Imputing Guilt or Not

Reflection

The 1st Week of Lent, Year A

Scriptures: Psalm 32; Matthew 4:1-11

Key Verse: “Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and sin is covered. Blessed are they to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” Psalm 32:1-2.

Lenten Blessings to you, my siblings in Christ.

After being marked with the sign of the cross on Ash Wednesday, we humbly entered the Lenten Journey and embraced the reality of our profound identity in God’s kingdom, “We are dust and to dust we shall return.” Today is the Sabbath, a day to rest our soul by grace through faith in God’s peace. It is also the first little Easter, a day to praise Jesus who spent those forty days and nights in the desert on our behalf.

Jesus wasn’t alone in those forty days. The Spirit led Jesus and accompanied him, and the devil was also staying close by Jesus, watching his every move, and waiting for an opportune time to tempt him. And this devil was just as crafty as the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve, a well-known story recorded in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. As we know, after being enticed by the serpent, Adam and Eve blundered by consuming the fruit from the tree of knowledge, for they wanted to be all knowing like God. What they didn’t know was the great responsibility that came with having the knowledge of God.

However, Jesus wasn’t enticed at all in Mattew 4. Maybe the devil didn’t know that God wasn’t absent at all because God lived through the life of Jesus. The devil underestimated the kind of sacred relationship that Jesus had with his heavenly Father and the Spirit. The trust and the bond among the Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit totally caught the devil off guard. Are you familiar with title of Jesus as the second and the last Adam? Jesus made up for what the first Adam failed to be and do as St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:45, “The first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”

I have been contemplating Psalm 32 this week, especially the first two verses, “Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and sin is covered. Blessed are they to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” Living in a culture that pushes us to punish, shame, diminish young or vulnerable ones, and demonize wrongdoers, we all can be tempted to impute guilt to others at any time and in any situation. How can we avoid imputing guilt to wrongdoers or shaming others in a self-righteous way?

A story comes to my mind. One afternoon, I got a phone call from a woman whose mom passed away a few weeks earlier. She was overwhelmed with several transitions in her life including moving back into her mom’s place. It happened that I was with my daughter and a family from church at the time, and we all went to her place to see how we could be helpful. The living room and the kitchen were full of boxes that weren’t unpacked yet, and she had a couple of bookshelves that needed to be assembled.

The family who went with me knew right away where to start after listening to the woman’s concerns. The mom went to the kitchen to sort things out, and the dad took their son and my daughter to one of the rooms to assemble the bookshelves. Both the boy and my daughter were high schoolers at the time. While talking with the woman, I overheard the dad use ‘we’ frequently with these two teenagers. He said something like: Let’s open the box and find the instructions; let’s sort all these screws and pieces; let’s check if we have everything we need; let’s see what we have missed; let’s find out what went wrong. I didn’t hear the tone of teaching, commanding, or diminishing from the dad. I also saw that these two teenagers responded with confidence and respect. I was amazed at the beautiful teamwork that I just witnessed. No one was superior. No one was incapable. There wasn’t self-righteousness involved.

At church, most of the time, we know what to do and to say in terms of equipping leaders or apprenticing disciples, but often, it is challenging to find time or have energy to practice how to do them in a life-giving way. Because of the lack of practicing or wearing several hats, in the process of building up the body of Christ or working as a team, the devil can sneak into our minds swiftly before we know it. As a result of it, the language of equipping leaders or apprenticing disciples is avoided somehow because no one wants to be treated as less, incapable, or unwanted. Have you noticed how often and easily we can compromise the reality of our profound identity as being dust in God’s kingdom? We are getting too comfortable with the culture that promotes imputing guilt to others and acting as if we can find the causes of our mistakes, our suffering, or our misfortunes.

It is just like the story of the original sin in Genesis. After God asked why Eve and Adam were hiding, Adam successfully imputed sin to Eve. And Eve successfully imputed sin to the serpent. Who would have thought that this imputing sin to others had become a snowball effect? It all started with the serpent who successfully imputed guilt to God for God failed to protect Adam and Eve from evil. And the devil did it again by imputing sin to Jesus, the second and the last Adam, the Son of God, by telling him who he should be and do. For the devil, first, Jesus should have lived by bread alone and not the word of God; second, Jesus should have tested God by taking his life lightly; lastly, Jesus should have served the devil instead of God.

Thanks be to God for the kind of sacred relationship and the strong trust and bond that Jesus has with the Father and the Spirit. This is the kind of sacred relationship and the strong trust and bond that God wants us to have with each other and with our Triune God. By helping us to do so, instead of imputing sin to all humanity, God imputed righteousness to us through Jesus as St. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Jesus Christ we might become the righteousness of God.” On this path of going back to God, may we know that all are welcome to join God’s mission in the name of Jesus through his righteousness. Yes, we share the common trait with the first Adam, a living being. But God also gives us Jesus, a life -giving spirit, that makes us life-giving spiritual beings through faith by grace. Thanks be to God. Amen.