Who's to Blame?

Coincidence is a funny thing. Sometimes, it leads us from question to answer. Or from thought to confirmation.

Last night, I posted a reply to an article on Belmont club about the latest in the 2000 year old war against Christianity. The story is the monetization of a massacre by turning it into entertainment, effectively giving a media pardon to murderers who beheaded dozens of innocent people and like Pontius Pilot of old, asking the gathered crowd "Should we crucify Jesus the innocent or Barabas the known criminal?". The outcry is, of course, the same as it was then, and for the same reasons, the same as it always shall be until all have heard the Gospel, until Jesus comes again.

I wrote (links added here):

"The desperate rush to assign blame to the Nth degree is the most
anti-Christian element of the whole event. It was that, the endless and unavoidable debt slavery and retribution that Jesus' death and resurrection saved us from. He gave us freedom. Freedom to be forgiven not just for the deliberate violations of the lex du jour, but also for those acts that cause the greatest anguish: the unintended consequences of just being alive. Jesus
brought us Grace. Christianity is the only religion in the world that offers grace: this forever-and-ever pardon, this once-and-for-all-time Grace. Thank God!

"It is a great tragedy that we sent our soldiers to these wasted lands and our own government refused to allow them to carry and share the Good News, and the unimpeachable freedom it brings to every individual."

and then, this morning, I ran across an excellent Sunday talk on the same theme on a blog I haven't read before "Preaching the Lectionary". For today, the 4th Sunday in Lent, the preacher writes:

" A man has been born blind. Jesus’ disciples wonder whether this man’s or his parents’ sin has caused the blindness. Who is at fault? This is often more important to us than finding the remedy because it is easier to find fault. Jesus...healed the blind man. Notice, however, that His remedy had little to do with fault-finding...."

"... Pharisees are not just skeptical; they actually root for failure. They stand in the way of belief. They would rather disbelieve so that they may continue to indulge themselves in their fault-finding. Seeing and believing would require them to reevaluate all that they “understand.”

"...Pharisees go far beyond unbelief. They want to police the beliefs of others. After questioning the man healed of blindness, they drove him out of the synagogue. They could not abide by the truth because it was not their “truth.” "

Read it all by clicking here.

The story of the man who had been born blind, and the questioning of who caused it can easily be found in headline after today's headline, in speech after White House speech, in movie after Made For TV Movie.

But there comes a time, as I once wrote in a poem,

"...when you live like that
and life's just something you do,
the whole thing gets to be kinda mercenary.

And you look around for somebody to blame
but there isn't anyone
but yourself.

And after a while, you realize that you
can't even take it on yourself, so there's
all this sorrow
and no place for it to go.

And that's why Jesus came. "


Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us! God bless you today, and always.