Hindsight and Heroes—Romans 14
With the benefit of hindsight and heroes it's easy to be
good at saying how things should have been handled all those years ago.
Where it is the case we now live in a world created by people
better, wiser, braver and far and away less selfish than we are. We
breathe the air they have purified, we think their thoughts or, better,
the kind of thoughts their way of thinking brings and we are
often seduced into admiring ourselves for our superiority over past
ages. But without exceptional people—people unlike the rank and file of
us—we would still be the people of past ages, doing the things
and thinking the thoughts of ages now past. Those who led us well may
not have redeemed us from a slavery that had our hands and feet in
chains but they certainly delivered us from enslaved minds that dared to
put chains on the hands and feet of others.
We shouldn't apologise or feel even the slightest twinge
of regret that we as societies have advanced ethically and morally
(where indeed that is the case) for even if we can "understand" some of
the harsh and heartless institutions and public practices of the past we
can never admire them and much less can we glory in them.
Still, because we each have a vote we're tempted to
think we're worthy of it and because we each have a vote we're tempted
to think we vote out of the reservoir of our individual brilliance and
virtue. The truth is: without the sensitive and wise and brave, the bulk
of us would mill around with our voting papers stuck in our collars,
like sheep to be penned, and that might well be the case not only
because we lack insight but because we lack character!
It isn't a mark of character if we jump on every
bandwagon that passes by and join in with the crowd, subscribing to the
latest trend in religion or foreign policy or social theory—it takes
character to refuse to do that. But it's a mark of character to
gladly submit our thinking to the test of other ways of thinking, other
ways of doing things. It is a mark of character that we
examine our preferred ways of thinking and doing for signs of
self-service; "does it cost me to think or do this?" or "do I pursue
this to further feather my own nest?" or "are we as a society blind and
careless to the needs of all others?" As surely as it is no mark of
character to follow the latest parade, it is no sign of character to be
blindly loyal to the past and refuse to budge. Having thought, it is a
sign of character to move forward on the basis of what seems to us to be
the truth.
We owe our world a debt! Boreham passionately insisted,
"Let me make no mistake. Unless I give back to the world something that
costs me blood and agony and tears, I shall, when I quit the planet at
last, be in the position of the man who leaves the neighbourhood without
first discharging his just and honourable debts." This is the kind of
thing Lord Macauley had in mind when he said: "We are free, we are
civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human
race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation."
To cash in on the costly achievements of men and women
of former days who stood up for the benefit of others and then to use
their accomplishments to completely dismiss others is not to have known
these people at all. It is to feed on their bones and forget their
sacrifice; as if a Christian waxed tearfully eloquent over Jesus
forfeiting his rights that he might live while he is stubbornly
unwilling to forfeit some of his own that his brothers and sisters might
live (see Romans 14).
It's more than arrogance, it's silly arrogance,
when we strut with our store of respectable, even correct, views as if
they were our creation and as if the world should thank us for what we have inherited.
Vision is never a merit, it is a gift and Macgregor was right: those who can see are always and everywhere debtors to those who are blind.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.