NOTES for Eze 18:1-32

In the mind of the ancient person, responsibility for one person's sin was borne by his whole clan and descendants. But the prophet proclaims something different to Israel: every person matters to God, and the way that person uses freedom will have decisive significance for that person. The one who commits sin separates himself from God and His life, while the one who fulfills His will becomes a member of His family.

In ancient times, the idea that a whole group was responsible for a crime committed by one person was widespread everywhere. Indeed, it is not so rare even today. Yet, speaking in God's name, the prophet rejects this idea—completely and unequivocally. To a large extent, of course, this is because collective responsibility can hardly be considered inherently just. The belief that children must answer for the crimes of their fathers—and, more broadly, that the members of one large patriarchal clan bear responsibility for one another's actions—arose when the clan was seen as a single whole living a single life, so that it was impossible to identify and distinguish the individuals within it. Today, however, there is little need to dwell on the fact that this is, at the very least, not always true.

But injustice is not the only issue. Collectivism is frightening not only because it can bring punishment upon someone who may have had no direct connection at all with the crime. It is frightening because there is no place in the collective for the unique and unrepeatable human person. There are no separate “I”s within it, only one great “we.” Yet the one who always stands before God is not a collective but a concrete human being in all their uniqueness and singularity. Therefore, God has no need for anything that draws a person backward into a collective of any kind. He wishes to deal neither with a mass nor with a crowd, but with the individual person.

We very often accuse God. We accuse Him of our troubles; we think that He directed us down the wrong path, that we should not have listened to Him. Although in Russian the verb for "make a mistake" is reflexive: it cannot be that someone else "mistook" us; we always make mistakes ourselves. Or, no better, when something in our life is not going well, we think that God is punishing us. But this is not so either. Most often we make mistakes, and the failures in our life are simply the results of those mistakes.

Does this mean that we must fear mistakes all the time and punish ourselves for every misstep? Of course not. We can entrust to God the mistakes we made in the past, and He will change our past. God will not make it so that what has already happened did not happen; that would be violence against us and our memory. But He can deliver us from the consequences of sin, which would otherwise have come inexorably and which we would have considered God's punishment.

If we entrust ourselves to God, repent, and let Him into our life, He will deliver us from the consequences of the sins and mistakes we have committed, thereby healing our past and changing both it and us ourselves. Therefore we can stop fearing the future, stop fearing that we will stumble. We are free, and fear no longer has power over us.

When it comes to sin and righteousness, what is closest to us humans is the formal, arithmetic approach. We are ready to count scrupulously other people's good and bad deeds, or less often our own, in order to draw up, if not a final, then at least an interim balance and understand what we have achieved and what claim we have before God. And from God's judgment we often expect the same kind of counting and balancing, only final.

The kind in which absolutely everything will be taken into account: after all, nothing can be hidden from God, and there is no reason to doubt the adequacy of His evaluations. It is no accident that the judgment after death, as pagans imagined it, was reduced precisely to such an evaluation, to the drawing up of a final balance. The image of scales, of the weighing of the soul after death, was widespread and well known in antiquity both in the Middle East and in the Greco-Roman world. And many believers in the Lord expected something similar from their God.

Ezekiel destroys all their expectations. He says: there is no balance, no summing up. A righteous person, if he sins once, can die because of that sin. And a sinner, if he once turns to God and repents of the sins he has committed, can remain alive. Humanly speaking, this seemed completely unjust: can one single sin really overshadow all the good deeds the righteous person has done? And one conversion, one repentance, can it outweigh all the evil the sinner has done? But God has different arithmetic.

More precisely, He has none at all. God does not count the evil and good deeds done by people, although, of course, He sees them perfectly and knows about them. But what matters to Him is not rewards and punishments. Not the balance of good and evil deeds. He has known since the days of Noah that every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth. But what matters to Him is to save the person. As he is. And He uses every opportunity for this. And an opportunity appears when at least some relationship arises and is established between Him and the person whom He wants to save. Even if only for a second.

For God, one second is infinitely much. In that one second He can contain the fullness of His Kingdom. And it does not matter what happened yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago, or ten years ago. What matters is what is here and now. For God there is no past or future, only the eternal present. Every relationship with Him is always here and now. And so is the absence of such a relationship. Therefore the salvation of the righteous person and the destruction of the sinner also take place here and now. Without any arithmetic. Only by God's love, accepted here and now or rejected here and now.