Jack Pelham

Let me be blunt: I submit that the following passage in Jesus’ teaching is widely disobeyed in the churches―and probably by your church, too. Read the following passage carefully, and then ask yourself whether this is your regular habit whenever someone sins against you, or it is is rather something you do only occasionally.

¹⁵ “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. ¹⁶ But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. ¹⁷ If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Jesus. Matthew 18:15-17. ESV.

Let us notice these four successive steps here, prescribed by Jesus in the hope that the first step alone will suffice:

It will surprise him to learn that among the things
Of which he robustly disapproves in this world,
Are some of the righteous things of God.

He didn’t realize it,
But as much of his doctrine
Had come from his own culture
Of psychological coping
As from the Bible.

And he would never realize
How much he had twisted it
Simply to make himself feel safer.

America has partied herself to death.
And I don’t mean with drugs and alcohol,
But with donkeys and elephants, mostly,
And all the pundits and labels that go with it.

It rarely happens,
But I do meet some
From time to time
Who can put a finger
Accurately on the lion’s share
Of what ails this country.
But not one in ten of those
Seem to have any real idea of
What it will take to
Make things right.

It seems they are so readily lost
When in the business of
Calculating so grand a total.

He does not know how to make a point,
But only how to hint at one,
After which he may tell himself,
If he pleases,
That those who don’t get it
Just don’t get it.

Having done a good thing,
He may impatiently wish it to be celebrated
As the summary of his life,
Though it was, in fact,
Just one moment of millions
In an unwieldy saga,
So lengthy as to make dubious
Any particular snapshot
As a proper icon for its cover.

You can make a new rule
Every time some blockhead
Transgresses common sense
Or common decency
And fouls things up.

He’s long been pretty sure that the other party is incorrigible,
So he was glad to join this one.
But if he’s like most, he’ll invest a lot of years in this party
Without ever realizing that it has its own incorrigibilities,
And is not the champion of goodness he had assumed.

He had only cared enough in the beginning
To ask whether this party is better,
And did not care enough to ask
Whether it is good enough.

I must have missed that memo from Jesus to the Christians―long revered and frequently alluded to (though strangely, never cited)―where he tells them that they must passively put up with the nonsense of others, and where he explains abashedly that he himself has since learned better than how he lived while he was here.

If I ever find a copy, though, you can bet that I’ll post it right here.