A week ago my sister-in-law, Lori, was in town with her husband, Steve. They were in Mount Juliet for a conference that kept them close to the event, and Steve was in a meeting, but we managed to squeeze in a quick visit with Lori.
Both Lori and Steve are Episcopal priests – yes, the family is lousy with them – and in their retirement they are engaged in a ministry of spiritual direction. Without betraying any confidences, Lori told the story of a woman who came to them for help and was deeply wounded by a toxic relationship with her daughter. And, over the years, the mother and her daughter had managed to say a lot of hurtful things to one another.
Certain that Steve and Lori were only going to be able to help her, if they had a complete picture of what her daughter had said to her, the woman came armed with a file folder, filled beyond its capacity, with printouts of the emails that her daughter had sent to her. She was shocked when Lori and Steve told her to put the folder away, observing that they weren’t interested in seeing its contents and that it was not a gift that God had given her that was meant to shape her life.
It struck me at the time that I have lost track of the number of people who have built their lives around alienation and the anger that it breeds. Parents and their children. Spouses, locked in a cycle of anger and alienation that spread across life. You see the same pattern in churches. It is the dominant feature of American society of late.
And left unaddressed, it metastasizes. It becomes a feature, not a bug in relationships. It isn’t just an experience. It shapes the way we understand our lives. It becomes the central feature of our identities. The turning point in our life-stories.
And when alienation takes center stage everything else withers and dies. People can no longer tell you who they love but they are certain who they hate. They can’t tell you what they believe but they can tell you with a certainty what kind of hateful things others believe. They can’t talk to people they know, who they believe have wronged them. And they can hate people they don’t know. It’s as if we have become so comfortable than we need alienation and anger to feel alive and far too many of us live with a file folder of offenses, filled to overflowing.
But Jesus, teaching how the Law – or Instruction (as it should be called in English) – has a very different vision of the way in which we should live:
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. Matthew 5:21-24 ESV
A lot is going on in these few words. One, Jesus is pointing out that when God taught Israel that they should not murder one another, he wasn’t simply asking them to avoid homicide. He was inviting them to internalize a different attitude toward their neighbors. So, as he notes, if they hated someone else, libeled them, or called them fools, they had already breached the commandment.
A second and equally challenging feature of what Jesus says here, is that he doesn’t allow for any exceptions. He doesn’t say, if you hate your neighbor but if he has wronged you, hate is ok. He doesn’t say, you can hate your neighbor, if he is a bad person or if he harbors hateful ideas. And he doesn’t say that you can libel your neighbor or call a fool, if he really is stupid.
This doesn’t mean that your neighbor hasn’t done something wrong, that you neighbor hasn’t hurt you, or that your neighbor hasn’t failed to grasp God’s will for his life. It doesn’t mean that you must assume that he is trustworthy. But it does mean that you can’t let hate govern your heart.
Now – up to this point in the sermon that Jesus was preaching, it may sound as if what he is saying is, “our motivations matter” or that thinking things is as bad as doing them. But reducing what he is teaching to one or both of those ideas carries with it all kinds of problems: For one thing, making either of those assumptions turns the teaching of Jesus into a body of self-help recommendations. It should also set off alarm bells, because the heart of Jesus’ teaching is about the Kingdom or the reign of God. And he is always talking about what God does in and through us, not what we can do on our own strength. The other, more practical problem, is that we all know that when we are mistreated, we can react angrily and we can also hold grudges. Which gives the entire expectation that Jesus outlines sound unrealistic, if not just unachievable.
But then Jesus goes onto offer a bit of instruction that comes as something of a surprise:
So, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift.
At first glance, this seems to be just nothing more than a bit of practical instruction. And, it might even seem irrelevant. Since, when Matthew wrote his Gospel, the Temple had probably been destroyed and – of course – we don’t have one at all.
But Jesus is after a deeper point than that. You see, the purpose of the Temple was not to offer sacrifices that made God happy, kept God from being angry or that made up for the wrongs that people did. Those are pagan notions of what happened in ancient worship.
What happened in Israel’s temple was that God repaired the alienation that existed: On the one hand — between himself and the children of Israel and – on the other hand – the alienation between the Israelites themselves. The Temple, then, was a place for reconciliation – a place for bringing back together those things which have been torn apart. In other words, precisely what the Gospel means when it uses the words, “salvation.”
Both kinds of reconciliation – both with God and with one another – is what God longs to achieve and in the teaching of Jesus, they are inseparable. And we can’t achieve one without the other. Both because only God can define it and because God is the only one who achieve it.
So, Jesus, knowing that the way of reconciliation will be a challenge for us, he urges his followers to be reconciled with one another, before they make an appeal for God’s reconciling power in the Temple. And, even today, that logic governs our liturgy. Before we celebrate communion, we confess our sins, we receive absolution, and we extend the reconciling peace of God to one another before we offer the gifts of bread and wine. Tellingly, in Greek, the word for reconciliation is katallasso and literally means bringing things back together, “eyelash to eyelash” — in other words, reconciliation has to be “face to face.”
Jesus, then, is looking for more that purer motivations or more effort on our part to be loving. He is putting hearts and lives back together. He is repairing the alienation that dominates our relationship with him and with one another. And – in his name – he invites us to participate in the task of reconciliation. Not as specialists in peacemaking, not as paragons of peacemaking but as people who draw our strength from the reconciling work he does in our hearts and as people committed to the larger task of divine healing and wholeness.
Paul calls it “the ministry of reconciliation” and he uses that phrase to describe the ministry of the church. But to our own discredit, we do little to embrace it and far too often the church mimics the divisions present in our culture and politics. And, sadly, we have far too little to say to younger generations of Christians who live online and find themselves wed to virtual communities that major in criticism and alienation.
So, practically speaking, what does can we do? The possibilities are endless, but they all begin with a life devoted to God’s reconciling love. People who share in that God-given mission
- Are witnesses to God’s reconciling presence in the world. They don’t hide their allegiance or their motivation. They are not drawing attention to themselves. They are drawing attention to God’s reconciling love for us.
- They invest themselves in eyelashes to eyelashes relationships. This is particularly important for younger generations who might be tempted to attribute undue importance to online relationships. This world, face to face relationships are not necessarily better. They are never perfect. But, unlike online relationships, they are not curated and often falsified relationships. There is greater pressure to own what you say and do. It is not as easy to indulge in anonymous cruelty.
- Those who embrace the work of reconciliation also seek reconciliation with those around them, whether they have offended others, or they have been offended. Or are simply people living on the edges of our communities, without connection and a sense of belonging.
- Those who embrace the work of reconciliation do not depend upon others to make that effort.
- They avoid contributing to alienation and anger.
- They resist the easy addiction to the approval of divisive voices. They avoid joining tribes
And, instead, they draw strength from worship, where they are reminded of God’s adequacy. They seek forgiveness. They offer forgiveness. And they share the reconciling, healing, life-giving peace of Christ.
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