Our Debts

Debt. Trespass. Sin. Different translations offer different words, but we have to believe that they all carry the same meaning--that there is something in the essence of these words that conveys the idea we are supposed to absorb. I will not debate which English word best translates the original Greek (or Aramaic--a topic which might engender a whole separate debate/argument/fracas that would do little to help anyone understand anything about the subject at hand); I think all three translations offer insights about our human condition and our relationships with God and with our brothers and sisters here. Without having to unnecessarily wade into the murky waters of semantics or attempt to scale the lofty heights of some philosophic conundrum, I think we can admit that, at their simplest, all three words are about doing wrong. For my purposes, then, I will only deal with the word debt, as it is the translation in the texts I use most often.


Someone might object that debt is not about doing wrong. As someone who has experienced more than his share of the thing, I can say that debt is not a right thing--it hurts. The high-school English teacher in me recalls the advice of Polonius to his son Laertes: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be. . . ." Actually, truth be told, this quote resurfaces for me from the Gilligan's Island musical version of Hamlet, the passage set to music from Bizet's opera Carmen--"Votre Toast (Toreador Song)" from Act II, to be precise. Many of us know the tune best from certain Bugs Bunny episodes, but I am sure that not everyone has been tainted by such pop culture phenomena--some have been tainted by the original, high-culture phenomenon.

A debt is something that we owe to someone, that much is pretty simple and straight-forward. But, as with most words, there is more lurking here; we have to plumb the depths of the word to begin to understand it. Debt is not a natural occurance; we are not born with it (although it might feel like it sometimes, debts of the parent are not passed on to the child). We are responsible for our own debts. We create them. They exist because of something we do, whether that be intentional or not. We might decide we want a house or a car and go to a bank to arrange a loan so that we can buy the thing, and so find ourselves in debt to the bank. Or, we might be turning our van around in a field at someone's farm and back over a newly-planted tree, lovingly placed beside the gravel drive by our friends' children, and so find ourselves in debt to our friends, owing them a new tree. In the former example, we chose to go into debt; in the latter, we accidently entered into debt. In either case, we still owe something to someone.


Marcus Aurelius observed in his Meditations that "A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission." This idea is common in discussions of sin, but being common does not make a thing trite in and of itself: we have to recognize that we are responsible for all our debts--those we undertake consciously and those that sneak into our lives.


I saw something on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt recently (I don't remember which, but they are equally effective as the media of our contemporary wisdom) that expresses a common attitude toward debt; the message said, "I owe. I owe. It's off to work I go," and that is how many of us live our lives: getting into debt, then working to get ourselves out. But there are some debts we cannot work off. We can work at our jobs to earn money to pay toward the mortgage or to make a credit card payment. We can cook a meal to repay a favor someone has done for us. But we cannot work to repay our spiritual debts--and, thankfully, we do not have to. Christ has paid our debts. Our account is clear because Christ died for us.


In essense, Christ has said to put it all on His tab. Whatever we owe, He will take care of it. So, our culture might suggest, let's just keep running up the tab since we have no obligation to pay on it. Yet there are two flaws with this: first, in order for Christ to take on our debt, we must accept Him as our Lord and Savior--and that means that we dedicate our lives to Him and undertake to live our lives in a Christ-like way; and second, we cannot truly escape a sense of obligation--of responsibility--just because someone else is paying. Taken one at a time, these reveal elements crucial to our relationship with Christ.


First, getting debt-free (spiritually) comes as a part of being Christian, and that means we do not want anymore debt; we try to avoid it. As Christians, we are reborn into a life in Christ; we do not live for ourselves but for Christ. Our new lives are predicated on Christ. If we are truly living as Christians, then we are truly attempting to live as Christ would live. We are not looking for loopholes and exceptions to help us have our cake and eat it too--we already have all we need, and we realize that. We are not trying to sneak sins under the radar. As Christians, we shun spiritual debt; however, that does not mean we will always be successful at avoiding incurring new debt. It does mean that we do not actively seek it. We will sin--and we will be forgiven--but we will seek to live our lives in the way that attempts to avoid incurring the debt, both because we want to do the right thing and because we want to spare Christ from having to endure any further pain at our expense.


Anyone who has seen The Passion of the Christ--at least any Christian who has seen it--cannot help feeling overwhelmed by the pain Christ endured for us. How can we not feel responsible for our debts even though Christ has paid for them? Further, how can we not feel even more responsible because Christ has paid for them? Our sense of responsibility becomes amplified when we realize that the suffering of Christ is a result of our debts He has taken on.


Does this mean that we must immerse ourselves in guilt? (There is probably a wonderfully bad pun about gilt lurking nearby, but we will persevere.) I don't think so. I believe that God would much prefer that we repent, ask forgiveness, and move on. Immersing ourselves in guilt paints us into a corner and leaves us stuck where we were--we stay with our debt, clinging to it even though Christ has offered to take care of it. Guilt is the thing that should happen between the the act of sin and the act of repentance. Guilt, then, is a thing of inactivity; it is the lull between two storms--the storm of sin and the storm of repentance, which washes away the sin. So long as we hold onto the guilt, we are holding onto the debt, and that can only hold us back and keep us from moving forward as Christians.

We all have had debts, we all have debts, and we all will continue to have debts. Debts are a part of our lives, both on the corporeal level and on the spiritual level. But just because we have them, does that mean that we always recognize them for what they are? In the world, we recognize debt because we have such a strong sense of ownership: we know what stuff is ours and we know what stuff is not ours, and so we know when we have taken something from another person--which means we owe them something, that we have a debt. A case could be made that not everyone has such a grasp of what stuff belongs to whom. Certain roommates have a very tenuous grasp of such personal property concepts, and there are some folks who have convinced themselves that everything belongs to them. Delusional and sociopathic individuals aside, though, most of us can and do grasp the basic ideas of debt on the level of things of this world.

Spiritual debt is not much different, actually, if we stop and think about it. In the spiritual realm, we are considering what we owe to God. As Christians, we have made a covenant with God, and in the terms of this agreement, we have given ourselves to God in exchange for salvation. We have agreed, in essence, to turn everything over to God. We have nothing. If that is the case, then identifying our debts is fairly simple: our spiritual debts are made up of anything we have held back from God. Whatever things--physical or not--that we have not handed over to God are our debts. Sin falls into this category because it is a manifestation of our not giving it all to God: we have held onto lust or anger or greed or sloth or any of those other things that seep into the cracks of our armor if we stop paying attention.

We are going to have debt. We do not have to allow it to take control of our lives. We have a solution. Christ has already paid. We just have to accept it.