Better Than Boxing

Leonard Defrance, Men Fighting (c. 1790)

After grade school, I had the privilege of attending an all boys Catholic high school, which had the imaginative name of… Catholic High School for Boys. Despite the dull name, it was –and still is – a remarkable school, in large part because of its remarkable principal. When I arrived there, Fr. George Tribou had been the principal for more than 30 years; he had taught my father and my uncles and now he was teaching me. He was a living legend, both as a great teacher and as a strict disciplinarian. We heard stories about the creative punishments he would sometimes give out for guys who were acting out. Not all of them would go over well today; for example, if you were caught smoking in the parking lot, he’d make you smoke the whole pack of cigarettes until you were just about sick.

I remember one year there were two guys a grade or two above us that kept getting into fights. They were friends, of a sort, who were also kind of rivals and couldn’t help but end up antagonizing each other. Throughout the fall, Fr. Tribou tried different things to calm them down, to help them get along, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, by the beginning of the spring, he had had enough. He announced that that afternoon, classes would be shortened by 30 minutes and the entire school would end the day end the gym. When we got there, we found a boxing ring set up, and the two troublemakers in the middle. They had huge, oversized boxing gloves on – the kind that would allow them to swing as hard as they liked and not cause any real damage. The sight of them fighting was pretty ridiculous, and by the end of their ten rounds, they were laughing along with the rest of us.

Because we are people of free will and independent minds, it’s inevitable that we will at times find ourselves in conflict with one another. How we deal with those conflicts largely depends on their context and on the willingness of each person to sort through them. Most times, we won’t be able to solve our differences by slugging it out with someone, nor should we. We have to find more creative avenues for solving our conflicts.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is clear that he wants us as his followers to see our conflicts with one other as redefined in light of him. Our Christian discipleship guides the way in which we handle – and are willing to handle – conflicts with others. Most of Jesus’s teachings about how we are to treat others deals first with recognizing our own faults – seeing “the plank” in our own eye rather than “the splinter” in another’s. Sometimes, the analogy is even more dire – that we should settle with our opponent on the way to court lest we be handed over to the judge and then to the jailer. Jesus is clear that the Christian first approaches any conflict with an eye to themselves – what have I done that needs forgiveness, where am I at fault, where do I need to be reconciled?

In today’s Gospel (Mt 18:15-20), however, Jesus speaks what to do in the other situation – if we are the injured party. First, we have to remember how much he speaks about the importance of forgiveness. “How many times do I have to forgive?” Peter asks this question to Jesus, just as we might ask it of ourselves about a person who keeps committing offense against us. “Not seven times,” Jesus answers, “but seventy times seven.” That is, an innumerable amount of times – we forgive as often as someone sincerely asks.

Sometimes though, when another hurts us, they don’t ask for forgiveness. This is the situation addressed today by Jesus and I think it’s one that we would do well to take to heart. Jesus’s direction, of course, is not to pick up boxing gloves and slug it out with the one who has hurt us. Rather, he says that we should humbly approach the person individually and make them aware of the fact they have hurt us. Notice that Jesus does not say we should approach them to accuse them, or to make them feel bad, or to let them know how angry we are about what they’ve done. Instead, first, we’re interested only in making them aware that they have hurt us in some way.

Hopefully, that alleviates the situation. As Jesus says, “if he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” We exist as part of a family – a human family, but especially with fellow Christians in the family of God – and seeing others as fellow members of our families, as brothers and sisters, can help us remember that we should be willing to dialogue and understanding. If speaking in private doesn’t work, then we can look at bringing the matter to others, first to a few, then even to the larger community, to help the person who has wronged us see their offense. The aim through all of this is not to shame the person but to help them realize the sin they have committed, not just against us but against God.

Sadly, even this at times doesn’t always work, and Jesus envisions this scenario too. There are times when we must unfortunately treat others as “a Gentile and a tax collector.” Jews of the time would have understood these words as advice to be are wary of such people, to avoid interacting with them too much, but also to always be ready to forgive and accept them again if they repent. Forgiveness does not mean we have to let ourselves be hurt again and again; we can and must be on guard around those who have hurt us and especially those who have not recognized they have done so. But for the Christian person, we never write anyone off – we never say anyone is beyond forgiveness, not ours and not God’s.

Friends, the way of loving and of forgiving that Jesus invites us to is ultimately the way God loves and forgives us. While it might feel good to slug it out with someone who has hurt us, either literally or figuratively, it doesn’t accomplish much in the end. My old principal, Fr. Tribou, knew that – what those two guys couldn’t settle with boxing gloves they got over via laughter of the ridiculousness of their own hardheadedness. We too should be people who are openly seeking harmony – with God, with ourselves, and with each other. Remembering our own faults, being ready to forgive, addressing someone in private who has wronged us – these are the mature ways the Christian disciple handles conflict. So don’t harden your heart against the person who has hurt you – but pray for them, talk to them, if possible, and love them enough to forgive them. Because Jesus loves you in the exact same way.

A Costly Discipleship

The German philosopher and social theorist Karl Marx famously once wrote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” You’ve probably heard that quote or come across it before – maybe you’ve even heard it, as I have, from a friend or family member who wants to explain to you why they are atheist or agnostic, or maybe why they’re spiritual but not religious.

