And he said, “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ so that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”
-Luke 11:46-52 (ESV)
Our problem must be learning not to say, “If I had been there, I would have had no part in that lynch, when our forebears killed the prophets…” but to wonder about the ways, hidden to us, in which we ARE participating in exactly those same mechanisms, after the manner of the blindness of our forebears.
-James Alison, Raising Abel, p.142