The Labor of Love
(Proper 18 Year A RCL)
6 September 2020
8:00 a.m. Said Mass on the Labyrinth,
10:00 a.m. Sung Mass livestreamed from the chancel
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s Gospel has a set of rules for dealing with conflict. They seek to help us find our way when relationships among those who walk the way with Jesus go wrong. You know the basic outline: first talk to the one who has offended in private. If that doesn’t resolve it, then go with two other people who can witness the exchange and bring some objectivity to it, and if necessary, assist each party to listen to the other and improve their communication. Finally, if that doesn’t work and the offender persists, “”they shall be to you as a pagan and a tax collector.”
Well, what does that mean?
A common reading is this: this is gradual escalation. Try out a one-one-one talk where public grandstanding can be avoided. If that’s no good, call in witnesses so they can help to brow beat the offender into submission, to, as Methodists used to say and Baptists still say, “labor with the brother.” And if that is no good, then kick his sorry behind out of the community altogether. To me, this understanding is a prettified way of justifying shunning, excluding people from community when we disagree with them. It seems to bless that most unwelcoming posture: “I wash my hands of you.”
I wonder if that’s a right reading. We know Jesus said “If someone sins against you seven times in a day and says, I'm sorry, keep on forgiving them seven times" (Luke 17:3-4) and that one form of the saying corrects any misunderstanding we might have by adding, "don’t just forgive seven times, but seventy-seven,” that is, never stop forgiving. And that original saying is almost certainly from the historical Jesus, using a striking and memorable turn of the phrase, and its emendation is clearly the creation of the later church trying to make rules out of the legacy of Jesus' sayings.
The saying in today’s Gospel, with its law-like procedural character and concern for rules to run a community, is almost certainly a creation of the author of the St. Matthew Gospel: note that it starts with the words, “if any member in the church offend you.” Church existed at the time of Matthew, but not in the life of Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel was written in Syrian Antioch for a mixed Jewish-pagan church, one with lots of conflicts and intercultural strife. It is trying to create a Standard Operating Procedure for managing church conflict. But remember this: Matthew, also called Levi, the disciple of Jesus that this Gospel was always associated with, was originally a tax-collector. And a major part of the church it is written to are gentiles, or less politely, pagans.
So when it says, “let them be for you a tax-collector or a pagan” I think it is not necessarily saying this is the last straw and you have got to break off all relations with the person. Rather, it is saying that communication has broken down. Community has gone by the boards. The relationship between the offender and the offended had turned out to be a non-relationship, or an antagonistic one, like the relationships of Matthew’s Jewish readers with tax-collectors or pagans. It is not saying give up on that nasty person because you couldn’t use friendly persuasion or browbeat them into conformity. It is saying face up to the fact that your relationship is toxic. Your communication is non-existent.
Why did Jesus teach “never stop forgiving”? Why did he teach, “don’t give up on someone? Why did he keep on forgiving, even the worst things?
There is a hint in today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson: “As I live, says Yahweh God, I take no pleasure when a wicked person dies, but rather when they turn from their ways and live.” This passage is the scriptural warrant for the Church’s doctrine of the universal salvific will of God, that God wants everyone to be saved, for everyone to come out alright. It comes from Jesus’ basic description of God as a loving parent, who gives good gifts to all his children. It is the principal scriptural problem with John Calvin’s doctrine of a double predestination, one to salvation and one to damnation.
The fact that God wishes good for all is the reason in this passage from Ezekiel for the prophets to warn people—it gives them a chance to turn back from the things that will destroy them.
God wants us all to come out okay, and thus we need to help warn people who are going to where things will not be okay. But this general desire to help and to show love by engaging and being in loving relationship with others can have a distorted form: where we try to remake all others in our own image. This is why a desire for the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human family is often corrupted by a proselytizing urge at best or an urge to holy war at worst.
Recognizing a break down in relationship, recognizing that someone has become a stranger to us, an alien, a pagan, or a tax-collector does not mean giving up on them. Quite the opposite: it means never stopping to the engage and try to communicate, even when they no longer walk with us.
Never give up. Don’t wash your hand of anyone. This has to do with not just the nature of God, all-loving, ever able, desiring life and health and prosperity for all. It has to do with the nature human beings: always eager to turn things into an us and them game, always ready to confuse the line between good and evil that runs down the middle of each and every human heart with a line between one group of people and another or even one person and another.
Every one of us is divided and mixed; good and evil war with each other in every one of our hearts. We need to follow Jesus, and always entice each other to follow the better angels of our natures. God gives his blessings of sunshine and rain equally on both the godly and the wicked. God loves us all. And Jesus tells us we should emulate God in this perfect compassion. That’s why we should never give up on people, though at times we need break off toxic habits and interactions in our relationships and try for a new restart.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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