Did I do something wrong?

It’s rarely correct when someone says, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” In my experience that phrase is used to deny responsibility for the breakdown of a relationship. Certainly one or another person in a relationship may be more or less at fault, but “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That’s usually a response that denies culpability and the statement is wrong.

It may be that we made a bad decision in getting into the relationship before we knew enough about the other. But more often than not there are a series of comments or dropped phone calls, or missed appointments, or lack of consideration, or a multitude of other little things adding up to one person or another saying, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Coming from the perspective of one raised with the Westminster documents the idea that one could come out and say “I didn’t do anything wrong.” seems simplistic. One of the documents teaches about the ten commandments. Most of the commandments have separate questions for what is commanded by this commandment and what is forbidden by this commandment and some commandments have more explanation than that. The lists go on for more than a couple of items.

While some of the answers are less than clear to the modern ear (I love that the keeping of stews (1) is forbidden) they still have the effect of letting each of us know that we have failed in the keeping of even one of the ten. And that is one of the points of the gospel. We all have fallen short.

That we have all fallen short is not something that I can convince another of. I’m more likely to be asked the question of ‘why does anyone need to be saved?’ if I talk to someone who’s not in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And if we spend more time trying to talk other people into believing that they’re sinners than focusing on the ways we ourselves sin we’ve got the message turned around.

We are the people in the race to follow Christ and it is our work that should be important to us, rather than how someone else is doing. In many ways ‘I didn’t do anything’ is more than just an incorrect statement it is a sad commentary. We should be doing something. We should be working on our relationships with family, with God, with friends, with strangers, with the person passing by on the street. We should be out visiting the prisoner, healing the sick, binding the wounded, feeding the hungry, treating the person next to us as our friend, treating the person we meet as our brother and sister.

Instead of saying, “I didn’t do anything wrong” we should be asking “What have I done right?”

(1) A stew, at the time the Westminster documents were written, was a type of brothel or whorehouse.