NOTES for Eze 18:1-32
Ezekiel’s sermon presented in today’s reading is devoted to what theologians and philosophers today sometimes call Christian personalism. Given the time when the sermon was delivered, however, it would be more appropriate to speak not of Christian but, more broadly, of biblical personalism. For the first time in history, the prophet proclaimed on God’s behalf what has now become a commonly known truth: children are not answerable before God for the sins of their fathers (vv. 1–19). This declaration was especially relevant precisely where it was made—in the Jewish community of Babylon, many of whose members were convinced that children, and sometimes grandchildren, suffered for the sins of their fathers.
In those days almost everyone thought this way, because pre-exilic religious consciousness was characterized by collectivism: the whole community was perceived as one great “we,” within which the individual meant little. Yet Yahwism had inherited such religious collectivism from paganism. While it was the norm for paganism, it hindered the development of the Yahwistic community, because God never deals with a collective. He establishes a relationship with an individual, concrete person, and that relationship is unique every time; it cannot become the possession of any collective. A community is nothing other than the unity of many such persons in all the uniqueness of their relationships with God and with one another.
Ezekiel goes still further: he says that virtue, like sin, is not accumulated. Thus a righteous person who sins once may die because of that sin, while a sinner who repents once and turns to God may remain alive despite all the sins committed before (vv. 21–28). As is evident, this arithmetic seemed strange and unjust to many (v. 29). How, indeed, can a sinner’s single turn to God outweigh all the sins committed before? Or how can one single sin devalue all the good deeds of a righteous person?
But the point is precisely that a person’s relationship with God cannot be reduced to such arithmetic. A relationship with God is always in the present; it exists here and now, and the past influences it only insofar as the past is present in the present. A righteous person did not live because of certain merits or even because of the good deeds they performed. They performed good deeds because they had a relationship with God, and they lived by that relationship. But the moment came when the relationship was broken, and now the righteous person who became a sinner may die. The same is true of a sinner who was heading towards death but suddenly turned to God: before, that person had no relationship with God, but now the relationship exists, and the repentant sinner no longer has any reason to die. God does not count our good and evil deeds; He is not an accountant balancing sin against virtue. He wants only one thing: that everyone should know Him and live the full life that He is ready to give to each person (v. 32).