NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 23 in Ordinary Time Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Last Sunday, remember, we finished with Jesus explaining to Peter and the other disciples the importance of a lowly reputation, being able to dwell in the place of shame, as a condition for being able to be a disciple of his, for being able to follow him properly. After that we have the Transfiguration, then still in Galilee, so before he heads back to Jerusalem, the disciples ask him about who's greatest in the kingdom. Normally, and I say this with some trepidation, this passage is read in a rather po-faced way, as though Jesus is, having talked about all the nice stuff, is now setting out clearly the kind of rules and regulations for good behavior in church and church communities, and how this is to be policed by different members of the community. And just in case you attempted not to read it in this po-faced way, the Catholic Church puts the reading from Ezekiel about being a good sentinel who warns people about how awful they're behaving, and ticks them off so they don't get into terrible trouble by being killed for the behavior. And if he wins them over, that's a good person. Now what I want to suggest to you, with some joy, is that I think that this po-faced reading is entirely mistaken. Let's look at what leads up to and follows on from today's Gospel. First, the beginning of the discussion is about who's greatest amongst you — in other words, who are the people who are going to be in charge? What does it look like to be running this show? And Jesus takes — not in some translations a child, but a small servant boy, a young servant boy — and puts him in the midst of them, and says this is the criterion for greatness. In other words, you're not going to be great except in as far as you become like this one and learn to listen to this one. Of course, servant boys were not considered proper authorities on anything. They were scarcely talked to, they would not have been noticed, scarcely had adult behavior patterns attributed to them. Yet Jesus is saying the criterion for what counts as behavior is a servant boy. And guess what: if you scandalize such people, then you are destroying yourselves. So the next section is about how not to scandalize one of these little ones, because the criterion of his own presence, as we've shown, is — going to be that of the servant boy whom he very carefully puts in the midst of them. And I bring this out because in our Gospel today, at the very end of his passage, he says: "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." In other words, he repeats exactly the same phrase: "I am going to be amongst the decision-making group as a servant boy" — the kind of person whose voice wouldn't normally be heard, who just gets on and does things and looks after people, who's present and should be present in a non-scandalized way. That's the criteria that's at work here. Immediately thereafter, Jesus tells them not the parable of the lost sheep, because in Matthew's version it's not a parable — it's simply perfectly straightforward. He says: "If one of you had a hundred sheep and lost one of them, which one of you wouldn't leave the ninety-nine sheep, go after and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray." So here is Jesus teaching something very specific about how the business of authority is going to be exercised. It's going to be exercised in favor of the one that went astray, the lost one. The whole purpose is not to be shoring up the good; the whole purpose, even to the extent of leaving the vast majority, is to go after the one who seems to have gone astray and finding them — and that's the cause of rejoicing. Now, Jesus is probably interpreting here as well a passage from the book of Deuteronomy that he's about to quote, where it talks about the setting up of the cities of refuge, so that if someone commits an accidental homicide — says Deuteronomy 19 — someone who commits an accidental homicide has somewhere to flee to before they can be got and killed, because the risk of the lynch killing of someone before it's determined whether that person really did something is so great that they need to have places to flee to. In other words, even the book of Deuteronomy Recognised that the risk of false justice is far greater than the risk of letting someone go, and far worse. It's much better to actually set up refuge cities so as to make sure that people can get away and any process can be slowed down. Okay, so that's the context within which Jesus gives today's teaching. The criteria: that of the servant boy who is not to be scandalized. The overall tendency: that of, above all, going after and finding in as benevolent a way as possible the one who's gone astray, the lost one. And that's when we come to Jesus' actual teaching. Now what I'd like to propose to you is that what Jesus is offering is actually the mechanism to follow through on what he's just been saying, and the mechanism is how to avoid a lynching. So the first tip: "If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone." Now, I'm old enough to have been in enough situations where I know that this is a really, really difficult thing to do. It's easy to get into a fight with someone, but it's really difficult to take sufficient distance from what has gone on when someone has offended you, to work out what's really going on between you, and to be able to stand up without the need to go and search for backup, to gossip to other people about what's happened, to try and present yourself as having been victimized by this person. It's tremendously difficult, actually, to be in a place of peace in yourself where you can go and say to the other person calmly — and not because you want to rub it in that person's face, but because you really want to recreate friendship with that person — "Do you know, you did this to me." I really want us to get beyond this. