Some Sunday in the late 1920s, a sober-faced church-school teacher looked down into my eyes and intoned “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” (1 Corinthians 10:12) Yesterday, at age 90, I had my first fall from loss of balance: I thought I was standing, but the truth is that I was falling. The Scripture was morally right, and my senior-exercise trainer was physically right.
The metaphor from our two-leggedness hit me as I read our question: “What does the Elliott Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?”
The world’s archives of wise-sayings and wisdom-tales have, as one common-category, the irony that weakness is the shadow side of strength, humiliation the flipside of arrogance. After using the metaphor of standing, the Apostle Paul illumines the same spiritual-moral truth by the metaphor of weakness/strength: “when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10) Overwhelmed by murderous opposition, his only hope was to confess his weakness and trust in the strength of Jesus Christ his Lord. A humble, realistic self-assessment in his situation protected him from hubris and opened him to the inner strength God was eager to give him. In this moral universe, the options are humility or humiliation.
The advantages to walking on two legs are worth the risks of falling; the advantages of freedom are worth the risks of corruption.
Yes, Spitzer should have resigned. May he use his humiliation wisely, to make a new start by the grace of God. As for his world-class hypocrisy – seeing to the enacting of tough laws against his own hidden crime – it was a pitiful effort at pseudo-atonement, as if one could be forgiven by being especially hard on sinners of one’s own kind.
True atonement, redemption, forgiveness, newness of life is a gift God is always eager to give – as in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son (Gospel of Luke 15:11-32).
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