Can a nation ever sin? If so, how can it be forgiven?
The stories and prophetic writings of the
Old Testament are replete with examples of national sin. There are
certainly stories of God dealing with individuals, but, on the whole,
His attention seems to be directed to Israel and other nations as a
whole. The promises and pledges are made to a collective people and the
chastisement falls on the whole nation as well. Our modern
sensibilities, rooted in a fundamental commitment to individualism,
recoil from this collective treatment. And we are not the first to
complain.
In Genesis 18, Abraham argues with God
about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Lord has threatened to
destroy the cities on account of their sins. Abraham raises the
troubling question:
“Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen 18:23-25)
Thus, this question has had a prominent
place in the thoughts of the faithful since the very beginning. In
Abraham’s conversation with God, he asks if God would spare those cities
even if only fifty righteous were found. God agrees. With continued
pleading, Abraham takes the the number down to 10 righteous (and stops).
And the Lord says that He would spare the cities for the sake of just
10. Alas, less than ten were found. But we do not upbraid God that He
was willing to spare the unrighteous for the sake of a mere handful.
There is a mystery contained within the
entire exercise of that conversation. For the truth is, none of us
stands alone. No one stands free of the actions of others. Our lives are
deeply connected. We are ourselves the offspring of many generations,
and we carry within us ever so much that was not of our own choosing.
Our inheritance is tainted – both for good and for ill.
Fr. Thomas Hopko describes some of this as “generational” sin. To understand this requires that we remember that sin is not a legal
problem. It is not about what is fair or unfair. It is about a mystical
burden that we experience as debt, hindrance, oppositional weight,
weakness, brokenness and corruption, or just the starting place of our
lives. Virtually everything in our lives is gifted to us, and there are
many “gifts” that we would prefer never to have received. It is part of
our incarnational existence. We are the offspring of others. To have an
embodied existence in space and time is to have a body burdened with the
DNA of eons and a family and culture that is both the product and
carrier of history. Our own existence is a consequence of everything
that has come before us. We cannot rightly suggest that such a
contingent existence comes free.
Of course, many historical burdens become
the targets of political attention. No human being, no ethnic or
national group is without sin. Some sins are more recent and obvious
than others. But our accusers can never plead innocence. Acknowledging
this does nothing to remove our burdens.
In the 20th century, there have been some
notable national crimes that have, in some way, been acknowledged.
Japan renounced its military in response to the atrocities and errors of
the Second World War. Germany paid reparations to Israel and enacted
numerous laws renouncing and restricting the scourge of Nazism. Many war
criminals were punished. The Russian government, with no outside
political pressure, not only acknowledged many of the crimes of its
Communist past, but also built memorials and rebuilt churches (often
returning properties that had been taken away) in an effort of public
repentance.
Photo from here
It has rightly been noted that “history
is written by the victors.” It is therefore the case that we more easily
repent for the sins of history’s vanquished and leave the writing to
the victorious. But the burden of sin as historical reality remains.
Unaddressed, the sins of the past become the problems of the present.
Many of the most enduring conflicts in the modern world represent
centuries of unresolved issues and the inherited burden of our ancestral
legacy.
Often the legacy of history is carried on
in competing narratives. We do not always know or rightly remember the
details of what happened, but we know all too well the emotional burden
of its trauma. Hatred can be a very ancient thing.
And it is to trauma that I want to direct
our attention. Trauma is a word for the damage we suffer in extreme
circumstances. It can occur as a result of natural disaster, or war –
any time and place in which we are endangered, injured, or exposed to
terrible actions. People do not experience war and then walk away as
though nothing had happened. The war stops outwardly, but it continues
inwardly. This experience is as old as mankind itself. Trauma sometimes
leaves people emotionally and even physically crippled.
Among ancient peoples, the trauma of life
was met with liturgy – rituals, both public and private that sought to
restore them to their right minds, to appease the wrath of the gods or
the spirits of their enemies. The collective psyche of a whole people
was set right through various actions and beliefs that worked to make
peace and re-establish righteousness.
Modernity has very few such rituals. The
secular state, presiding over competing and disparate groups has almost
nothing to which it can appeal that serves as catharsis or repentance,
or even thanksgiving. Sport (such as the Super Bowl) comes closest to
public liturgy in modern America, but it serves nothing transcendent,
nothing permanent. It cannot heal or speak to the needs of a nation.
The outcome of this lack is an inability
for nations and often individuals to be healed of their trauma. The
wounds of lost wars or historical sins remain unaddressed, erupting from
time to time as renewed trauma in the national psyche.
Studying parish ministry in seminary, I
was introduced to the phrase, “recurrent latent cycling.” It was meant
to describe a struggle within the life of a parish that erupts
periodically, that is, in fact, the same struggle. It might be around a
new presenting issue – but it was still the same struggle. Healing the
parish required a discernment of what was actually going on – to bring
something that was latent into the light of day.
Nations (and individuals) who ignore
their wounds and griefs do not leave them behind – they bring them
forward and repeat their battles endlessly. Subsequent generations who
never knew the first cause, become the unwitting bearers of the latent
violence and destruction that they have inherited.
 |
| Icon from here |
Though Orthodoxy does not generally use
the term “original sin,” it doesn’t thereby deny the reality of the
inherited burden of sin. The growing study of epigenetics would suggest
that we may even inherit such burdens genetically.
The medicine we have received from Holy Tradition for this on-going sickness is repentance.
Of course, it is very difficult for nations to repent, though there
would easily be services for such in the Orthodox tradition. However,
the shame associated with national or collective sin is often denied or
retold in other ways. Without repentance, nations are doomed to relive,
repeat or act out the bitterness of their trauma.
There is, of course, another way. It was
first expressed in the prophetic words of the High Priest Caiaphas as he
contemplated the Jesus problem:
“You know nothing at all, nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.” (Joh 11:49-50)
The death of Christ on the Cross becomes
the public liturgy for the sin burden of Israel. Of course, He was the
public liturgy for the sin burden of the whole world. But there was a
principle articulated in His sacrifice – that one man could die for the
whole. This is not a substitutionary legal event. Rather, it is the
mystery of coinherence and koinonia. “He became what we are that we
might become what He is,” the Fathers said. It has also been the
knowledge of the Church that we are invited into that selfsame
sacrifice. Buried into His death in Baptism, we are united to His very
crucifixion. United with Him in the grave, we journey with Him into
Hades, and there, brave souls make intercession for the sins of the
whole world, and with Him set souls free. The Elder Sophrony describes
such brave souls as Christ’s “friends.”
For at least as long as the days of
Abraham, we have had intercessors who saved the cities and nations of
the wicked. Their prayers were effective because they prayed in union
with the one mediator and true advocate, Christ our God.
Abraham was God’s friend. As God visited with him, He said:
“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing, since Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” (Gen 18:17-18)
This is God’s inauguration of Abraham as
an intercessor for the nations. The greatest friends of God have always
taken up this same intercessory role. Through Christ and the prayers of
our holy fathers, God preserves the world and saves the nations from the
full brunt and weight of their history.
There are thus two kinds of people: those
who are the weight of history, and those who join themselves to Christ
in their repentance and bear the weight of history. This latter role is
the true life of the Church and the heart of her who prays, “On behalf
of all, and for all.”
About sin
LIVE, BEYOND THE LIMITS!
An Atonement of Shame – Orthodoxy and the Cross
Heaven & Hell in the Afterlife Acc. To The Bible
Salvation and atonement (& The significance of the “Antilytron”)
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου