Refusing Responsibility

“Then I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24).

Not often does the preacher find it proper or helpful to quote a poet like Ogden Nash. Nevertheless, I find myself listening in memory to a couplet of his which, like so much that he writes, is accompanied by a mischievous twinkle of the eye:

Why did the Lord give us agility
If not to escape responsibility

That is one man’s biting satire on a gravely widespread tendency of our time—the tendency to run away from life’s demands instead of meeting them with willing shoulders.

The same thing has been said in chaste but challenging prose by Elton Trueblood in The Life We Prize. After reminding us that the heavy strain under which modern life must be lived is essentially the same for all of us but that the reactions to this strain differ sharply in different persons, he says: “It appears that the most common reaction is that of some form of escape, and especially the effort to escape responsibility.”

Although there is no comfort in it, there is perhaps instruction in the fact that this shabby way of treating life and the Lord of life is not altogether new. To this our text can testify—it goes back three thousand years.

Description Of Failure

Consider, then, the description of Aaron’s failure as we have it in biblical history.

Only three months earlier the people of Israel had left Egypt. God had drawn a curtain over the four dismal centuries they had spent there. Now they were encamped over against Mount Sinai on their way to the Promised Land. Already Moses had made one ascent into the solemn heights of the mountain, returning with the Ten Commandments.

Again he is lost in the unapproachable splendor of Sinai, this time to receive a revelation from God as to the order of worship that the people are to follow. Before his six weeks’ absence had run its course, the people grew restless. Where was he? Why so long withdrawn from them? Was he dead or alive?

In this restlessness they conceived the idea of holding a festival. Since Aaron was second in command, would he make them an image around which they might have a religious dance? We may be sure that he was not for it. The pity is that he wasn’t firmly against it.

Under his supervision golden earrings were collected and melted down. From this molten gold a calf was fashioned. Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf and offered sacrifices.

Whether this was primarily a violation of the first commandment or of the second is a matter I make no attempt to settle. Each view has its advocates. If the sacrifice to the calf meant that the people were giving up Jehovah, then certainly it was flying in the face of the law they had just accepted: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

If, as some believe, it was an effort to hold on to Jehovah and to mingle with spiritual worship the visible image of deity, then it was a transgression against the law that says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” We may not be able to read all of their thought. What we know is where their conduct led them. Their dancing became reveling. Their reveling became their shame. Their shame exposed them to the leering gaze of their pagan enemies.

In the midst of this disgusting spectacle Moses appeared. He “saw that the people had broken loose [for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies” (Ex. 32:25)]. The stern challenge that Moses flung at Aaron is set down in verse 21: “What did this people unto thee, that thou brought so great a sin upon them?”

To which the red-faced Aaron offered the feeble, flustered reply: “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Ex. 32:22).

Then comes a further build-up of self-defense, after which Aaron says, in the words of our text: “I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”

Aaron was a good man, whose name was to become famous as the founder of the priestly line in Israel, but in that hour Aaron was a weakling. It was cowardly of him to refuse responsibility for his part in Israel’s sin.

Cowardly or not, he did it; and, cowardly or not, you and I in one way or another are sorely tempted to soften down or sneak around this tall, titanic fact of responsible living. Under God we are accountable not only for the evil we may do or condone but for the good we might achieve or encourage. Let cabbages be vegetables, let animals be bundles of instincts, but let men know, creatures of God as they are, that the Lord of life will one day reckon with them for the way they have handled themselves and others. Let them know, too, that over the Day of Judgment is written: “No Excuses Accepted.”

Directions Of Responsibility

In view of this, it would be helpful to look around at the directions in which the lines of responsibility run.

To start with, there is our responsibility for ourselves. However we got here, whatever we find here, one thing is certain: we have ourselves on our hands. That’s something that won’t be changed by motoring to Miami or flying to Rio or taking a drawing room to Southern California. “For every man shall bear his own burden” (Gal. 6:15). Just that bluntly did St. Paul express it long ago, meaning centrally, I take it, the burden of responsibility. Professor Hocking expresses the same idea when he says: “Other creatures nature could largely finish: the human creature must finish himself.” “Therefore,” to quote St. Paul again, “thou are inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest” (Rom. 2:1).

Or, take the family, the first and closest social organism in which our relationships spell responsibility. Between husband and wife, mutually, there’s a love to be given, a care to be exercised, a loyalty to be guarded. Between parents and children there’s a table to be spread, a wardrobe to be furnished, a set of physical, emotional and spiritual habits to be fashioned, a system of responsible sharing to be worked out. It was a thoughtful father who said that he purposely delayed, by a year or two, the installation of an automatic heating plant because he wanted his teen-age son to gain experience by getting up at an early hour and firing the coal-burning furnace. Today’s irresponsible homes are the spawning grounds for tomorrow’s juvenile deliquents and day-after-tomorrow’s shiftless citizens or chronic criminals.

Still another line of responsibility runs into the schoolroom. It is easy enough for us to say that the school is responsible for the child. What we need to see more clearly is that part of that responsibility consists of making the child feel responsible for the school—responsible, in a measure, for its cleanliness, its physical care and upkeep and, in larger part, for the classroom atmosphere, for the grades he will receive and for the progress he will make.

Again, there is responsibility as it relates to one’s work. Usually, to start with, it takes the form of what one owes to his employer. Later the tables may be turned and the duty is that of an employer toward his employees. In either case, of course, there must be recognition that these responsibilities are mutual. When employers frequently fall back on injunctions and employees frequently fall back on strikes, it takes no expert economist to tell that somewhere the sense of responsibility has broken down. Nor will the trouble be cured merely by laws and penalties. There must be a new spirit, a different disposition.

Or, once more, there is community responsibility. Whose concern is it that we shall have decent housing, proper sanitation, good schools, respectable government, a healthy moral climate? There is only one intelligent answer: it is everyone’s concern. It is when this simple, basic fact is forgotten, when, in short, responsibility is shirked, that government rots, gangsters have a field day, vice flourishes and community standards deteriorate.

Let me name only one more direction in this survey of our responsibilities. It is the church. I’m not quite satisfied with this way of expressing my thought. Actually, what we owe the church is not just one of many responsibilities. What we owe the church and her Divine Head, Jesus Christ, should be the center of all our concern.

This gripped me powerfully the other morning as I was reading the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Christ’s gifts and appointments to the church, says Paul, were for “the equipment of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (vv. 12–15, RSV).

Not one of us has reached this goal. Until we have, we had better put the church first on our list of loyalties and responsibilities.

Go back to that phrase “responsible living.” It is inescapable. Ourselves, our families, our schools, our jobs, our communities, the church of Jesus Christ our Lord—these circle us with claims we dare not deny. They lay upon us obligations we shun only at our peril.

Yet, shun them we do. Aaron did, long, long ago. Some of you have done it within the week. How?

Devices For Evasion

Let’s think next of the devices that we commonly use as we follow feeble Aaron down the road of refusing responsibility.

For one thing, it is frequently a trick of ours, as it was Aaron’s, to blame natural forces for our failures. Mark Aaron’s words: “I cast it (the gold) into the fire and there came out this calf.” Don’t blame me, the accused man seems to say; blame the fire. When the heat had done its work, this idol happened to be the result.

Moses’ comrade never looked so little as in the moment when that piece of sophistry escaped his lips. What of the pattern he had cut out for the idol? What about the graving tool he had used? No mention of these! Instead, the complaint is that by the play of natural forces, by the prankish effect of the fire, this image was produced over which Israel had corrupted itself.

You know the modern equivalent of such weakling talk, don’t you? You get it in crude form in the popular song of some months ago—“Doing What Comes Naturally.” You get it in somewhat more refined form in many current novels. You get it in a still more sophisticated version in some—by no means all—half-baked courses in psychology. In gist it says: Nature made me this way; I have these urges and drives; it’s really not my fault if I run counter to old-fashioned morals, which after all were foisted on the people by frustrated priests and old maids.

So a man who has been untrue to his wife, while admitting mildly that he has caused a tangle, says to a minister, self-defendingly, “I did exactly what other men in my position would have done.” The urge was there; I simply satisfied it.

Actually such nonsense is not modern. It is as old as Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. It makes man an animal reacting to stimuli instead of a person responding to challenge. It takes no notice of what Jesus Christ said: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

What is more, it takes no notice of the sanest and soundest findings of psychiatry. Listen to Dr. Starke Hathaway in his Physiological Psychology: “After going through the experimental and clinical literature, the thoughtful reader will conclude that the effects of personality upon glands are more impressive and easier to illustrate than the effects of the glands upon personality.”

No, when we are confronted with personal responsibility, we can’t slither down the rabbit hole of nature and so escape blame.

But there’s another device, also tried by Aaron, which commonly serves as a means of shirking responsibility. It is putting the blame or the load on

other people. Look at verse 22: “Thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.” In verse 23: “They said unto me.” In verse 24: “They gave it me.”

Some scholars say that in verse 1, where the Authorized Version reads “The people gathered themselves together unto Aaron,” it would not be incorrect to render it, “The people gathered themselves together against Aaron.” To use contemporary slang, “they ganged up on him,” jostled him, challenged him, threatened him.

Everybody likes to be talked up; most people like to be talked about; but nobody likes to be talked against. So we buckle at the knees and bow down to the great god called the crowd. “They … they … they!” They decide what clothes I shall wear, what books I shall read, what music I shall play or hear, what TV programs I shall view. They determine whether I shall drink or go sober, whether I shall smoke or go free, whether I shall support Hollywood or the Kingdom of God, whether I shall rate success in terms of money made or in terms of manhood dedicated, whether I shall behold the fair face of Jesus Christ and cry “Away with him” or whisper worshipfully, “My Lord, and my God!”

A member of this church, invited to a gathering in honor of a distinguished university professor, found herself surrounded by members of the intelligentsia who engaged in round after round of cocktail drinking and became the giddier for doing so. When her courteous insistence brought her ginger ale in place of alcohol, she was gently chided as one who was still held in the grip of a “cultural taboo.” With that light phrase they would dismiss a deliberate conviction held fast in conscience. It is that kind of smiling paganism that you and I must meet as Christians.

We must meet it, let me add, not with sour visage, not with a martyr’s halo self-fixed, not with a whipped and whining resignation to duty but with a passionate and unashamed devotion to Jesus Christ and all the high things for which He stands.

It is year’s end. Some of us have stood up to our responsibilities creditably well, all thanks to the grace of God on which we have leaned. Others have sagged miserably, like Aaron. We haven’t been as true to ourselves as we might have been, nor to our families, nor to our work nor to our church.

Let’s confess it. Let’s come out of hiding. Let’s stop making excuses. Let’s throw back our shoulders to bear the full weight of whatever responsibilities God presses down upon them. And then, taking gratefully His forgiveness for every one of yesterday’s failures, let’s head straight into the new year, trusting, dauntless, unafraid.

Paul S. Rees is an alumnus of University of Southern California, which conferred the honorary doctor of divinity degree upon him in recognition of his gifts. Since 1938 he has been Pastor of First Covenant Church of Minneapolis, which has about 1500 members. He has 18 years of continuous broadcasting experience and is author of seven books.

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