Reflections from The Hill – Use or Ab-use?

From time to time, TV journalists do stories on domestic violence. It’s an horrendous topic, both visually and aurally, even if the re-enactments are staged for the report.

Such behaviour is so far outside my level of desire that it’s almost dreamland stuff and, frankly, I am confronted and offended by the reports, despite being able to see myself in many of them.

This delicate subject of physical, emotional and verbal abuse gets a fair bit of attention – and rightly so – those in authority are doing their level best to lower the high physical and monetary costs associated with the problem.

In the context of today’s Gospel Reading from Matthew, we get a glimpse of another type of abuse, a most insidious example called spiritual abuse.

Wikipedia says that spiritual abuse ‘occurs when a person in religious authority or a person with a unique spiritual practice misleads and maltreats another person in the name of God or church …’

Sad to say but this passage from Matthew has been used by clergy and church officials the world over to harm people, to exercise power over them and, if two or three of them agree on something, to ignore everyone else’s opinion and do what they want.

Of course, I’m not thinking of your Parish or ministry area as I write this. Such things don’t happen there, I’m sure. But if this form of abuse did occur where you are, and if you used Matthew to justify your actions, we can be pretty sure that it happened because someone put a spin on the words of Jesus that just ain’t there.

When we get to read it, it’s important to stand back a bit and look at chapter 18 as a whole, like I had to do when I visited Canberra and saw Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” in the National Gallery. I had to consciously avoid getting up close and personal.

Standing back ensured that I was able to take in the painting in one go, to see it as it was. Its impact on me is still profound to this day.

The trouble is that, when we get to Scripture, we tend to do the same thing: get up close and personal first, rather than stepping back and getting the bigger picture.

When we get too close, we become picky and selective about what’s there. Some bits are agreeable to us and some aren’t. For example, we don’t drown people for being a stumbling block anymore and I’m not sure that plucking out an eye has ever had the desired result.

Mind you, not too many farmers would leave ninety-nine sheep in a paddock to go look for one which went missing, either. Leave them alone and they will come home is far more cost effective but I could be wrong.

So what was Jesus trying to get us to understand in these few verses this week? Retribution is good? Hardly. Excessive use of power is a thing to be grasped? Not likely. Drown your opposition? Excuse me …

No. Jesus is continuing his teaching on the Kingdom by helping us understand that He sees things from a very different and opposite perspective from the one we have.

Jesus is saying that it’s not the greatest, or the most powerful, or best dressed who are top of the pile in God’s Kingdom but those who are vulnerable, without power and without status.

He uses hyperbole (overstatement) to help us hear the gospel of God’s love in different ways, through different experiences, with different language and images.

Jesus could have used his power to tell the disciples exactly what he thought of their question about who was the greatest, but he chose to listen, to open up conversation and to teach.

There’s a good lesson here. If Scripture is a closed word and simply an answer book, then we’re all in trouble. We’ll continue to use scripture to attack others and thus perpetuate violence against one another and to justify harm in God’s name. In this, we will limit God – and that’s no exaggeration.

Jesus’ own exaggeration goes beyond what the disciples and we can comprehend: it goes way beyond the tokenism of inclusiveness to a radical inclusivity where we take each other seriously, listen to the other, and dare to trust that this other person belongs in God’s love as much as we do.

In the wash-up, that’d have to be a whole lot better than a head full of power, a mouth full of control and a fist full of abuse, now, wouldn’t it?