One of the oldest pagan tricks in the world is the practice of simply assigning guilt. The one to whom it is assigned is not permitted to argue about it, and it is considered very bad manners if he does. To do so is simply heaping additional guilt on top of his designated and assigned guilt, and it usually makes the masters of the process furious. Of course, in the great revelation of God’s love for mankind in the scape-goated death of Jesus, God ripped the mask of respectability off this ancient practice, and everyone who tries it today always has an uneasy conscience about it. Not like the old days.
Once there was a low-level government official who was responsible for the maintenance of a small dam, upstream from a small town. One day, after a week of heavy rain, signs that the dam might give way and flood the town below became unmistakably evident. This official was a dutiful man, and so he did everything that the book of procedures called for. He notified everyone, sounded the alarm, called the media, and discharged his duties faithfully. But, because of a great deal of bungling on the part of those he notified, the town was not fully evacuated by the time the dam broke, and there was great loss of life. In the loud cry of outrage that followed this, the media immediately began demanding answers to the question, “Who is responsible?” The answer from the true bunglers also came immediately, and conveniently landed on the one official who had done everything he had supposed to.
Well, actually, he did one thing wrong, at least in the minds of those who assigned his guilt to him. He had piles of documentation of everything he did, and when he did it, and why, and when the inevitable congressional hearings came, he was able to easily disprove all the accusations against him. In fact, he disproved them all so thoroughly that everyone was quite angry with him and his career was ruined.
As a result, he moved to another city, changed his vocation, and became quite successful as a software developer. But whenever he was asked about his former career, he was genuinely magnanimous toward his former colleagues. He was not at all bitter, and so one day his wife pressed him about this. “Why are you not bitter?” And he did say this much. “Our old friends really want to be forgiving. And they could have forgiven anything . . . anything but innocence.”