Love the sinner, love the sin

    Christians like to say, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but as I see it, this is not the attitude of Jesus or the desert monks of the early Church.

     Augustine said to “strive to make everyone a friend.”  So if we are to love everyone around us, without partiality, how are we to love those around us that are living in the vices as listed in the Scriptures?  Theologians call this the area of orthopraxy, right action, versus orthodoxy, right belief.  I discovered an amazing example of the “orthopraxy” of love in the example of the desert monks of the early church when I was writing a paper for my Nashotah Church History class, so I’m just basically going to cut and paste from it a bit. (Please forgive its length and all the footnotes.)

     As Archbishop Rowan Williams states in Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, “the desert wisdom teaches rather than preaches. Its authority is experiential, not theoretical.”[1] At its peak in the early fourth century, it is believed that ten thousand men and twenty thousand women were desert monastics.[2] The benefits received by the Church from their foundational insights—of which the communion they held with each other was key—are immeasurable.

     The famous desert monastic John Colobos (339-409) saw the imperative to love one’s neighbor in even stronger terms than one finds in the biblical texts themselves. He said to his disciples,

‘A house is not built by beginning at the top and working down. You must begin with the foundations in order to reach the top.’ When they asked him what he meant by this, he said, ‘The foundation is our neighbor, whom we must win, and that is the place to begin. For all the commandments of Christ depend on this one (Mt 22:39-40).’[3]

     This seems a motto for life that stems from the earliest of the desert monastic teachers, Anthony of the Desert (251–356). Athanasius in his Life of Anthony quotes Anthony saying: “Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.”[4] Whereas today we often consider the commandment to love your neighbor as the “second commandment,” to the desert monastics “love of neighbor” was most often described simply as “the commandment” or “the law.”[5]

     And they not only spoke as if they believed this, they also lived as if Christ was in others. When John Cassian, the author of Conferences of the Fathers, went to visit an old man in Egypt and was offered hospitality and food, he asked him why he did not keep the “rule of fasting.” The old man replied,

Fasting is always (at) hand but you I cannot have with me always (Jn 12:8) …. Thus receiving Christ in you (Mt 25), I ought to serve you with all diligence, but when I have taken leave of you, I can resume the rule of fasting again. For ‘can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?’[6]  The old man saw his visitors as if his Lord Himself was there with him and then explained to them that “whenever you appear the wedding feast of Christ is here.”[7]

Saint Anthony of the Desert similarly teaches, “Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God … You become a place where God happens.”[8] Archbishop Williams notes, “You ‘flee’ to the desert not to escape neighbors but to grasp more fully what the neighbor is—the way of life for you, to the degree that you put yourself at their disposal in connecting them with God.”[9] This helps make better sense of their voluntary self-denials: their ascesis assisted them in overcoming that in themselves that was an obstacle to the connection between God and their neighbor.[10]

     For the desert monastics “sin is healed by solidarity, by identification.”[11] They individually kept their own sin and neediness tearfully before their eyes to help them empathize with others and to be better able to extend Christ’s absolute mercy and gentleness. They forgave others that they might be forgiven.[12] A brother once questioned Abba Poemen, saying, “‘If I see my brother sinning should I hide the fact?’ The old man said, ‘At the moment when we hide a brother’s fault, God hides our own. At the moment we reveal a brother’s fault, God reveals our own.’”[13]

     Their solidarity in dealing with sin is also witnessed in this example: “Once, when two brothers were at market, one of them ‘fell’ into fornication and was so ashamed of what he had done that he refused at first to return to his cell with the other brother.” But the other persisted and “wishing to win him over said to him, ‘The same thing happened to me too…come, let us go and do strict penance and God will forgive us.’ … Then one of the brothers did penance for the other as though he had sinned himself.”[14] Douglas Burton-Christie, author of The Word in the Desert, recognizes, “the willingness to ‘be with’ another in an experience of suffering and to redeem that person through this action is one of the most striking aspects of the practice of compassion found in the desert.”[15] In contrast to today’s often individualistic religious practice, the desert monastics saw that their approach to God was communal and that to approach Him, they needed to go together.

     Okay. So the example and words of the desert monastics help us to better understand what Jesus did for us (see this post I wrote around Easter). Jesus healed sin by solidarity, by identification with it. He said, “I’m sinful (though He wasn’t). I’ll do the penance for you.” Likewise, as we are called to befriend and love every person, we will befriend those who sin against God and who will sin against us, but by the power of the Holy Spirit we can “love the sinner, love the sin” or, another way to say it would be, we can “love the sinner, own the sin” to bring Christ’s transformation to them. We’re not untruthful—just willing to “be with” tax-collectors and sinners and want to keep that relationship with them as long as they are willing.

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[1]Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another  (Boston: New Seeds Books, 2005), 1.

[2]Ibid., 128.

[3]Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 264.

[4]Williams, Where God Happens, 13. Emphasis mine.

[5]Burton-Christie, Word in the Desert, 262.

[6]Ibid., 263.

[7]Ibid., 263.

[8]Williams, Where God Happens, 24.

[9]Ibid., 33.

[10]Ibid., 32.

[11]Ibid., 31.

[12]Ibid., 30.

[13]Ibid., 21.

[14]Burton-Christie, Word in the Desert, 287.

[15]Ibid.