IN
EXILE
By
Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Wonder
of incarnation is that we can do for each other what Jesus did for us
Twenty-eight years ago, when
I first began writing this column, I wrote a piece I entitled Binding
and Loosing inside the Body of Christ. Among all the things I’ve
ever written, I have probably received the most feedback on this.
What is the concept? How
can we bind and loose each other inside the Body of Christ? Here are
the essential lines:
Imagine you are a parent
who has a child who no longer goes to church, no longer prays, no longer
observes the church’s moral commandments, no longer respects your
faith and is perhaps even openly agnostic or atheistic. What can you
do?
You can continue to pray
for them and you can live out your own faith convictions, hoping that
the example of your life will have power where your words are ineffectual.
You can do that, but you can do more:
You can continue to love and forgive them and insofar as they receive that love and forgiveness they are receiving love and forgiveness from God.
Your touch is God’s
touch. Since you are part of the Body of Christ, when you
touch them Christ is touching them. When you love them Christ is loving
them. When you forgive them Christ is forgiving them because your touch
is the church’s touch.
Part of the wonder of the
incarnation is the astonishing fact that we can do for each other what
Jesus did for us. Jesus gives us that power: Whatever you bind on earth
will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed
in heaven. . . . Whose sins you forgive they are forgiven.
If you are part of the Body
of Christ, when you forgive someone, he or she is forgiven. If you love
someone, he or she is being loved by Christ because the Body of Christ
is not just the body of Jesus but is also the body of believers. To
be touched, loved and forgiven by a member of the body of believers
is to be touched, loved and forgiven by Christ. Hell is possible only
when someone has put himself completely out of the range of love and
forgiveness so as to render himself incapable of being loved and forgiven.
And this is not so much a question of rejecting explicit religious or
moral teaching as it is of rejecting love as it is offered among the
community of the sincere.
Put more simply:
If someone whom you love
strays from the church in terms of faith practice and morality, as long
as you continue to love that person and hold him or her in love and
forgiveness, he or she is touching the “hem of Christ’s
garment,” is being held to the Body of Christ and is being forgiven
by God, irrespective of his or her official external relationship to
the church. How?
They are touching the Body of Christ because your touch is Christ’s
touch.
When you touch someone, unless
that person actively rejects your love and forgiveness, he or she is
relating to the Body of Christ. And this is true even beyond death.
If someone close to you dies in a state which, externally at least,
has him or her at odds with the visible church, your love and forgiveness
will continue to bind that person to the Body of Christ and will continue
to offer forgiveness to that individual, even after death.
G.K. Chesterton once expressed this in a parable: “A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded.
His priest also went and
argued: ‘He was not really a bad fellow; given time he would have
matured. Let him out, please!’ The gate remained stubbornly shut
against all their voices. Finally his mother came; she did not beg for
his release. Quietly, and with a strange catch in her voice, she said
to Satan: ‘Let me in.’ Immediately the great doors swung
open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell
and there redeems the dead.”
In the incarnation, God takes
on human flesh: in Jesus, in the eucharist and in all who are sincere
in faith. The incredible power and mercy that came into our world in
Jesus is still with us, at least if we choose to activate it. We are
the Body of Christ. What Jesus did for us, we can do for each other.
Our love and forgiveness are the cords that connect our loved ones to
God, to salvation and to the community of saints, even when they are
no longer walking the path of explicit faith.
Too good to be true? Yes,
surely. But how else to describe the mystery of the incarnation!
Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website: www.ronrolheiser.com.
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