ORIGINAL BLAME [SAT, 1-31-26]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—ORIGINAL BLAME [SAT, 1-31-26]

 

I noticed about 20 years ago that I got angry when I dropped something. Not because it broke, or hit my toe, or had to be mopped up--although all those were real once in a while--but because I had to bend over to pick it up, and it was beginning to get difficult to bend over.

Or was that the real reason? Maybe the aging that made bending over difficult was just the way my real reason was revealed: I was angry when I dropped something because I couldn’t blame someone else for it. It was clearly I who had made the drop.

Whenever I have made a mistake, my first impulse was to blame someone else for it. I think I learned that from my mother. One of her favorite phrases was, “Look what you made me do.”

 

Or, maybe it was just part of original blame.

I wasn’t the only one who dropped stuff. Sometimes other people dropped things in our house, Helen or the grandchildren. But if Helen did it and left it there, it was just because she had not noticed it, like something dropping out the back of the clothes basket as she took it from the dryer to the bedroom. The grandkids just didn’t notice things they dropped, or they were so intent on getting on with their activities they didn’t stop to pick up.

In those cases, I didn’t really blame Helen or the grands, but I was pleased that I did not have to blame myself. I really like to blame someone else. That inclination to blame others, I call original blame, as a part of original sin.

 

Actually, we blame, because we need blame. The great thing about blame is: it resolves the tension.

That’s why the substitutionary atonement of the death of Jesus [Jesus took the blame for us] has been such an enduring notion: stuff happens, folks get mad, somebody gets blamed, the tension is resolved.

It’s called justification. Auto mechanics used to talk about justifying an engine, when they got all the parts of the engine to work together correctly.

The original English translators of the Bible didn’t have a word for the concept of the death of Christ making things right with God, putting things into wholeness, so they translated the Greek as at-one-ment, which became atonement. [1]

Jesus, of course, is not blamed for our sin. He himself is sinless, according to the theology. But he takes the blame for our sin—our separation from God and others and nature and our own true selves—and takes the punishment, death, that is rightly ours.

 

There. All the tension about God and salvation and the whole holy schmear settled, because someone got blamed. And it wasn’t me!

John Robert McFarland

Yes, I know that grammatically that last sentence should be “And it wasn’t I” instead of “It wasn’t me,” but somebody else made I do it

1] There is a bit of controversy about that. Was it really Bible translators, or just regular English speakers in the early 1500s, who used the word atonement, which then was picked up by Bible translators?