Lead Us Not Into Temptation

            By now, you have probably heard about the child sex abuse scandal involving Penn State University.  I won’t go through all the details here; if you somehow haven’t heard about it, you can go here to get more information.

            It’s a terrible, sad, awful situation, of course.  In addition to criticizing the perpetrator of the deeds, much criticism has been leveled at the Penn State administration and football coaches.  They have been accused of covering up the scandal, or at least of doing nothing to do anything about it.  The accusation is that they were concerned that the university’s football program if these accusations came out, so they tried to make sure the accusations would not come out.

            Much of the criticism is justified, but there’s still something that bothers me about it.  It seems to me that a lot of the criticism has an awfully self-righteous tone to it.  It is implied, and sometimes even stated, that “if I had been in that position, I’d have done something about it.  I certainly wouldn’t have covered it up or not done anything about it like these people did.

            Really?  Are you sure?  Don’t get me wrong—I hope you would have.  I hope I would have, too.  I am in no way trying to rationalize or explain away the failure to act by the Penn State administrators or coaches.  Still, I’m a little bothered by this easy assumption that if you or I had been in that position, we’d have done so much better than the people who were actually in those positions did.

            The reason I say that is that I keep looking at who these people were.  All of them were people who were very highly respected ten days ago.  No one thought any of these people would do anything like this.  There’s the president of a prestigious university.  There’s the athletic director of that university’s highly regarded athletic department.  There’s the head football coach, Joe Paterno, who had been considered the most honorable college football coach in the country until all this came out.

            None of these people are evil, horrible monsters.  They’re people, just like you and me.  In fact, until ten days or so ago, most of them would have been thought of as more honorable than you and me.

            There’s a reason why, when Jesus taught us the Lord’s Prayer, he included the line “lead us not into temptation.”  Jesus knew that sometimes, when we’re tempted, we fail to resist the temptation.  An alternative translation is “lead us not into a time of testing”, which works just as well.  Sometimes, when we’re tested, we fail the test.  We are human, and we are all subject to human failings.

            Again, this is not intended in any way to justify or defend the actions and inactions of the Penn State administration and coaches.  Still, self-righteousness is a sin, too.  I would suggest that all of us not be quite so quick to assume we’d have handled the situation so much better than these people did.  I hope we would, but I also hope none of us is ever put to the test.