Readings: Ezekiel 9.1-7; 10.18-22; Psalm 113; Matthew 18.15-20
The gospel reading today is about excommunication, the sad and difficult situation where the Christian community comes to the conclusion that one of its members, for reasons of belief or lifestyle, is no longer in full communion with the Church. It has been much in the news recently with breakaway groups ordaining bishops in Switzerland, Scotland and probably other places also. We find it difficult to think about such things, as we find it difficult to think about the reality of death. For excommunication is a kind of death, a terrible wound in the body of Christ, a real sadness and a profound loss. It means we have failed to maintain the communion to which Christ calls us and for which he prayed in his last great prayer to the Father.
The gospel reading says we are to try everything to maintain that communion: talking privately with a person first of all, talking with them in the presence of one or two other people, and only if it is absolutely necessary bringing a matter to the attention of the whole Church. The conclusion is chilling and we might even wonder 'is it Christian'? Surely we can find a way to stay together, to remain in communion? But truth presses in also, not in order to serve some structure of power or to maintain some artificial conformity. Truth presses in because it is the truth of that communion itself: what if the basis on which we are joined is undone by what a person believes or by how a person behaves? Our communion dies.
This passage of Matthew's gospel is about the difficulty of staying together and it reflects how, even in the early Church, it was realized very quickly that there would be problems in staying together. Sometimes people will do things, or will come to believe things, that even the Church cannot see as compatible with the life of the gospel. Of course we hesitate to use the word ‘excommunication’ but in human relations it is sometimes, sadly, the reality. Even having done our best, we do not see how some can be contained within the life of the community. Some ways of living and some convictions are not compatible, as far as we can see, with life in the Church. More often than not it is people themselves who make the decision to separate from the Church because they no longer share its beliefs or are no longer convinced about the goodness of its teaching. Much more rarely the Church itself makes this decision about a person or a group of people.
We can never be happy about the exclusion of a brother or a sister. It is a death and death is terrible, the last enemy of human flourishing, a final failure. But within the context of Christian hope, exclusion can never be the last word about a person or about our relationship with them. They remain always children of the heavenly Father called to be brothers and sisters of Jesus. I like to think that the two or three gathered in Christ’s name at the end of this gospel reading are the same two or three who have earlier confronted the erring brother or sister. They are praying, and prayer is the characteristic act of the virtue of hope. What is on their minds as they pray must be that same brother or sister whom the Church has decided it must relate to as if he were a pagan or a tax-collector. And there is Christ in the midst of them.
Therefore outside the Church there is no outside, because the prayers of the Church, like the anxiety of loving parents, follow her children everywhere. Even when we cannot see how unity and reconciliation might come about, we must continue to hope for those things, to pray for those things, and to work for those things. All the commandments are summed up, Saint Paul says, in this saying: 'you shall love your neighbour as yourself'. We know that our neighbour is everyone, those who are living and those who are dead, those who are sick and those who are well, those who are in joyful communion with us and those who are in sad separation from us. We reach the limits of our capacities but we know that the Lord, who was crucified for our reconciliation, stretches his arms across the widest horizons of this creation in order to gather in all the scattered children of God.
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