Homily

At our priests’ conference a few weeks ago as part of a talk we were shown a short video clip of a woman who said she had a problem that she suddenly noticed one morning when she was home alone. She was rushing about getting ready to go to work and all of a sudden, she dropped her coffee mug. It hit the floor and coffee and ceramic went flying everywhere. The woman said, “The first words out of my mouth were ‘Frank, I can’t believe it.’ I blamed my husband and he wasn’t even there. I realized that maybe I had a little bit of a problem.” Of course, it was somebody’s fault the coffee mug hit the floor. But it wasn’t her fault.

Ah, the blame game! Adam and Eve were the first to play it, but it soon became one of the most popular elements in human behavior. It’s somebody’s fault. It’s got to be somebody’s fault. It’s someone’s fault that I am angry, unhappy, nervous, frustrated, late, ill-prepared, or for a thousand other states of mind, I can easily come up with a suspect’s name. Kids practice at it: “He made me do it.” But by the time we are adults we have long since perfected this art and learned how to point the finger of blame at someone who is not me. How much time did we spend last week thinking about the faults of others and finding them guilty? Now contrast that with how much time we spent last week thinking about how blessed we are to have wonderful, generous, helpful, considerate loving people in our lives. Now, from a different angle let’s also check how much time we spent accusing other people versus how much time we spent accusing ourselves of wrong doing.

“The man said, ‘The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree and I ate.’ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done”’ the woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’” Someone is to blame, but it certainly isn’t me.

The woman in the video said, “I was completely amazed at myself. Here my husband had been gone from the house for half an hour but somehow it was his fault that the coffee mug I was holding fell to the floor. And it made me think about how much time and how many times I spend assigning blame to other people as though somehow that is a great help to my peace and happiness—because it never is. And it made me wonder how often I have blamed other people in the most foolish and thoughtless ways for trouble in my life. Even when it is just a dropped mug of coffee.”

Notice Jesus’ disciples ask him whose sin it was that the man was born blind? Whose fault? Then the Pharisees question the Man Born Blind asking how he received his sight. Then they question his parents who grow afraid. Then they drag the man back once again. And in all this what are they looking for? They are looking for someone to blame, not to praise, or to thank. They want to blame the man responsible for giving this fellow his eyesight. And they threw the Man Born Blind out, blaming him for not blaming his healer. So, how happy and peaceful do you suspect these Pharisees are in their daily lives?

Now it is indeed sometimes necessary to discover who is to blame, who is at fault. If little fingers steal a dollar bill from the counter it might be wise to find out who did it so a lesson can be learned. If someone commits a crime it is right for us to accuse and punish the guilty party. So, of course, we sometimes need to blame those who do wrong. But a great deal of our accusations against other people in our own lives may be untrue and unjust—but even if true, they may not be helpful at all to us, only causing anger and frustration instead of peace and kindness. Our finger-pointing may be correct, but it may also be, at the same time, unhelpful and unnecessary.

If we blamed ourselves with the same vigor with which we blame others, I suspect the line for confession would run out into the lobby. Let’s not blame a man Who performs miraculous healing, nor blame a spouse for a mug that we dropped. Let’s look instead to see whether and how much we are falsely accusing others for the troubles in our lives, and even if we correctly see the blame that others share, let us honestly question how much help and good it does for us to dwell on it and keep thinking about it. And let us ask the Lord to pardon our own trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.