As we waited this year for our oldest daughter (that’s a stock photo there, not our daughter) to give birth to our first grandchild, one of our conversations pretty early on was about COVID-19 concerns. It wasn’t about just the risks of prenatal care visits, going to the hospital for the actual birth, etc. It was a concern about what would happen if, Lord forbid, our daughter contracted the virus. Would it pass on to the baby?
Fortunately, that fear was unfounded and Susan never came down with COVID-19 and, in fact, tested negative shortly before our grandson was born. Perhaps even more fortunately, it appears that transmitting the virus to an unborn baby is something about which pregnant women don’t really need to worry too much. See this discussion of the relevant studies and data on the Harvard Medical School blog.
Yet there are physical conditions which can be transmitted from mother to baby, and pregnant women are given stern warnings about the effects of alcohol, smoking, and other drugs. We also live in an age when we worry about the passing of genetic liabilities from generation to generation. However, our text for this coming Sunday from Ezekiel 18 makes it abundantly clear that, while future generations may be affected greatly by what their parents or even more distant ancestors do, moral responsibility, like the coronavirus, is not transmitted directly from parent to child.
The 18th chapter of Ezekiel opens with God’s questioning of a popular proverb (which also appears in Jeremiah 31:29, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.” That NLT translation has the right idea, but I still hear the KJV’s more literal rendering of the second half, “the children’s teeth are set on edge.” In any case, it was a way for the exiled people of Judah to deny responsibility for what had happened to them. They were suffering, so they imagined, for the sins of their ancestors.
That shifting of blame seems to be a human universal, starting with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. We see it writ large across the political landscape of our country right now. God answers it all by a careful and explicit denial that He, as the moral judge of the universe, engages in such transference of blame. With the example of shifting character across three generations of a family, the Lord asserts that he holds each human being accountable for his or her, and only his or her, own sins and relationships to God and to other human beings.
In recent conversations about structural racism, a natural question might arise whether those attempting to address racist structures and policies are doing just what God denies, holding present generations accountable for what their ancestors have done. One can imagine those who resist the charges of implicit bias or structural racism also quoting that ancient proverb about parents and children and sour grapes. But we need to read the whole chapter, reflect carefully on what the concerns about structural racism actually are. The point is not to hold present generations morally accountable for what previous generations did, but to hold present generations accountable for their actions once they become aware of unjust structures and unconscious practices.
Through it all here in Ezekiel, there is the idea of individual human free will. Jemar Tisby calls it “contingency” in his book The Color of Compromise. Injustice does not have to be. What one’s parents did for good or for ill does not constrain us, nor does it bind our own character. There is always freedom to disastrously turn from a good path on which parents set us, or to repent and turn from an evil example set by parents, thereby receiving God’s forgiveness and grace.
In the overall ethic of Scripture, Ezekiel 18 stands as a needed corrective to the absolutely correct emphasis on human community and our collective accountability to God and human nature as essentially social. That communal character is real without absolving any of us of individual responsibility for our own behavior and character. We are both one and many (in the parlance of ancient philosophy), just as is God’s own self as Trinity. What one does alone matters and what we do together matters. That’s the biblical ethic of responsibility.