It’s no secret that organized religion has taken a popularity hit in recent years, Christianity included. Studies have shown that more and more Americans, especially among the younger millennial generation, identity when asked as “Nones” – they do not ascribe to any particular church or affiliation. The reasons for this are numerous, but certainly some acknowledgment must be made of the sentiment expressed by Karl Marx. Many look at what religion offers – including, traditional forms of Christianity – and it feels a little too convenient, too domestic. With so many causes of injustice and so many examples of suffering, religion for some can become a way of staying up in the clouds and not engaging with the realities of the world as it is.

As you might guess, I don’t agree with Karl Marx, but I do think some people do approach religion that way, even some of us Christians. We can tend to say things like “God’s in charge,” and “Everything happens for a reason,” and “Let go and let God.” These things are not necessarily untrue – but we can use them as a false panacea, a kind of therapeutic cheeriness that glosses over the real pain and suffering that does exist in the world. Whether it’s some private tragedy that we suffer at a personal or family level, or whether it’s the inexplicable devastation of something like the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, religion doesn’t explain all of our problems or make them go away.

Horace Vernet, Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem (1844)

There’s a time in every Christian's life when we feel a bit like Jeremiah in the first reading (Jer 20:7-9) today: “You have duped me, O Lord, and I have let myself be duped.” Jeremiah was called by God to preach his Word, proclaiming the sins of the Israelite people and the coming judgment for their sins. But his message, as one might expect, was not well received and he suffered great persecution because of it. Jeremiah perhaps had been under the impression that if he was faithful, if he did what God had asked of him, everything would work out fine. Instead, he finds himself abandoned by friends and neighbors, beaten and nearly murdered, and eventually arrested and put into stocks for all of Jerusalem to ridicule. In this context, he cries out to God in the words of our reading, lamenting in desperation all that he has had to sacrifice. We can relate – our faith hasn't saved us from suffering; if anything, we've suffered more because of it.

In the Gospel today (Mt 16:21-27), Jesus is very clear with his disciples what the cost of following him is. Peter, having confessed his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, as we heard in last Sunday’s reading, today takes him and aside him and rebukes him. Imagine the audacity! And yet, the reason for this rebuke is something altogether shocking to Peter, something scandalous even – that the Messiah, the Son of God, would have to suffer and die. Peter’s religious framework did not allow for that – “God forbid” it, as he says. But Jesus is not interested in religion as the way we would have it, in faith as a panacea for our problems. Instead, he says that the Christian life is one of paradox – to seek to save one’s life is to lose it, and to lose one’s life for his sake is to find it.

The mystery of the Cross – that is, the mystery of salvation that comes through Jesus’s sacrifice and death and our participation in that mystery by our own suffering – is not something that makes sense according to the way the world thinks. It does not fit the mindset of the present age, as St. Paul says; as we hear elsewhere in Scripture to many it is foolishness, a stumbling block. Even we who are Christians, who use the symbols of the cross and the crucifix as symbols, too often struggle to understand how our faith is defined by the mystery of the Cross. We end up with a watered-down Christianity, one full of platitudes and nice moral sentiments.

And yet, for 2000 years, people have heard the invitation, “Take up your Cross and follow me,” and they have responded. In every age, in every land, men and women have found in the paradox of Christianity a truth not found elsewhere – that radical love, self-sacrificial love, love in the shape of Christ’s Cross is redeeming and life-giving and world-changing. For Christians, encountering the Cross doesn’t mean finding a set of pat replies to any question we may ask; it doesn’t give us a reason to avoid realities of life and keep our head in the clouds. But what it does give, and what the world cannot give, is the grace of salvation, of true transformation which the world does not know.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

A religion that gives easy answers is rightly one we should be skeptical of, as the “Nones” well know. But what Karl Marx and others who think like him did not see, at least about Christianity, was understood well by another German thinker. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and theologian in the era of Nazi Germany, who as his country was descending into madness, was working with a group of Christians intent upon taking the Gospel seriously. He saw that it was only in Christian faith that the evils of Nazism could be combatted, and so he resisted and encouraged others to do so, a decision that eventually cost him his life.

In one of his famous works, Bonhoeffer writes that discipleship is not an offer that we make to Jesus – as if we will follow him on our terms, if our conditions are met, if it suits us. Rather, it is an offer Christ makes to us – we can take it or leave it, but the terms are clear: we must take up the Cross. As he writes, “when Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die” – that is, to die to self, to kill all the parts of oneself that do not conform to the radical love of the Cross, perhaps even that it may “cost a man his life,” as it did Bonhoeffer himself, all because from it “it gives a man the only true life.”

Friends, in the Gospel today, Jesus assures us that we will suffer if we follow him, and this at times is truly a hard thing to understand and accept. But at the end, the Cross can help us face down any evil because after it comes the Resurrection. A Christian faith that has not wrestled with suffering, and found in the Cross the possibility of redemption, has not fully matured. Jesus asks us, like Peter, not to be “Satan” – the word means “adversary” – not to be opposed to the way of grace he has given us. When we resist the message of the Cross – as too antiquated, as too difficult – then our religion might as well be the tame sentimentalism that Karl Marx decried. However, if we embrace the mystery of the Cross as the mystery of our sanctification, the way in which we work out our salvation, in the words of St. Paul, then our discipleship will lead us through the Cross to the Resurrection.

May this Eucharist which we will share in a few moments, in which we unite ourselves to the mystery of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection, be for us renewed strength – not to find easy answers in our faith – but to take up our daily Cross, mysterious as it can be, and follow our Lord.