Destroying the Righteous with the Wicked
I’m sure many of us are familiar with the story of Abraham negotiating with God about the fate of Sodom in Genesis 18. Abraham knows that God is sending angels to determine whether Sodom is worthy of destruction or not. While the divine investigators go on ahead, Abraham takes a moment to speak with God. Perhaps he is concerned for his nephew Lot. Perhaps he is genuinely concerned about all the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, people he had rescued before. Whatever the case, Abraham negotiates with God, trying to convince God not to destroy the city. Abraham starts by asking God if the city would be destroyed even if fifty righteous people were living in it. God responds that the city would be spared for the sake of just fifty righteous people. Abraham slowly widdles down the number, all while holding on to the notion that God should not destroy the wicked and righteous together. Ultimately, they get the number all the way down to ten. If ten righteous people are present in the city, God will spare the entire place for their sake.
There are at least three important functions of this text, but I want to talk about two in particular today. Of course, I want to mention the third one. This text solidifies the wickedness of Sodom. All God needed to find was ten righteous people in the whole city. Just ten! God and the angelic inspectors couldn’t find ten people worthy of saving in the city. The whole place was utterly lost. If there were ever a question in mind, this text can be used to justify God’s actions in destroying the cities. It isn’t a matter of wiping out the innocent with the guilty. There simply weren’t innocent people. The only arguably righteous people were evacuated before the destruction, but even their goodness isn’t really clear. As far as Genesis 18 is concerned, God’s actions here are justified.
But why wouldn’t God’s actions be justified? Why do they need to do the work of demonstrating that God did God’s homework? Why do we need to know that there was a thorough investigation to determine the culpability of the people of Sodom? While it could be fun to speculate on whether or not this was a response to people claiming that God wasn’t just even in that time, I think the simplest answer is that the author of this passage wanted to make one thing perfectly clear. God’s justice isn’t arbitrary. God takes care to avoid punishing the righteous as if they were wicked. God doesn’t just absent-mindedly group people and condemn them to collective suffering.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a lesson that we have successfully internalized yet. While we may find it easy to differentiate between people within our group, we are quick to collectivize and condemn people we disagree with. A Lutheran that we disagree with just has some creative theological ideas, but Mormons are all wrong together. Or if not Mormons, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, whatever it may be. When we see a rival group, we are quick to condemn them as a group. They are all wrong together. They are all evil. We don’t need to differentiate them as individuals. They are wrong because they are in the wrong group.
This isn’t always a major problem. Sometimes the groups we draw are imaginary and/or inconsequential, like when people take those online Harry Potter house sorting quizzes to see what kind of wizard or witch they would be based on their personality. Trying to find the most useless personality quiz doesn’t cause problems, but there are other groups we form.
In the United States, we have had very politicized views about our southern border for quite a while. Whatever you may think about letting migrants into the country and providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, we can at least look at how people talk about them. A few years ago, when refugees moving toward our border was a constant news story, part of the rhetoric was speaking about the criminality of the people coming. They talked about how many criminals were present among the refugees. Of course, it isn’t really clear how we found accurate criminal records for people who we hardly knew, but there was another problem as well. By the most reliable estimates, there really wasn’t a greater ratio of criminals to innocent people than in any given US city. In fact, there were probably fewer criminals among the refugees. Thinking logically, we shouldn’t have been any more afraid of nationally finding homes for these refugees than we should be afraid of having new neighbors from Chicago or New York move in next door. However, the rhetoric wasn’t logical. That was never the point. It was all about fear. And it worked for many of us. We would have happily condemned the majority of righteous people into the perpetual limbo of waiting without a refuge or home, if it meant we could protect ourselves from a handful of criminals. If we had the power to judge Sodom, we would have destroyed it even if we could only find fifty evil people though the rest were righteous.
But what can we really expect of ourselves? We don’t have God’s righteous patience. We are afraid of outsiders. We can get swept up into a terrorized frenzy when our leaders tell us a threat is at the door. We can’t be slow, methodical, and perfectly loving in our judgment. Fortunately for us and for our world, the final important meaning of this story is that righteousness goes far, and a very small number of righteous people can cover for a great many wicked ones. God only needed ten righteous people to make Sodom worthy of saving. Ten would be enough to cover an entire city. The influence or righteousness is strong.
I don’t know if I’m acquainted with ten perfectly righteous people, ten people who are good enough to make up for all our sins and save us. We don’t have ten leaders in elected office who are perfect enough to guide this country wisely. We don’t have ten ministers in the church who can make the church perfect. However, I do know one righteous person who is enough. Thanks be to God, the righteousness of Christ is sufficient to save us all.
