14 June 2024 Matthew 5:27-32
“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go to hell.” Matthew 5:29
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you nice.” That is the Gospel according to Reader’s Digest, and doubtless the one that an astonishingly large numbers of Christians want to believe. The truth will make us popular and likeable and comfortable. Irresistible sweetness is the surest test of truth.
Flannery O’Connor was nearer the mark: “The truth will make you odd.”
The church is the only community on earth that is constituted by the confession of sin. We know who we are (viz., sinners), and what our community is for (viz., salvation from sin) by the practice of confession of sin. Confession isn’t “nice.” It forces us to face what is ugliest in us and in our communities, and if we are Catholics, it forces us to say our sins out loud to another person who is empowered by God to impart divine mercy. Confession is at least as liberating as it is uncomfortable, and we insist on it. We tell gruesome stories about plucking out eyes and cutting off hands as testimony to our seriousness. The churches that don’t insist on it are pagans in Christian disguise.
But they are “nice.”
It is the “nice” people and the “nice” churches that find true believers the most odd. In his novel The Brothers K, James David Duncan tells the story about the Chance family, and particularly Irwin Chance, who had allegedly gone crazy in Vietnam. His craziness was due to his inability to do as his brothers had done, namely lose his faith. Irwin’s trouble began when he refused to kill a young Vietnamese boy who had been taken prisoner after setting booby traps that killed U.S. soldiers. Irwin recognized that this enemy was a killer, but he was still just a boy, so Irwin attacked his commanding officer instead. Irwin was put in the brig where he sang hymns and prayed out loud, which was considered “psychotic behavior,” and he was ordered to receive electric shock therapy to restore his obviously unbalanced mind.
It was considered the “nice” thing to do.
Before the treatments were to begin, Irwin’s fallen-away brother came to Irwin’s church, interrupting the preacher’s sermon with his own, to plead for help for his brother whom he loved:
And the reason I came here, to Irwin’s God’s house, is that his trouble started here. I’m not trying to place blame by saying that. This whole situation is a compliment to the staying power of what gets taught here, really. Irwin, after he left here, kept on keeping your faith up till the day he was unfairly drafted. And every letter we got from him was a Christian letter – the letter of a man who couldn’t begin to reconcile Thou shalt not kill or Love thy neighbor with the duties of a soldier. He’s still yours, Irwin is. That’s the crux of all I’m saying. He still loves this place…. But I feel I must say to You, Irwin’s dear God, that if somebody in this house doesn’t hear our family’s cry, if somebody isn’t moved, not by me but by You, to sacrifice some time and thought and energy for Irwin’s sake, then his mind, his love for You, his belief in this House, are going to be destroyed…. And for the first time in my life, I hope it’s Irwin, not me, who’s right about this place.
When the chips are down, as eventually for us all they are always down, nobody yearns for someone, some church that is merely “nice.” We want true believers in all their heroic oddness to roar in with rosaries blazing to say the things that only they can say to restore hope and vision. They can do that because they have become experts at odd practices like confession, adoration, and prayer. They can do that because they have learned to prefer odd to “nice.”
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