“When anyone has committed a deliberate wrong, they must confess their sin and then bring forward their offering for their wrongdoing committed against the Holy One. For the sin that they sinned, a female lamb or goat the priest will offer to atone for their sin” (Leviticus 5.5-6).
Why isn’t it enough to just say you’re sorry? I mean, I get the idea of bringing some sort of offering—of giving up something to make things right, but is it really necessary for someone to stand in front of everyone and confess—to say what they did and why it was wrong? Is that really helping anyone? Aren’t we just rehashing the past, bringing up all the hurtful stuff? What’s that doing for anyone?
It is funny, from this twenty-first century viewpoint, that nowhere in Leviticus is there any requirement that someone go to someone else and make an apology. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid that was something you were taught to do. If you cut in line or took a toy someone else was playing with, it wasn’t enough that you got in back or gave back what you’d taken, you had to tell the other person you were sorry.
On the receiving end, it feels good to hear, doesn’t it? Sure, it doesn’t change anything. But hearing someone say that they feel some sorrow for acting with disregard for our feelings, our inherent value as a person feels good. It leaves you with a sense that they really care.
That’s what makes a difference, mends a relationship, heals our wounds is the feeling that someone else really does care about us and how we feel. Even if they don’t mean it.
The non-apology has become a genre unto itself the past several years. I’ve read and listened to so many celebrities and personalities issue or make apologies that are at best admissions that someone didn’t like something they did and, at worst, a statement of how wrong other people are for feeling how they do about certain words or actions. Sorry, not sorry.
Which may be why nowhere in this book of instructions how to live life with one another is there any concern with making apologies for the wrongs that were done. Saying you’re sorry doesn’t have to require much from us.
That’s the difference in these instructions, though, isn’t it? The act of wrongdoing, which in this chapter directly impacts another person, costs a person something. They are required to bring an offering equivalent to their means, a loss they feel. And they’re required to give up their pride, their own sense of rightness and say not that they feel bad for what they’d done but that what they’ve done is wrong.
I’m not sure it makes me feel as good to her someone confess their wrongs toward me without some expression of sorrow, but perhaps it’s not about me. After all, these acts were committed against God. Against the image of the Divine carried in every one of us, An image, in acting as we may, we’ve denied. We’ve forgotten for just a moment that the very Presence is among us, surrounding us. And there’s something to admitting we’d forgotten that.
It might even make us feel sorry.
Jesus, you took on humanity to remind us that everyone we meet bears the image of the Divine. But in my impatience, arrogance, and insecurity, I forget this, and wound you as well others. Open my eyes today that I might see the light, your light, in everyone I meet.