This blog follows the daily bible readings of the Catholic Church

Reading 1, Ezekiel 9:1-7; 10:18-22

1 Then he shouted loudly for me to hear, ‘The scourges of the city are approaching, each carrying his weapon of destruction!’ 2 Immediately six men advanced from the upper north gate, each holding a deadly weapon. Among them was a man dressed in linen, with a scribe’s ink-horn in his belt. They came in and halted in front of the bronze altar.

3 The glory of the God of Israel rose from above the winged creature where it had been, towards the threshold of the Temple. He called to the man dressed in linen with a scribe’s ink-horn in his belt 4 and the Lord said to him, ‘Go all through the city, all through Jerusalem, and mark a cross on the foreheads of all who grieve and lament over all the loathsome practices in it.’5 I heard him say to the others, ‘Follow him through the city and strike. Not one glance of pity; show no mercy; 6 old men, young men, girls, children, women, kill and exterminate them all. But do not touch anyone with a cross on his forehead. Begin at my sanctuary.’ So they began with the old men who were in the Temple.7 He said to them, ‘Defile the Temple; fill the courts with corpses; then go out!’ They went out and hacked their way through the city.

18 The glory of Yahweh then came out over the Temple threshold and paused over the winged creatures. 19 These raised their wings and rose from the ground as I watched, and the wheels were beside them. They paused at the entrance to the east gate of the Temple of Yahweh, with the glory of the God of Israel over them, above. 20 This was the winged creature I had seen beneath the God of Israel by the River Chebar; I knew that they were winged creatures. 21 Each had four faces and four wings and what seemed to be human hands under their wings. 22 Their faces were like those I had seen by the River Chebar. Each one moved straight forward.

American Idol

These extracts are from a very packed narrative dealing with a) punishment for worshipping idols in the Temple at Jerusalem b) the departure of God’s glory or presence from both Temple and City. This vision of Ezekiel leaves no doubt that idolatry will be punishable by death. The scene mimics the Exodus, when the children of Israel are spared death because their doorposts are marked with blood: here they are mostly killed because their foreheads are not marked with the Hebrew letter Tau (not “cross”).  God’s holy nature cannot permit the worship of idols. Perhaps this prophecy was made around 590 BCE. Doubtless the editors of it saw the vision as fulfilled in the destruction of temple and city by the Babylonians in 585 BCE. Ezekiel has a visceral horror of idolatry which could be valuable to a society whose media encourage it. The constant parade of idols of sport, fashion, music, celebrity is one of the distracting devices of unjust societies.

Gospel, Matthew 18:15-20

15 ‘If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. 16 If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you: whatever the misdemeanour, the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to sustain the charge. 17 But if he refuses to listen to these, report it to the community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a gentile or a tax collector. 18 ‘In truth I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 ‘In truth I tell you once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.’

Jesus commands a very different way of dealing with offenders. The community of believers is entrusted with responsibility for “binding and loosing” that is, for leaving a person in the power of evil or delivering him from it. An offender is to be given every chance of submitting to correction before being treated as a “gentile or tax-collector, that is, as an unbeliever who requires conversion. Expulsion from the community is the ultimate punishment, as it leaves the offender “bound” by evil.

Jesus words give great responsibility to the church community: God trusts it to interpret his will, because his Son, Jesus, is present amongst them.

where two or three...

The interpretation of this teaching of Jesus in the use of excommunication by the Roman or Calvinist churches is not encouraging, but neither is the utter absence of discipline in many other churches today. The crucial elements in Jesus’ command are these:

1. Discipline is only for members of the community; it does not apply to anyone else
2. It must be based on established fact and standards.
3. Its purpose is to free the offender from evil, and to restore him to fellowship.
4. Expulsion is the very last resort, but is preferable to pretending that all is well when it is not.

A pervasive moral sloppiness in many church communities finds any discipline unacceptable. We need the humour of Groucho Marx, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that accepted the likes of me as a member.”