Deflecting Becomes Reflecting
I saw a gif this morning that attempts to excuse white people from the sin of slavery by equating it with the expectation on current Japanese generation to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Of course it was shared on Facebook by someone I care about and consider a decent human being. “This is utterly missing the point,” I fumed. “What a cop out!” I thought immediately about a recent video I saw on YouTube by Phil Vischer entitled “Holy Post—Race in America” that quickly yet in great detail explains all manner of recent racial sins current white people are culpable for, but I knew how slim the chance that someone posting a gif like the former would give time or openness to a video like the latter.
This was on my mind when I sat down to read scripture for the day. My reading schedule took me to a story in the gospels about Jesus casting out demons and then verbally sparring with religious leaders (Matthew 12, Mark 3, Luke 11). Then I hit Luke 11: 47-51 and knew it was connected to that gif and the spiritual origin of its damaging sentiment. Jesus is talking to the most powerful and respected people in Jewish society when he says,
“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your ancestors did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.’ Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all.
It was the word “ancestors” that caught my eye. Jesus’ accusation here to the current generation of religious leaders is that they built tombs for those their ancestors murdered to show how apologetic and pious they were—to distance themselves from those actions—and yet, continued to do the same thing: distrust and kill prophets sent to them to speak truth and call them to repentance. In fact, later in the Gospels, they’ll do this same thing to Jesus. They did not kill the prophets their ancestors did, but by doing the very same thing in subsequent generations (while hiding behind false repentance and reparation), Jesus says that the sins of the past will not dissipate but heap upon them. Ultimately, they will end up being responsible for all of it because they knew what their ancestors did was wrong, and instead of stopping the cycle, they perpetuated it. They have tried to excuse themselves from the sin of the past by burying it. However, their recognition and apology for past sin has been for themselves rather than the offended. It has been a false repentance. And so those unrecognized sins are not staying in the past but growing and building. This is why current generations of white people are still responsible for slavery. Not because we actually owned slaves, but because as a group of people, our repentance of an ancestral sin has been a mask behind which we have hidden to continue that same sin, and benefit from it. We have used the Emancipation Proclamation as a tomb to bury the sins of the past rather than own, remember, repent, and change.
I have never personally been asked to apologize for slavery. I am being asked to apologize for current sins of prejudice, racism, and apathy. We are feeling the weight of our ancestor’s sins because the tower of current racial sin has been built on the foundations that came before it—foundations we “buried” but did not dismantle. “Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for all.”
Until we demolish this tower of sin from which we have ascended, we won’t be able to move away from the foundation we so desperately don’t want to be held accountable for.
