You’re running a day care center that closes at 5pm. You notice a handful of parents pick up their children late. Every time a parent arrives late it impacts you: you must stay late—family dinners and events are lost. What do you do? Realizing that your honor system isn’t cutting it, you start charging a fine for arriving late.
And then the unexpected happens: the number of late-arriving parents doubles.
This experiment was run by economists trying to help an Israeli daycare. The results confounded the researchers. They realized that, “As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.”
In economics, the lesson is that incentives may not have the anticipated impact. Economists realized that moral and social dynamics also had to be considered.
I want to consider this experiment from a different angle. What are the ways we excuse ourselves?
The Israelites were masters of excusing their behavior. They excused their desire to create a false god because Moses was gone for longer than expected and “we don’t know what has become of him” (Ex. 32:1). Aaron tried to wriggle out of culpability for creating the gold by casting blame on them (“they are set on evil” (Ex. 32:22)), and the miraculous creation of the golden calf in the fire (“I threw [the gold] into the fire and out came this calf” (Ex. 32:24)).
Jesus accused the religious leaders of using their generosity as an excuse for dodging God’s call to righteous living, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt. 22:23)
We are just like this, aren’t we? As soon as a loophole appears, we exploit it. We leverage our righteousness, thinking it can cover up our unrighteousness.
The daycare owner was asking parents to treat her with more respect. But, by implementing a fine, the parents treated her with less respect. In what ways do we excuse ourselves and fail to love our neighbor because we believe we are owed it?
He walks past trash in the parking lot. “That’s what the facilities crew is for.”
She moves in with her boyfriend. “We are married in our hearts.”
He doesn’t pick up after his dog. “I pay HOA fees for that.”
She fudges her timesheet. “I work harder than anyone else here.”
He doesn’t check his child’s homework. “That’s what the teacher is paid for.”
She doesn’t serve at church. “I tithe. That’s what the staff are for.”
And on and on it goes. Whatever excuse we can cling to, we will grab.
God reminds us in Revelation, “I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works” (Rev. 2:23). We can’t fool the Judge. We can’t bargain with him. We can’t bank up righteousness in one area to cover another. May the King of Grace reveal our duplicitous hearts and strip away our excuses, so that our righteousness might be found in him alone and our lives might be conformed to his justice, mercy, and faithfulness.
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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash