Ezra prays in shame over his people's guilt
Then, at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the LORD my God 6 and prayed:
“O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. 7 From the days of our forefathers until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today.
One of the surprising things about Ezra’s reaction is the intensity of his shame and grief. He feels “ashamed and disgraced” for the sins of his nation, even though he himself was not guilty of the sin of intermarriage. In our day, when many feel little responsibility even for their own sins, it strikes us as strange that anyone would feel such personal guilt and pain over the sins of others. A more common reaction might be a feeling of smug satisfaction, like that of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as sinful as the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). Political leaders today seldom feel compelled to resign because of the misdeeds of their subordinates as they once did. They might be more inclined to put the blame for their own misdeeds on their subordinates and sacrifice the subordinates to save themselves.
Ezra’s sense of responsibility for the sins of others might seem peculiar to us. Yet it was an appropriate reaction. This becomes clear when we remember that God’s people are an organism that works like the human body. “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; . . . Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Corinthians 12:12,27). When you have a headache or stomachache, your whole body can be so incapacitated that you cannot perform your daily work. Poison that enters the body through a wound in the foot can kill the whole body. In the same way, when part of the nation of Israel defied God’s law, the whole nation suffered the devastating consequences of that sin, namely, captivity to heathen nations. Today too when a member of Christ’s body, the church, falls into a grievous sin, the work of the whole church can suffer. When unrepented sin is ignored, the poison can spread to other members of the body.
Like Ezra, we should feel grief, not smugness, when fellow Christians fall into sin. Like Ezra and like Moses at the time of the golden calf (Exodus 32), we should intercede for our fellow Christians at the throne of grace, praying that God will grant them repentance. We should also pray for our nation, so that the drift into moral indifference and selfcenteredness will be halted by the clear words of God’s law. If the people of a nation live in reckless disregard for God’s law, the whole nation will ultimately pay the price. It will not only be the fault of others “out there” somewhere. We too will share the blame.
We are indeed our brothers’ keepers. We are involved and responsible. Interceding for others before the God of mercy is one of the most important ways of fulfilling our Christian responsibility. We need a heartfelt compassion and concern regarding the sins of others so that we never close our eyes through smugness or indifference. Instead, we will pray for them and confront them with God’s Word.