Can the Church Evict Jesus?

No, but it can certainly try to.

This morning I read this post on a friend's blog that he had written in response to this article from the New York Times. The article tells the story of a Catholic hospital that ordered an abortion to save the mother's life. The Catholic church excommunicated the nun that made the decision and cut ties with the hospital (a step which stops the hospital chapel from saying mass). The author of the article called it "evicting Jesus" and said that the Catholic church has lost the compassion that Christ so championed.

My friend's post disagreed with the author of the article. He uses Matthew 25:41 to make a point that Jesus wasn't all about compassion, and the church has a right to punish those who sin.

The problem with his use of this verse is that he didn't keep going. In Matthew 25:41 Jesus says this:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Sounds pretty judgy and compassionless, right? Well, this is the parable of the sheep and the goats, which happens to be my favorite passage in all of the Gospels. If you keep reading you find out why Jesus was so hard on those goats. Verses 42-43 say:

For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.

This passage is about compassion for other people. The goats were damned because they didn't have compassion.

So yes, Christ says we will be judged for our actions. But does He ever tell us to judge each other? No, in fact he says the opposite. The final judge is God.

Did Jesus ever punish anyone while he was on earth? No, you won't see Jesus sending someone to Hell in the Gospels. He did send people away from him, but usually it was because they were too stuck on rules, or they cared more about money than people or following Him. In fact, Jesus went out of his way to stop people from stoning that prostitute (a woman that would certainly be ostracized in the Catholic church. Most churches, as a matter of fact).

He also didn't tell the church to punish people by trying to sever their ties with God. He told Peter, the guy he was going to build His church on, to feed his sheep, not try and make them stay inside their pen. He wants the church and its members to have compassion to all of his sheep, including, but not limited to, the broken and downtrodden, and certainly the sinners.

I'm not going to try and pass judgement on the whole abortion situation. I wasn't there, and I wouldn't have known what was going on if I had been. But I do know that that decision that the nun, and other hospital employees, had to make was probably one of the hardest decisions of her life and that she is going to have to live with it for the rest of her life, especially now that her calling, her life, has been taken away from her. Even if she is judged by God for that decision, He sent Jesus to earth for the exact purpose of forgiving the sins of His people, even if the church doesn't. That's the verdict: forgiveness.

Of course the church can't evict Jesus - he's everywhere- but it can turn people away from Him. Fortunately, there are others working very hard to bring those people back. As the New York Times article quotes,

"Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph’s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying.”

Hallelujah.

What do you think?