27 November 2024
I won’t remark upon the event that gives rise to this lesson. It’s immaterial. I have been witness, though, to a friendly argument over what some behold as an abomination and a personal affront and others regard as an expression of personal taste.
As to one side’s fixation on the word, abomination, the Hebrew word, to’eva or toebah which King James’s scribes translated that way has a range of meanings and implications in its original language. Its earliest occurrence time-wise in the Old Covenant is in Proverbs, where it appears numerous times, and it connotes the notion of irregularity, of contraventions of ancient norms, something which offends the accepted order of things. It ranges in meaning from “disgrace” to “nuisance,” “offense” to “outrage,” and yes, “abomination.”
In spite of the range of meanings, the English translators in the 1600s translated to’eva almost exclusively (116 times) to the noun “abomination,” and 23 times to the verb “abhor” from what I can find. I don’t argue that a “disgrace” is less offensive to God than an “abomination” or that a “nuisance” is more tolerable to God than an “outrage.” I hope God sees it in context. The worst criminal among us, whose life has been hell from the moment of his birth and whose transgressions horrify us, may be viewed more kindly by God than the almost-perfect citizen who has found it easy to be blameless. But I do argue that many of our Christian brethren mistake an offense against God as an offense against themselves and vice versa.
I have this mental image of an underground labyrinth; picture an anthill but with tunnels large enough for us all to wander in the filthy darkness of our sins. We’re all equally besmudged by the dirt and dankness that we wander through. No one is holier than anyone else. No one is any nearer the exit than anyone else because for each of us there is only the one way out and that is through Jesus, for we all fall short of the glory of God.
Any transgression that I have committed against you is certainly your business, and by committing that act against you I have by default agreed to accept your judgment as to an appropriate reaction, and I have accepted by default whatever your response may be. When I see someone committing an aggressive act against another person that may cause or is causing harm to that person it becomes my business, not because it offends me but because it is my duty to help my fellow man. But what I’ve done to offend God alone and which did not affect you or anyone else in your purview is really not your business.
So when I notice someone committing an act that may be shocking or repulsive to me but does not affect me and is not harmful to others, even if I believe it is offensive to God, I need to distance myself and concentrate on my own relationship with the Almighty. For he has not called on me to judge others, only to resist the evil that wants to defile me. Unless it affects me personally, then only if it is my friend or someone erring in my presence or someone under my care who is doing something offensive to God do I want to intervene and urge correction.
While looking inward and concentrating not on the sins of others, a person’s detestable behavior becomes my business when I am targeted and wronged. The same is the case when people act as a group — government being one example — and when their group then won’t leave me out of their business; when they steal from me, endeavor to manipulate me, or otherwise impose their beliefs and practices on me. Then it is not their abhorrent behavior that becomes my business, for I defend anyone’s right to behave abhorrently, but their aggressive, indignant encroachment on my freedom to act differently, my freedom to be left out of it.
There is one more aspect to this. People with beliefs or behaviors that I resist in myself and which I might feel are self-destructive to them, and which I perceive as possibly offensive to God — those people are still children of God. And in spite of what I perceive as someone’s apparent sin, I actually have no idea what another person’s relationship is with God. Maybe she is inwardly striving to get things right. Maybe tomorrow he will have that long-awaited awakening that I had many years ago. Maybe what we perceive as an abomination in someone is minuscule in God’s eyes because that person has overcome a panoply of other sinful practices and God is actually pleased to see that all she had left to overcome is the one that repulses us the most.
I don’t know what God’s relationship is with you and you don’t know what his relationship is with me. Outwardly either of us may appear virtuous and exemplary but inwardly one of us may be far more of a disappointment to God than someone else who is apparently guilty of an abomination. So when I encounter someone acting in a way that I am pretty sure is offensive to God, I have to ask myself, What would Jesus do? Never mind that he could see to the core of a person’s soul. I can’t. But what would he do? What would he have me do?
He calls on me to love my neighbor. That one whom I see as an obvious sinner and I are both equally wandering in the depths of that dark labyrinth. I may be the only “Jesus” that someone else ever sees. I’m going to try to do what Jesus would do, and that is to share his love and leave the judging to him.
In short, concentrate on your own sin, not someone else’s. If others are open to your insight, speak to them kindly but don’t force yourself onto them any more than you want them to force themselves onto you. Resist oppressive assaults by others, but otherwise let them wallow in their misguided beliefs. And emulate Jesus as best you can.
Albert Jay Nock 