Don't Be A Donatist

“Don’t Be a Donatist”
By The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

Matthew 26.31-35

Then Jesus said to them, ‘You will all become deserters because of me this night; for it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.” 
But after I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee.’ Peter said to him, ‘Though all become deserters because of you, I will never desert you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I tell you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.’ Peter said to him, ‘Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.’ And so said all the disciples.     

The chances are very high that everyone in this room at some point in your life has been offended.  There is always the chance of an outlier, but in all probability most everyone here has been insulted or spoken to in a way that is rude or been treated in a less than kind way and you got offended.  What is also true is that if the feeling of offence was intense, something reaching the level of being "deeply offended" the offender was a friend a family member a long-time acquaintance, someone important to you.  And this last bit is very important when you try to understand what it means to be offended.

Being offended, getting your nose bent, can look like and feel like anger.  For someone to be angry and to be offended can look a lot like the other.  But anger and offence are different.  The main difference is that anger begins in a myriad of triggers, or buttons.  When you talk to people who are angry, or better yet, after they are no longer angry, usually you can find the trigger, the button, what it is that sets people down the path of anger.  And these buttons can be people, circumstances, things, ideas even.  Offence is the opposite.  It only has one possible source: it is about people and the way we lose trust in people, in one another.

In this way offence is a lot like betrayal.  Betrayal has the curious requirement of friendship and love and trust.  A stranger, an enemy, an acquaintance can't betray you.  They can't because what is betrayed is love and trust.  A stranger cannot betray you because you don't share love with a stranger. Offence is much the same, it needs to have some sort of connection, some sort of expectation or definition that is torn apart when we get offended.  I can't believe you would say that.  I don't know who you are any more.  That you would do that to me?  This is close to the place of being deeply offended and you can probably see how close that is to betrayal. 

Yet, betrayal, unlike offence, has a reality all its own.  When a spouse is unfaithful, this is not offensive, this is an act of infidelity. When someone lies or steals, and in doing so injures others, this is not a matter of poorly chosen words or a lack of civility, but misdeed.  When someone breaks a trust in this way, betrayal is an appropriate feeling.  You betrayed my trust.  Offence is close to this, but it is very far as well.

Betrayal is the poor choice others made that injures you; offence is the choice you make.  You may feel forced into being offended, "how could I not take offence?"  Or you might feel like you have a right to be offended and thus the choice is justified.  But the biggest difference between offence and betrayal is a matter of who it is making the choice.  When you are betrayed, someone made a bad choice that hurts you.  When you are offended, it is your choice to be such.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote a little book called, Training in Christianity.  He wrote it in 1850 under the pen-name Anti-Climacus.  Like all his works Training in Christianity is wild and enigmatic, genius and painfully ironic. The focus of the book is something Jesus said to the disciples of John the Baptist.  John was in prison, about to die, and he sent word to Jesus asking if indeed he was the Messiah or if he was an impostor.

Word had gotten to John the Baptist that Jesus ate with tax collectors and consorted with prostitutes; he was, so the rumor claimed, a drunkard and a glutton.  For John, this was not acceptable for someone who is the Messiah.  John the Baptist, who told Jesus, I am not worthy to untie your shoe, John the Baptist was wavering in his trust of Jesus, his confidence was shaky, and he wanted Jesus to reassure him.

What Jesus says in response is the focus of Kierkegaard's book.  Jesus tells the disciples, report to your teacher the lame walk, the blind see, the hungry are fed and the poor hear the good news. And, blessed is the one who is not offended in me."  Blessed is the one who is not offended in me.

For the most part Kierkegaard took this claim of Jesus and explored it with philosophical/theological questions.  He argued that the idea that God would become human is offensive; and, that this one man could be God is equally scandalous.  This is why John the Baptist was struggling.  How could Jesus be the Messiah if he went to dinner parties with a horde of sinners? John was losing faith in Jesus.

Yet before Kierkegaard set down this esoteric path of God being incarnate or the scandal of particularity, he said something much more down to earth.  He said, when we get offended, we lose trust, we no longer believe someone is good or right or true.  He made this point by saying: the opposite of faith is not doubt.  Doubt is part of the struggle to believe, doubt is the way we come to greater understanding.  The only way we achieve greater faith is doubting the faith we have.  No.  Doubt, he said, is not the opposite of faith.  The opposite of faith is offence.  It is because when we are offended, we lose our faith in people, want to discard them, or hate them.  To whatever degree our offence reaches it begins with losing trust, faith, confidence in someone.

