What would you do about another member of the congregation who was harming or offending you in some way? How do feel about the prophets of climate change? Our readings today, have the underlying theme of corporate versus individual responsibility; it’s tension accentuated by the threat and promise of imminent judgement and Salvation.
The disaster which Ezekiel foresees is not to individual wrongdoers, but “the whole house of Israel”. The community is threatened because of the individuals’ wickedness and there is a corporate responsibility to avoid punishment. It’s at this point, I think, that we become uncomfortable, not so much at the idea that wickedness may bring about punishment, but that we shall all be involved; I find it hard to see retributive punishment of this sort, as a very useful idea and corporate punishment is harder still. We can certainly feel, however, a similar urgency, as the consequences of our global wrongdoing draw closer, as the world gets ever hotter and the dispossessed multitudes to our south ever hungrier and angrier.
But the idea of punishment is a personal; we believe in our individual responsibility and expect to pay the price of failure personally. I am as offended by the punishment of a whole class school for one pupil’s misdemeanour as I am by Israel’s blockade of Gaza, or the bombing of cities to persuade their political leaders to mend their ways; they are all abuses of the authority conferred by power (and all, I suspect, pretty futile).
Matthew’s Gospel takes up Ezekiel’s questioning about what we should do about wrongdoing in our midst; but his story makes some strange assumptions; chief among them is that Jesus should be talking about a church at all, as apart from passages like this (mostly in Matthew) there is little to suggest that he intended to found a church. It sounds more as if it is the early church, experiencing difficulties and looking back to what it thought Jesus should have said. The final condemnation is telling, as being “a Gentile and a Tax collector”- well, we are mostly gentiles in this church and we welcome any who may not be, as we do employees of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. More seriously, we do not I hope see ourselves as a closed community. It is closed communities that need the sort of reassurance Jesus is reported as giving, in the church’s authority (elsewhere it is specifically Peter’s authority) to bind and to loose on earth as in heaven. This sort of authority and exclusivity are needed because the early church was under imminent threat, as was Ezekiel’s nation and as are churches in Iraq and elsewhere. But is, I think, this sort of threat which leads to the confusion of corporate and individual responsibility and of punishment and the consequences of wrongdoing.
One of the noticeable differences between the world of the Old Testament and the Gospels is the change of focus from the community to the individual. Ezekiel, typically, is concerned not so much with the wickedness of individuals, but of society as whole.
There is less feeling of community in the Gospel; clearly there is a group around Jesus, but they are hardly structured and collapse when seriously threatened. There are crowds and a significant miracle involves five thousand people. But even in that busy story, as in other congested miracles, there is an individual encounter at the centre; one life transformed by the experience of Jesus and his often unspoken and always brief message of salvation. I am, of course, rather ignoring the Sermon on the Mount and other discourses; but even in these the message is to individuals, rather than society as a whole.
The feeling changes when we read about the early church; we are back to a sense of a community, inspired by the Spirit, working in society- and notably there are mass conversions and beginnings of structure and a hierarchy.
This tension between individual and community as the basic unit of Christianity continues. Morally, we generally think individually; our concerns are with the freedom of the individual, in particular, the freedom to choose and the right to treated as a human individual. Criminal law reflects both Christian and secular ethics in treating as guilty only fully grown and responsible individuals.
And yet when it comes to moral motivation and to the way as Christians we are commanded to change the world in which we live, to bring about the Kingdom, then we see ourselves as a body- the hands and minds of Christ active doing his work of healing and bringing salvation. That task requires communal effort; although I sometimes think that it is individual acts of constructive kindness that go furthest, and, of course, the world we seek to change is composed of millions of single and diverse human beings.
The resolution of these tensions is to be found in the comforting assurance that where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, he will be there- that group will be his body capable of moving the world. But they remain two or three individuals. The strength of the body is its different parts.
After this service the co-ordinators of the various groups of volunteers- servers, sidesmen, flower arrangers, Sunday school teachers and many others- in the church will be meeting. The reason is that we face a crisis; not enough of us are willing to help with the many jobs on which this church relies. This in a way is the threat which we face as community; it needs an individual response. You are all different members of this body; please think over the next few weeks of ways in which you can play your part in helping us build the Kingdom here. We will not be punished if we fail; but the consequences will be dismally uncomfortable. Amen.