Anticipating Sin, Restoring Justice

A history professor at the University of Wyoming has written a book about the penitentials. Erin Abraham’s book “Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society” digs up the sins of the past and how the church dealt with them.”

The book is priced at 105 dollars on Amazon so I have read only the review in the Laramie Boomerang. The book is a study of what was known as the penitentials, small books describing sin and the penalties for sin in the 6^th through the 9^th centuries. These were guidebooks used by priests to determine the appropriate punishment for specific sins. 

The penitentials offered a concise list of potential sins and the penalty each carried. Eating unconsecrated meat, what we might call “road kill,” would land you a sentence of living on bread and water for four months. A priest who lost a holy item had to serve seven days of penance.

If any bishop slays someone, for example, he is to forfeit his orders and fast 12 years, 7 on bread and water, and for 5 years he may partake of food for only 3 days each week.

Professor Abraham took a deeper look than before at these penitentials and she has discovered that they were not arbitrary but were actually about restorative justice. In other words, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which is often misunderstood as brutally violent but was always about imposing a penalty commensurate with the offense.

One of Professor Abraham’s conclusions about these medieval rule books is that they had more to do with imposing greater responsibility on those to whom more had been given. The more you have been blessed, the greater the penalty for failing to serve the needs of others. The more you’ve been blessed, the greater the penalty for doing harm to those who have less.

Abraham found that the penitentials dealt more harshly with the rich than the poor, more harshly with adults than children. They dealt more severe punishments to those to whom more had been given, thus more expected.

It was not about how much or how little money one had. It was about knowledge. Those old enough to know better were treated differently from children. Bishops and priests and highly educated lay people, those with responsibility to others, were held to a higher standard.

When those to whom much is given mess up, it affects not only them but sets a terrible example for those who look up to them. The whole idea behind the penitentials was that when we mess up or sin, we don’t only do harm to ourselves. Unlike tax breaks for the wealthy, our sins actually do trickle down to those who look up to us.

The writers of the penitentials worried about the strong taking advantage of the weak, of the rich taking advantage of the poor, of the privileged taking advantage of the under-privileged.

Where have we heard that before? We read it first in the Bible Jesus read, the Old Testament, what Jesus called the Torah. And there it is in this morning’s reading from the book of the prophet Ezekiel.

Ezekiel was a prophet and a priest. His ministry began before the conquest of Judah in 587 BC, and continued into the exile in Babylon. This book is the foundation for both Jewish and Christian visionary or apocalyptic literature. The prophet's message to the exiles is clear. If their lives are to be restored, they must revolve around justice. He assures his hearers of God's abiding presence among them, and he emphasizes God's involvement in the events of the day, so that Israel and all nations "will know that I am the Lord.” Ezekiel allows us to see the importance of the individual in his or her relationship to God. To a dispersed and discouraged people, he brings a message of hope and that message of hope is found in this morning’s reading from Ezekiel 34.

As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered,” says Ezekiel using the words given him by God, “so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.  ¹⁵ I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God.¹⁶ I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.

There it is. To whom much is given, much is expected. The weak will be strengthened, “the fat and the strong, I will destroy.” How does Ezekiel say they will be destroyed? Not by sword but by feeding them justice.

Ezekiel turns an oracle of judgment against the wealthy oppressors of the people into a vision of hope for all, based on justice for all. Ezekiel gives us the image of what a good shepherd means to the people. Jesus uses this image in his parable of the judgment in Matthew 25.

Matthew 25, what is “the parable of the sheep and the goats” or “the judgment parable.” Maybe we could think of this as “the parable of the ultimate penitential.” The painting on the front of your bulletin sets the scene. Jesus sits on his throne and it’s a moment for clarification. Lives have been lived. It’s time to determine whether they had any meaning.

As this scene opens, Jesus has been teaching, telling parables, but his ministry is at an end and Jerusalem and the cross will now occupy Matthew’s narrative. As the next chapter opens, Jesus tells his disciples, “The son of man must now be handed over to be crucified.”

Allan Aubrey Boesak is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric and politician. He was an anti-apartheid activist, who, like his colleague Nelson Mandela spent too much time in a South African prison. Boesak would be speaking from that experience when he tells us what he sees in “the least of these” verses of Matthew 25.

He sees Christ QUOTE standing where God stands, sharing the pain and the destitution of the poor, feeling the pain of their exclusion.” He says the parable of the sheep and the goats requires us to assess the depths of the pits from which the poor are yearning to be heard.

It’s unsettling whenever the lectionary asks that I preach on a passage so familiar to you all as Matthew 25. What more can be said about the day of judgment when Jesus divides those who fed the hungry, visited the prisoner, housed the homeless, gave drink to those who thirst from those who didn’t and explains dramatically, that which you did or didn’t do for the least of these you likewise did or didn’t do to me.

But…I thought, it begins with Jesus placing some on his right-hand side, where you want to be…and others on his left-hand side, which is never good. Having separated the goats from the sheep, “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”

Jesus turns his attention to those on the left. “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” 

Jesus is sorting folks at the day of judgment as we have sorted folks during our lifetimes. We sort people into groups that look like us and those who don’t, into groups of people who think like us and those who don’t, who speak the way we do and those who don’t, who worship like we do and those who don’t.

It is the ultimate form of justice that on that day, Jesus does the sorting, not as judgment, but Jesus sorts us between those who were able to see the face of Christ in the hungry, homeless, naked, ill and imprisoned and those who could not…not as a judgment but as a penitential seeking to restore justice through God’s grace in asking more of those to whom more has been given? What if we tried to shoehorn a bit of the grace of God in between the words of this old passage?

When those on his left asked, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you? And those on his right said, “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and minister to you?

And Jesus answered saying, “Whether you did it or failed to do it for the least of these you chose to do it for me or chose not to do it for me because when you looked upon those in need and made your choice, you were seeing me in their faces.”

I am reading a biography of one of the modern-day prophets, Caesar Chavez. Wonderful story; wonderful human being of whom his biographer said, “He never let his one life get between him and serving others. That is what the parable of the judgment asks of us.

Living is about serving, serving is about restoring justice.

That is what those Medieval penitentials were about…not crime and punishment but re-creating the world God intended, a world where justice denied becomes justice restored by finding the face of Christ where we least expect it or as Ezekiel said, by destroying injustice by feeding it enough justice.  AMEN