What Kierkegaard picked up on was the word for offence in Matthew.  Scandalon.  To be scandalized in Matthew's gospel is to be offended, to feel compromised, betrayed, shocked, to the point where we begin to lose faith.  Matthew recorded the scandalizing of John the Baptist.  John was offended by how Jesus lived.  In our reading today he does the same thing with the disciples of Jesus, the twelve.  Only this time it is not how Jesus lived but how he is going to die, how he will suffer and be crucified, interrogated and flogged like a common criminal. 

Jesus says to his disciples, "soon you will all take offence, be scandalized because of me, and you will lose faith in me, you will be ready to discard me."  And then Peter responds, "that is not going to happen.  They might be scandalized, they might lose faith in you, but I won't.  I am willing to die with you." 

Now we all know the rest of the story, how Peter denies Jesus three times and the cock crows.  Yet, that is really another matter altogether.  That is not a story about Peter and his life and his choices.  Our reading today is about Jesus, not Peter; and it's about our choices not his.  More to the point, our reading today is about the choices we make when offended and how to endure when we are the offender. 

The greatest lesson of offence and the choices we make when offended comes in the opening decade of the 4th Century in a controversy called Donatism. But before we go there, I want to reiterate the three parts of offence because they could get lost in the controversy.  First offence is a personal choice.  We must choose to be offended.  We know this because two people can hear the exact same words, read the same book, be in the same room and one might be annoyed by something, while the next person is cut to the core. In other words, offence is determined within each of us. The second is that it must be personal.  Offence is some sort of relationship, some sort of trust and faith in someone that is put in jeopardy and then lost.  Lastly, it cannot be avoided.  We can try to limit the possibility of offence, but as it is the choice of another, we cannot stop it or prevent it.  Sometimes what is offensive to others is the silence of those trying not to offend.

The Donatist Controversy is a pivotal moment in the history of the Roman Empire.  The quick version is that the Emperor Diocletian, fearing the rising influence of Christianity in the East and in North Africa, instigated a persecution to bring this growing sect into line.  He demanded that the clergy hand over their holy books, renounce their faith in Jesus, and make an offering to him as the emperor god.  For three years in small towns and large cities, the clergy were persecuted.  Ultimately, this backfired and soon Diocletian was dead, Constantine was emperor, and Christianity the religion of the empire. 

Yet, before it backfired, many clergy did renounce their faith to avoid persecution, and many choose prison or death instead of renouncing their faith.  The Donatist Controversy was over what to do with the clergy who renounced their faith to avoid persecution.  Half of the churches of North Africa said, "let them return."  The other half said, they can return to the church, but not as clergy."  This would have been enough to fuel a debate, but the half rejecting the offending pastors took their sense of betrayal to an even greater level.  The followers of Donatus said, not only are they no longer priests, but everything they did as priests is now null and void.  All their baptisms, weddings, funerals, blessings, acts of authority: it is as if they were never here.

At this point Augustine enters the stage and makes brilliant arguments about vessels and wine and how mercy and grace pass through us.  His arguments, although they prevailed as the official doctrine, had little to no consequence.  Not only did the Donatists not accept the verdict, but they also refused to have relations with those who did accept it.  And this is the hardest part of the Donatist controversy: their refusal and rejection and bitterness and offence lasted for almost four hundred years.  When Muslim forces rid North Africa of Christianity, there were churches still fighting each other.  What happened in 303 was still going on in 698.

It's the persistence that makes Donatism the great morality tale of offence.  We all get offended; and we most likely all offend.  We lose faith in each other, and we can be seen as less in the eyes of those who once cherished us.  The power of offence, once the temptation has been chosen, can destroy love, make faith disappear.  That is a very powerful darkness we all have in us that can go on and on for centuries. 

But here is the good news.  Offence need not persist.  Nor do we have to choose it.  Overcoming offence is one of the most difficult things to accomplish.  A grudge is hard to put down.  But it can be.  I wish I could say that time could heal this wound, but I am not all too sure of that.  Time certainly didn't help the Donatists.  Seems to have made it worse.  Imagine four centuries of being offended.  The clergy who renounced their faith would have been dead within a generation most likely and yet the need to hate, to reject, to discard and disdain persisted.

I believe that is why John records this moment between Jesus and Peter.  Some could say he is erasing the denials.  But it might be better to think of this in terms of how Jesus could have held a grudge, could have demanded a painful contrition of Peter, could have demoted him, or shunned him.  Instead, he is healing Peter, releasing the grip of offence.  And he is doing it with love.  He asks Peter, do you love me?  Not if he believes in him or is he ready now to proclaim his faith.  He asks if he loves him and here is the great possibility.  Are you willing to love the one you cast aside?  Love has greater power than offence.  Amen.