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. It requires a huge amount of that peaceful calm in your own life. That's why I think that if anything, that's where the Ezekiel instruction in our first reading comes in. It's just a reminder, a portentous reminder of quite how difficult it is, rather than succumbing to any number of easy solutions to someone offending you, quite how difficult it is just to be able to go to the person and talk to them about it. It's a hugely important thing, but what is really important about it is what it's not doing. You are preparing yourself because you want to bring back this other person; you want to resolve this; you want this person to be on the same insider basis with you as everyone else. It's only when that's failed, when you've spoken to that person alone so that there's no risk of you humiliating them, so that they're not having to keep up appearances before anybody else — you have not told anybody else, you've not whipped up by gossip opinion against that person, said they need to defend themselves — it's only when you've done that and it's failed that you then need to go and talk to two or three witnesses. And here Jesus is repeating what is said in the book of Deuteronomy about the need for witnesses. The witness of one is not enough; you need the witness of two or three if you want to make a claim stick. Why is this so important? Because it means that you actually need to go and convince them that you're telling the truth. This is a matter of process. It's slow. They have got to be convinced that they are not going to be false witnesses — which would be subject to the death penalty in the book of Deuteronomy — they're not going to be false witnesses if they join with you in facing down the other person. In other words, you are exposing yourself; you, the person who has been offended, are exposing yourself to other people putting you right and saying, "Actually, I think you're misinterpreting what he or she did or said to you. I think that there's a more innocent explanation; you should perhaps get off your high horse and see what's really going on here." In other words, by your putting yourself through this exercise, you're running the risk of learning something. And so, then, if they agree with you, and if therefore it seems clear that what you say is true, they're prepared to back you up for it – it's gone slowly enough so that the person who is being confronted has not been pushed into a situation whereby they're feeling paranoid and defensive. If all that's happened, and still that person says, "Actually, no, I didn't do that," or, "I was right to do what I did," then before taking any action, and before entering into yet more gossip – trying to whip up popular opinion – then you talk to the whole of the community, and see whether they too can be won over by an accounting of events in such a way that they too could work out with you how to bring the person back on board. In other words, this is a mechanism for slowing down a lynching. And if, at the very end of the process, the other person continues either to deny that they did something, or to deny the intention in which they did it, or to deny that the thing they did was wrong – under those circumstances, having given them every possibility, it then says: treat them as a Gentile tax collector. And again here, the surface-face reading is so obviously wrong, because Jesus has spent the time just before all this discourse in Gentile country. He's just done the feeding of the four thousand amongst the Gentile people, amongst the nations. He's healed the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman. And with regards to tax collectors, remember: this Gospel is attributed to a former tax collector. If anything, for me, the sign of the use of the word "tax collector" there is one of Matthew's clever ways of saying, "Remember, what this means is we go back to the beginning and try to find ways of bringing them back in," because that's what this is about. And he then stresses to them that there is no way beyond this mechanism – the unscapegoating mechanism. There's no external reference. God is not an outsider to this process. God is to be found present in the undoing of the scapegoating witness, which is how he – Jesus – is going to be present to them, occupying the same place as that servant boy. And he says, "No outside…" "You're going to have to take responsibility for this. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed on earth." In other words, it's you who are going to advance in understanding of how to create insiders together, as you learn constantly to find ways of letting each other off awful, violent mechanisms of control or policing. In other words, he's taking this further than Deuteronomy, but in the same sense as Deuteronomy, which was already being careful to avoid unfair proceedings.