Just before his death, so the story goes, Saint Augustine excommunicated himself.
The bishop and saint, doctor of the Church, father of western theology and civilization: in the final days of his life, he joined the sanctioned wrong-doers of his community, putting himself in the locus paenitentiae, the place of penitents, alongside those who couldn’t, because of their sins, receive communion. This holy and learned bishop, this saint, identified himself with sinners. Pope Benedict XVI said of it, “He wanted to meet his Lord in the humility of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”[1] That’s how he wanted to die—with them, with the sinners, the supposed worst of his community.
It’s an act hardly comprehensible today, for anybody much less a bishop. Most of us I imagine would like to end on a high note, our spiritual and moral accounts clearly balanced. We want to get right with the Lord, and as publicly as possible, so as to remove any doubt. To join the exiled, the excommunicated, the public shameful company of sinners, why would anyone do that? It hardly makes sense, as I said; wallowing with the worst, stepping out of the sanctuary, just when you’ve finally made it, when you’re finally holy.
Yet Augustine’s self-excommunication, strange as we may think it, was an act born from the very heart of the Christian faith, born of the central paradox of God’s love. Augustine did what God did; he identified himself with sinners, joining them in company and fellowship, counting himself one of them. More than mere liberal tolerance or acceptance, which are together merely the patronizing charade of love, God actually became human, taking on the form of the servant, emptying himself, as Paul said.[2] Jesus not only dined with sinners and loved them, he did more. To quote Paul again (at his most theologically scandalous), Christ “became sin” so that we might “become righteousness.”[3]
And it’s love Jesus took to the extreme—his identification with us, his becoming one of us. Paul put it rather nicely saying that Christ died for the “ungodly” while we were still “helpless,” but it was a more brutal thing than that.[4] Christ identified himself so much with us, so much with our sinfulness, that not only did he die as a criminal, he felt within his own divine self God’s abandonment, feeling what you and I ought to feel because of our rejection of God. “My God…why have you forsaken me?” he cried from the cross, so one with us he nearly tears himself apart.[5] “God bereft of God that He might save those who have sinned against God.”[6]
That’s what Augustine was doing putting himself with sinners at the end of his life. He was imitating Christ, loving his people the way God loved him. And it is, as I said, the heart of our Christian faith, the central paradox of God’s love. It’s God’s “Strange calculation;” it’s just “how the books are kept with God,” to quote the great poet, Charles Péguy.[7]
And it’s the love we see by the side of the well in today’s gospel. Again, to quote the poet Péguy, “He put himself in the circumstances of needing us.”[8] Or as Augustine said of this passage, “For you was Jesus weary from the journey…Jesus is weak and strong…The strength of Christ created you, the weakness of Christ recreated you.”[9] What we see here simply and beautifully—if we’re not so smart and sophisticated that we’re blind to it—is the love of Jesus, his love for a sinful woman, his love for me and his love for you; no matter she’s done, and no matter what you’ve done either.
This, really, is the hardest thing for us to believe, not the existence of God, but that God would still love us, even after all this. Yet it’s true; the word of God speaks it. Our God loves us, and he still does. We just need to open our eyes to it, our hearts. It’s not that God isn’t there, it’s that we’re so angry, so addicted, so saddened by it all that we’re blinded to the God sitting there right next to us, loving us, waiting to hold us, to heal us. Like Christ to Jerusalem just before his death, so he to us: would that I could have gathered you to me, but you would not.[10] His patience waits for us. That is the secret, the opportunity of Lent. Christ by the well, Christ by the confessional, waiting for you.
But of course, it means more. Yes, God loves us. Christ became one of us. And it’s a love that is endless. But it’s also a love that should move us, make us love like God, love others the way we’re loved. The woman at the well ran off to tell others about Christ.[11] Augustine identified himself with the sinners of his community. The best of us love our enemies, love those radically different than us.
This is partly what Pope Francis meant when he said, “The Church must step outside herself…To the outskirts of existence.”[12] We must love sinners, love our enemies—really love them. We must even be willing to identify ourselves with them just as Christ identified himself with us. We must, to put it the way Bonhoeffer did, enter into the communion of the confession of guilt, loving others so much we want their sin and their punishment to come upon us and not them, for their salvation because we love them so much, sometimes even more than they love themselves.[13] We must become their friends, serve them, practice inexhaustible charity towards them, even our worst enemies. As Dr. King said once, “Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you…Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.” “We shall meet your physical force with soul force.”[14] This is the sort of love that Christians can offer the world once they finally realize how much God loves them. And it’s the only sort of love that can make a difference. Everything else is fleeting and fake, not even love at all. Only this love is real, the love willing to suffer, even for those you hate.
And that’s the hard question and the challenge for you and me today. Can you love like that? When you see your enemy, when you see sinners unlike you, do you think about that score yet to be settled, or about the judgment when God will finally sort them out, prove them wrong; or do you beg for the love it’ll take to make them your brother or sister, which is the only love that could convert them? Praying to God, have you ever asked to suffer on behalf of the person you hate? That’s what God did for you. And it’s the question we’ll be asked when we stand before God when it’s all said and done.
Think about it: that’s what our judgment will be. “Why did you think you couldn’t love the way I loved you?” he’ll ask us. That’ll be the question. And it’ll be the moment we realize how foolish all our hatred was, what a waste of time it all was.
That’s why we need to find the well again, and the Christ waiting for us there. Amen.
[1] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 86
[2] Philippians 2:7
[3] 2 Corinthians 5:21 paraphrase
[4] Romans 5:6
[5] Matthew 27:46 passim
[6] Lesslie Newbigin, Signs Amid the Rubble, 43
[7] Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 86
[8] Ibid., 85
[9] Augustine, Homily 15.6
[10] Matthew 23:37
[11] John 4:28
[12] Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy, 99
[13] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 110-116
[14] Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 56
© 2020 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
