What is it to love someone? What is it to speak the truth? What is it to be faithful to God? These are question always present to the preacher, at least the good ones. But they’re also questions for you, for any who seriously call themselves Christians.
We hear of Ezekiel, appointed “watchmen for the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 33:7). And we also hear of Christ and of his vision of a community of radical truthfulness and forgiveness, of a community in which members confront each other with the truth—not only of God’s mercy but first of the reality of sin. “Go and tell him his fault,” Jesus says (Matthew 18:15). He wanted his followers to be truthful with one other, fully truthful in all its squalor as well as its glory.
What this means for us is this, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “If the Church refuses to face the stern reality of sin, it will gain no credence when it talks of forgiveness. Such a Church sins against its sacred trust and walks unworthily of the gospel.” That is, if Christianity is to be something real for you, if the Gospel is to mean anything, then you must become the sort of person who can hear the Church’s call to repentance. You must be able to hear the priest when he talks about sin; you must hear your brother or sister when he or she confronts you about the sins which are yours. Otherwise you are not living the Christian life, only a false sentimental version of it. And that only lasts so long.
To put it in starker terms: St. Bernard of Clairvaux called our unwillingness to accept correction a certain sort of madness, like spurning a doctor’s healing hand. “What extraordinary perversity!” St. Bernard said. He said that it was the beginning of an impenitence that was also the “mother of despair,” the beginning of a woe, that if not corrected, is in the end “for eternity.” All because we stubbornly assumed we couldn’t be corrected.
Thomas Merton said, “If we follow nothing but our own natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell.” This is what happens when we do not open ourselves to sometimes brutal honesty and candid correction; we become impudent and fall away from maturity and reality. Spiritually, we become like spoiled children. Which, of course, does not end well, as Merton suggests. We become Christians, not like Christians at all, unhumble and rude.
So, dare to be truthful if you dare to be Christian. Dare to hear the truth, even when painful, even when it comes to you from the mouth of someone close to you or from the Church. Dare to be honest. Dare to repent. Because that’s the only way we can truly love each other—in the truth which is real mercy.
