any voice that challenges it comes across as dangerously subversive.
I’ll end by repeating part of today’s Epistle reading, because I find that it brings me out of my personal bubble and reminds me that I’m not doing this work in isolation:
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.