Advent Travels: Relationship All the Way Down

Nancy reminded me when I mentioned this Advent writing project that whenever two or more gather in Jesus’s name, Jesus is with them. Historically, this is understood in ecclesial terms. We gather in and as a church which both keeps Jesus and makes him accessible (on terms and contions it sets as Jesus’s keeper).

But in the Matthean text in which that promise appears, it’s less about ecclesiology and more about justice. How do we judge another? How do administer judgment in a way that binds us as community?

Matthew’s Jesus walks us through a series of escalating approaches to judgment which culminate in treating the sinner the same way we would treat a pagan or a tax collector, e.g., they aren’t one of us. There’s the door, don’t let it hit you on the way out.

The promise is, if at least two of us gather in Jesus’s name to condemn a brother or sister, we can rest assured Jesus shares in both the judgment and the disposition.

Which, of course, is silly. There is no historical basis for arguing that Jesus excluded anybody, and lots of evidence – across multiple academic disciplines – that his practice was radically inclusive, which accounts for its popularity among marginalized people. Women, especially, were drawn to it.

(Writing exercise: what would a “radically inclusive” practice like that look like today? Who would it appeal to most? And, why aren’t we practicing that inclusivity?)

This inclusivity accounts for why – as the Jesus movement spread and became popular – local ruling classes (political, religious, economic) – worked so hard to coopt the movement and water down the message, culminating in the tragedy of the First Council of Nicea. Matthew is obviously putting words in Jesus’s mouth that serve Matthew’s objectives, not Jesus’s. Not Love’s.

But what interests me is less repairing the Matthean (and Nicean) confusion around that promise, and more reflecting on why we have chosen to reinterpret that phrase of Jesus against its theological and historical context.

In other words, Nancy was wrong in a literal sense but right in a much deeper and more helpful sense (which of course she knows).

I first heard the “two or more” phrase in a memorable way in Captain and Tenille’s “Wedding Song,” which includes these lyrics:

The union of your spirits here
has caused him to remain
For whenever two or more of you
are gathered in his name
There is love, there is love

I’m not defending the song so much as pointing out a popular example of a radical revision of the Matthean text. “Two more more” is about feeling the love of Jesus when we pair up in His name. It’s not about finding a rationale to kick someone we don’t like off the island.

And the revision is what most of us think about when we think about that line from Jesus.

It’s as if, on some level, we intuitively understand that Jesus would never condemn a brother or sister and would never endorse a community rule that privileges one person or group of persons over another.

For Jesus, Love was decentralized because God the Father both had all of it and gave all of it. The invitation he made was to see how this was true and then consent to be changed by that seeing so that Love might continue to extend more broadly and less conditionally.

That was the gift the Holy Spirit offered: to see the Lord and be remade in the Divine Image, effectively by realizing that Creation does not abide the judgment by which distinctions arise. Which is a paradox, right? There is no “image” of the Lord because you can only make an image through exclusion and God does not abide exclusion. As I said recently, the Pietà is not only the shape we see, but also what we don’t see, without which, no shape could exist at all.

What both has, and cannot ever have, form?

It’s helpful to see clearly that a body can’t not judge. A mind can’t not judge. You’re doing it right now and so am I. Bodies and minds world build. They make shit up.

Which is not a crime against God or nature! But there is another way, one that leads to peace and happiness for all of us.

That other way begins when we are faced – as in Matthew’s fear-based dogma, the bland legality of Nicea and the overwrought cry for help that is A Course in Miracles – with separation, and clumsily but surely stumble in the other direction towards Love.

We are so beautiful – we are so so beautiful – and I love us so much.

We really are lovers, not fighters. Peace, not conflict, is our mode. The kids are right – Netflix and chill is the way. But we only know this when we come together! We have to do the work of being able to join, we have to do the work of joining, and we have to do the work of sustaining and nurturing the resultant union.

It’s relationship all the way down.

It’s not Jesus who shows up when we gather in his name. It’s us. We remember who we are when we gather in Jesus’s name. And what we are together pierces the illusion of separate interests, and unifies what is held apart in the mistaken belief that existence is contingent on exclusion and division.

Today, in Advent, I remember the way we are together Christ.

Seven / Nine