A monopoly on love

This past June my spouse and I went camping for the first time as a couple. 11 years in and we’ve never gone. Maybe for the best, some might say. We were out on Haida Gwaii, incredible place. We got to our site, unloaded our gear. We had been joking about the stereotype of the couple that gets into an argument setting up a tent. We would not be that couple, we decided. We had a plan. I was in charge of the tarp, my partner in charge of the tent. It all went pretty smoothly. The first night, we slept great. The next day, we had a beautiful drive, saw lots of scenery, ate delicious food.

The second night, again, we fell asleep no problem, but we woke up at about 4 or 5 am. It was raining and we were freezing. No problem, I thought. I sat up in my sleeping bag and reached for the extra blankets. I realized then that the cold I was feeling wasn’t so much a dry cold, but a damp cold. I looked down. Water had pooled along the perimeter of our sleeping bags.

We got up and started wringing out our gear. We were moving to a hotel that night, so at least there was a hot shower waiting. We packed up a soggy tent and a dripping wet tarp and made our way. 

Now, for the next couple of days, we did as any couple would do and subtly explored whose fault it was that the tent got wet. 

“I wonder if the tent had been moved uphill just a bit if we might have stayed dry?”

“I wonder if we had left the bags in the car, as I had suggested, instead of inside the tent, as you had insisted, maybe then our clothes would have been dry?”

Later we were sitting outside the Haida Gwaii museum enjoying the view across the Skidegate Inlet. A young woman came and asked if she could share our table. We said, sure. We started chatting and she asked, as people often do, what do you do for a living? I said, “I’m an Anglican priest. I work at a sweet little log cabin church called St. Clement’s in North Vancouver.”

She said excitedly, “I’m an Anglican! I know people at St. Clement’s!” 

Turns out she grew up with our own Brianna Parlongo. 

Long story short the young woman asked how our trip was going. We told her about camping, how the first night was great, the second we got soaked. She said, “Did you tuck in the ends of the tarp? You know you’re supposed to tuck the tarp under the tent or the water runs inside?”

Remember whose job it was to set up the tarp? 

Sometimes you need to bring in a third party to resolve a dispute. This is part of the back-and-forth Jesus is having with the disciples in today’s gospel reading. Jesus is telling them what to do when you’re having it out with a fellow parishioner. He tells them to talk it out one and one, and if that doesn’t work, to bring in a couple of witnesses, and if that doesn’t work to go to the Parish Council, and if that doesn’t work to let that person be to them as a Gentile and a tax collector. In other words, to excommunicate them.

This wasn’t a new framework for the disciples. The first step is written in the Book of Leviticus, the second step in the Book of Deuteronomy. The third to bring the dispute before the church is written in the Qumran scrolls and the final step of excommunication was also practiced in first century Jewish communities. None of this was new to the disciples, so why say it?

The difference comes in what Jesus teaches right before this passage. He tells the parable of the lost sheep. He explains how the shepherd leaves the 99 and goes after the one sheep that has gone astray. He says it isn’t the will of God for anyone who has been put out of the community to remain on the outside. Jesus shows particular care for those who have been put on the outside of religious communities. 

When Jesus speaks of the member of the church who sins against another, he isn’t speaking only of the lost sheep or of you or me or any other person in the pews. He’s speaking also about himself, namely the process by which the religious authorities will treat him on account of the sins of blasphemy and of desecrating the Sabbath Jesus has been accused of. So far the authorities have followed the Mosaic Law to a tee. They’ve spoken with Jesus privately, they’ve brought witnesses, and soon they will put him before the Sanhedrin. As the gospel story unfolds, we’ll see that the chief priests and the elders will consider Jesus unrepentant. He claims equality with God by forgiving sins. He heals on the Sabbath. Under the Mosaic Law, the unrepentant sinner who is brought up on charges of blasphemy and desecrating the Sabbath isn't merely excommunicated; they are sentenced to death. 

Here’s the catch. While the Sanhedrin enjoyed what some would call extraordinary legal privileges under the Roman Empire, the one thing the Sanhedrin couldn’t do was carry out an execution. The Roman Empire stripped local non-Roman courts of the Rule of the Sword in order to signal who truly owned the territory, who truly held the power over life and death. If a local non-Roman court like the Sanhedrin could independently carry out the death penalty it would say to the wider population that the Sanhedrin—not the Roman Emperor—possessed supreme authority. 

So, the Sanhedrin had to seek the permission of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, for cases of capital punishment. Which, as you know, is exactly what happens. The chief priests and the elders arrest Jesus, bind him, and hand him over to Pilate. So when Jesus says to his disciples in this morning’s gospel “let that one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” he is foreshadowing the work-around, the putting Jesus out of the community and into the hands of the Empire that the religious authorities will ultimately employ in order to put him to death. 

What purpose then does Jesus have in coding this conversation about community discipline as a foreshadowing of his death? Whereas Jesus will be handed over to the authority who has a complete monopoly on death, Jesus’ disciples are invited to become the complete monopoly on love. He tells them that they need only to gather in twos or threes in his name and they will find there the power to exercise that ultimate authority on love. 

I’ll tell you a quick story to illustrate this point. While I was studying Palestinian Theology at the Vancouver School of Theology in July, I learned about Bedouin farmers in the West Bank who are increasingly beaten, killed, or forced out of their homes by Israeli settlers. I learned about an elderly farmer who came out of his house one day to find an armed Israeli youth grazing his sheep on the farmer’s land, stealing the very food the farmer would need for his own flock. First the farmer went over to the young man, offered his hand and asked if they could sit down and talk. The man refused, pushing the farmer to the ground. Then the farmer got in touch with some international activists in the area who had come to the West Bank to document for human rights organizations violations such as this that occur daily against Palestinians. The activists came and tried to offer a non violent protective presence, but still the settler refused to leave. Then, the farmer appealed to a group of soldiers standing guard at a fence nearby, but the soldiers, having been enlisted to protect the religious interests of a group the farmer doesn’t belong to, disregarded his complaint.

Exhausted and out of ideas, the farmer sent his grandson, a boy 6 years old, to where the man was grazing the sheep. The boy put out his hand and offered the settler a glass of juice. The activists said to the farmer, why did you send your grandchild to offer this man who is stealing your land something to drink? The farmer replied, what else can I do? 

What else can he do? He did everything right. He went to the man privately. He called in witnesses. He brought the matter before the religious authorities. The farmer alone has no power to put this man out of his land, so what else can he do? 

Resistance seems the only answer. As Quaker theologian and Palestinian Jean Zaru wrote in her 2008 book Occupied with Nonviolence “There should be no surprise in Israel or elsewhere in the world when the next wave of Palestinian resistance explodes. There should be nothing surprising about the refusal of another generation to inherit pain and powerlessness, or another generation to resist the catastrophic subjugation and oppression.”

What then is this farmer to do? How shall he resist? Shall he put his enemy to death? With what gun? The farmer offers the only thing he has left: humanity infused with the Divine. A hand outstretched. A glass of juice. In a land where one party has a monopoly on violence, the farmer chooses to be the ultimate authority on love. Truly he has seen the face of Christ. 

A friend of mine tells me that when she prays for the despots of our time, when she prays for Benjamin Netanyahu, for Trump, for leaders in our own nation complicit in genocide, she doesn’t pray that these leaders will face a gruesome death. She prays that they will have a Road to Damascus Pauline conversion experience. She prays that they will at last come to find the love of God irresistible and repent. She prays for a monopoly on love. May it be so.

Image: Patrick Nizan, made with Canva Teams for Non Profits