Gospel Prism

Gene Edward Veith has a really interesting post on the Korean-American community’s reaction. I’ll quote it here in its entirety and then a comment:

Koreans and Korean-Americans are horrified that the Virginia Tech killer came from their ethnic group and are reacting in a remarkable way:

South Korea’s ambassador to Washington, Lee Tae Shik, spoke at a candlelight vigil I attended Tuesday night in Fairfax County. Through tears, he said that the Korean American community needed to “repent,” and he suggested a 32-day fast, one day for each victim, to prove that Koreans were a “worthwhile ethnic minority in America.” More than 600 people attended the hastily organized vigil. Many in the audience, overwhelmingly composed of Korean immigrants, sobbed openly as they prayed for healing in America in the wake of this tragedy. Many also expressed a personal sense of guilt.

This is so unnecessary. I don’t think anyone is blaming or looking askance at Koreans as a whole just because this one murderer was Korean. The Korean-Americans most of us know have a good reputation as exemplary citizens and, for the vast number of Christians in that community, particularly devoted to their faith. I am moved, though, by this collective repentance, with the innocent assuming the guilt of the guilty, and repenting for what someone else has done.

The article I linked said that this is a function of their more collectivist culture, as opposed to mainstream America’s assumptions of individualism. I go with the latter, though I think our individualism can blind us to the Biblical truth that we do have a collective identity.

Notice too that the Koreans–unlike, say, the Muslim community– are not dissassociating themselves, nor defending their virtues, nor accusing people of being prejudiced against them. They are repenting. I really respect that.

I guess in one sense, it is admirable to the eye of the beholder. Koreans/Asians know how to repent very well. We know how to feel guilty and to turn towards self-immolation. BUt what Koreans/Asians have a tough time understanding is grace and forgiveness. It is that double passion, terrible guilt and shame and the vigor to do something about it (such as fasting) that can be both powerfully effective and yet spiritually detrimental. I know that this gathering includes probably both Christian and non-Christian. So therefore, non-Christians would not be motivated by the same presuppositions. However, I would imagine that even the Christians would have that penance mentality, as if the fasting will “undo” the sins of Mr. Cho and their corporate guilt as a ethnic Korean.

The problem with such a perspective is that freedom from such guilt comes from within rather than from outside of oneself. Freedom comes from the works of the guilty, rather than from the work of the only One who can pay the penalty for sin perfectly. And though some might feel good after the fast and after a hard cry, it’s so fleeting. Thank God for the message of Romans 8:1-4 and its true freedom from guilt and shame:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.