Excuses are attempts to free ourselves from blame or guilt. They are lies...

Linus, Lucy, and Lame Excuses

By Brenda Evans

Tucked under warm covers up to his chin, Linus had his excuse all figured out. “I can’t go to school today. My right shoulder hurts. If I happened to know an answer, I wouldn’t be able to raise my hand.”

Lucy, his ever-bossy sister, wasn’t buying it: “C’mon, get up! You can always raise your other hand.”

Linus pushed back his covers and yelled: “You expect me to answer questions left-handed?”

I love Linus. Sure, he offered a lame excuse, but it’s brilliant and hilarious. That’s Linus for you.

Charles Schulz once called Linus “my serious side…the house intellectual.” Linus was the Peanuts® character who was “thoughtful, cautious, intuitive, funny, and the voice of reason,” and I like him. I don’t care if he sucks his thumb and drags around a security blanket. We all need a little comfort sometimes, especially if we must deal with bossy people like Lucy. Besides, he’s Charlie Brown’s best friend. That counts for a lot.

Sure, Linus’ excuse was lame, but I’ve made lame excuses, too, plenty of them — all less funny and certainly less brilliant. The truth is his bossy sister Lucy made excuses as well. Her excuse-making skills, especially regarding her poor performance on the baseball field, out-class Linus’ sore shoulder and left-handed answers. Remember the time she told Charlie Brown she missed a fly ball because “the moons of Saturn got in my eyes.” Far-fetched — sounds more like some of mine.

Regarding Lucy, Schulz once said she was a crabby bully who mocks and intimidates, and “I don’t especially like her, but she works. She’s mean but has a way of cutting right to the truth…through a lot of sham.” She can, I suppose, but it’s hard for me to like her while she’s doing it. Most of the time, I don’t like being shown up for who I really am under all the layers of pretense.

Until Linus and Lucy, I’d not thought all that much about Bible characters who make lame excuses, but they abound. Moses did not want to go back to Egypt to free Israel. He made five excuses at
the burning bush (Exodus 3-4).

• I'm nobody; why should I go?
  

• They'll ask who sent me. What’ll I say?
  

• They won't believe me.
  

• I'm not eloquent and am slow of speech.
  

• Lord, please send someone else.
  

All are flimsy, but the last two hit at the crux of Moses’ excuses — he was worried about speaking (and this is the man we believe wrote the first five books of the Bible), plus he simply did not want to go. As God’s people, we identify with both. I sometimes worry about what to say and how to say it. Other times I just want to stay home, read a book, eat a snack, watch a movie, sit on my backside — do anything except go.

But to me, Aaron’s excuse in Exodus 32 was the most absurd. Moses was on the mountain. The people asked for a god. Aaron told them to bring gold jewelry. They did, and he made the golden calf. But later, when Moses asked him to explain himself, he said the people wanted a god, brought gold jewelry, and “I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”

What kind of excuse is that? It’s a lie, and not an innocuous white one. Fact is, Aaron lied to Moses, God, and himself. Himself because he excused his part in the golden calf and blamed the people for it all. “It’s their fault, not mine,” he said. Then he added an implausible lie to further distance the blame. “Not my fault! Magic,” he said. “Poof! Out came this calf.” God must have done it. Aaron demonstrated no shame, only blame. Are we guilty of that as well?

Blaming others is often at the root of our lame excuses. Remember Eve blaming the serpent and Adam blaming Eve? Shifting blame to her or him or them is easy. We like pointing a finger at anyone but ourselves. Jonah even pointed his finger at God. To paraphrase, he told God, “I knew you would be gracious and merciful and slow to anger. I knew you would relent and not destroy Nineveh. That’s why I did what I did.” We take comfort in pointing away from ourselves: it’s her fault, his fault, their fault, even God’s fault, so it can’t possibly be our fault. Shifting blame is a feeble excuse. It won’t stand.

Some excuses have to do with weaknesses. We’re quick to take up those to excuse our behavior. Remember Barak in Judges 4? Deborah, the judge from the hill country of Ephraim, summoned him to gather 10,000 men and go to war against Sisera. She would go also, another way, draw Sisera out, and give him into Barak’s hand at the river Kishon. He answered: “If you go with me, I will go, but if you do not go with me, I will not go.”

Why the excuse? We assume fear. Maybe fear of death, or fear of Sisera’s monstrous army, or fear of failure as a commander of troops. We don’t know, except we assume Barak saw some weakness in his life that provoked him to beg off.

Deborah’s answer cut deep: “I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.” I wonder what Barak thought about that. He may have said to himself, “So, Deborah’s going to kill Sisera and get all the glory herself.” That’s what I would have thought. But that’s not what Deborah meant.

Jael, a Kenite wife, who’d probably never gone to battle a day in her life, received the glory. Judges 5:1-31 records “The Song of Deborah and Barak.” It’s a powerful psalm that praises God and the tribes who followed Deborah and Barak to battle. The song also calls out three tribes that made excuses. They “sat still among the sheepfold” with “great searchings of the heart.” They mused and mused and excused themselves from going.

Then there is Jael. No excuses there! What nerve she had. “Most blessed…of the tent-dwelling women,” Deborah said and graphically described Jael’s gruesome execution of Israel’s enemy:

He asked for water and she gave him milk;
She brought him curds in a noble bowl.
She sent her hand to the tent peg
And her right hand to the workmen’s mallet;
She struck Sisera;
She crushed his head;
She shattered and pierced his temple.
Between her feet, he sank,
he fell, he lay still.
Where he sank,
There he fell — dead.

No getting up from that nap! At the end of Deborah’s song, the author of Judges noted: “And the land had rest for forty years.”

Linus, Lucy, and I are not the only ones to make lame excuses. Excuses abound in Scripture. Abraham’s excuse was Sarah’s beauty, and so he deceived the king of Egypt. Greedy Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard and pouted until Jezebel got it for him. David lusted after Bathsheba. Jeremiah tried to beg off God’s call because he was young. Gideon stalled and stalled, asking for more and more signs. Pilate washed his hands. Peter denied Jesus saying, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Excuses, lame or otherwise, deny responsibility. They defend, justify, or hide a fault. They are pretexts, pretense, or rationalizations. They are attempts to free ourselves from blame or guilt.

They are lies we tell ourselves.

The dramatists of Greece’s Golden Age created characters who wore enormous masks to depict dramatic characters. These actors performed “under the mask,” pretending to be someone they were not. Of course, that’s what actors do, even today. And that’s okay.

But when we give lame excuses, we also perform “under the mask,” and it’s not okay. Nor are we amusing like Linus. We allow fear, pride, envy, laziness, hate, lust, or greed to taint our better selves. We pretend. We excuse or even accuse. That’s never okay. So, let’s make up our mind to leave behind the lame excuses, even if we must answer questions left-handed.

About the Writer: Brenda Evans lives and writes along Rockhouse Fork Creek in Ashland, Kentucky. You may contact her at beejayevans@windstream.net.