Friday, Dec. 30 2011 7:23AM
The fathers have eaten sour grapes
By Lenny Cacchio, guest columnist
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ReprintRick is from Texas, and it shows.
One time he was acting a bit puny, so I asked him, “How are things going, Rick?” Rick says, “I’m lower than a snake’s belly in a wheel rut.” Expressions like that made living in Texas a bit more bearable way back when.
Here are more expressions from the Lone Star State.:
“Busier than a cat trying to cover it up on a frozen pond.” “All hat, no cattle.”
“It’s hotter than a stolen tamale.”
“Busy as a hound in flea season.”
“She’s as jumpy as spit on a hot skillet.”
“You can’t get lard unless you boil the hog.”
The Bible has a saying or two as well, although most are not quite as earthy as those coming from our Texas friends.
One that recently caught my attention goes like this: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” (Ezekiel 18:2)
This was apparently a common saying among the people in Ezekiel’s day, and it means that the children pay the price for the parents’ misdeeds.
This is certainly a sobering statement for those with children.
What we do can and does affect them, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
We can so wound their sense of security and self-worth that they will recover only with great effort. We can teach them wrong ways of living that they then emulate and thereby suffer the same dysfunction as previous generations.
In a case relevant to our current national situation, a generation can borrow money by the trillions, setting on edge the teeth of their children for half a dozen decades.
This passage in Ezekiel and a companion one in the context of Jeremiah 31:29 are a reflection of several statements in the Torah (such as Numbers 14:18) that talk about how it often takes generations before the curses of family dysfunction dissipate.
Having said that, the passages in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, when read in context, hold out an alternative future.
Ezekiel continues with this: “As I live, says the Lord God, you shall no longer use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine, the soul of the father as the soul of the son is mine. The soul who sins shall die” (18:3-4).
The passage then goes on to explain that even if someone has all the disadvantages in background, that person by changing ways can escape the natural curses that come from that background. Jeremiah’s passage says essentially the same thing.
Put differently, people can and do get caught in multi-generational habits that are difficult to escape. We often are victims of circumstances beyond our control. Poverty can be a family bequest, although one that we would neither want to bequeath nor accept.
Such is the way the world works. We need to admit that, and we need to accept that the sour grapes that parents eat can be hard to escape for the generations that follow.
But it is also true that there is a way to escape from the cycle.
Such dysfunction does not need to last for generations. The natural course of events might lead to generation after generation of the same mistakes being made, but fortunately we do have some measure of control over our own destiny.
Jeremiah’s passage speaks of the need to reform our hearts in order to escape the past.
“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Verse 33)
Change your heart and change your life. Do that, and, as they might say in Texas, you’ll be happy as a clam at high tide. Lenny Cacchio is a resident of Lee’s Summit. He blogs at http://morningcompanion.blogspot.com.
