The parents eat sour grapes and [what happens?] the children’s teeth are set on edge. Ezekiel 18:2
How true that proverb seems to be even within our last couple of centuries. Since our founding fathers failed explicitly to include African slave laborers within the Bill of Rights, our teeth have been set on edge ever since. Or when you think of 18th to 20th century European imperialism built upon colonization, exploitation, the subordination of native populations, were not those nations eating sour grapes without knowing it? Until competition among them broke out into the World Wars of the 20th century – bequeathing Europe a landscape of shell holes and ruined cities – and now the people of those former colonies are coming home to roost by the millions, which has set the teeth of many a European on edge today.
The proverb is a warning. Watch out – what you are doing (however justifiable it may seem) may amount to eating sour grapes that will leave a bad taste in the mouths, the lives of generations yet to come. Of course the proverb is fatalistic and we don’t believe in fatalism. We believe we can fashion our lives and futures rationally, justly, wholesomely – with the help of God. And so we hear God saying in that same Book of Ezekiel: As I live, I swear that none of you will ever repeat this proverb in Israel! If a man is just, if he oppresses no one, gives food to the hungry, clothes the naked – he shall surely live!
In other words, you don’t have to follow the crowd, the tainted, even ignorant practices of your forefathers. You can change things for the better. You don’t have to be a lemming. You have the God-given capacity to be a responsible person, whatever your society may do. Personal responsibility is a possibility, indeed a must because, like ignorance, it too can be contagious.
Today’s first reading from Genesis is an illustration of that ideal. Sodom and Gomorrah are on the verge of destruction because of their predatory, insatiable life style (look up a mentoring business called Lifestyles Unlimited on the Internet). Caught up in unbridled consumption they are about to consume their very selves.
But Abraham intercedes with God. And note: he doesn’t ask God to save only the good people in those cities (few though they be). He asks God to save both cities, whole and entire, good and bad, on the basis of those few good people – be they only 50 or 45 or 40 . . . or 10. Destruction need not be inevitable, if (as the Marines say) a few good men and women can stand up to imminent disaster.
Whatever may have been the behavior of prior generations, in that same chapter 18 of Ezekiel we hear God conclude: Cast away from you all the crimes you have committed, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, house of Israel? I find no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, says the Lord. Get yourself turned around and begin to live.
In the aftermath of the Luftwaffe’s attempt to bomb Britain out of the war in the autumn of 1940 – which failed, Winston Churchill, referring to the courage of the Royal Air Force, said: Never . . . was so much owed by so many to so few. Formidable though it may seem, we few who try to live like Christ, can save the world. It’s a matter of faith.