The Work of Mercy: Admonish the Sinner, Part 1

Of all the works of mercy, probably the most thankless and despised is admonishing the sinner. Nobody wants to do it (except human toothaches), and people never want it done to them. Repent! is a word that eats at the heart. Your conscience nags, “Who are you, you great hypocritical gasbag, to go all John-the- Baptist on people?” Here you are, riddled with a thousand sins and vices that leave you in no position to mind anybody else’s business. But then something sticks in your craw, and the Holy Spirit won’t let you rest.

You can’t bear the way that guy humiliates his wife and kids in public. You watch the news and hear some politician lie through his teeth about the graft you know for a fact is happening down at city hall. That woman at work unloads on you with her bigoted remarks about coworkers, behind their backs. Your shoulder angel looks at you with a cocked eyebrow and says, “Well? You gonna let that stand?”

Throughout life we find ourselves facing evil—sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle—and either not quite knowing what to do about it or being afraid to do what we should. That’s because another imperative is drilled into us, not just by our Christian background but also by our relativist culture, which regards only one biblical passage as divinely inspired: “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1).

The problem with invoking this as the Only Thing Jesus Ever Said is that it isn’t the only thing he ever said. Still less was it ever intended by him as a commandment to think or make no moral evaluations or to speak not in the face of obvious evil. The proof of this is Jesus himself, who not only makes moral judgments frequently but urges us to do the same: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24).

The commandment against judging is not an exhortation to never make moral judgments (a feat that is, in any case, impossible). It is an exhortation to remember that, though we are creatures who by nature make moral judgments, we must always recall that such judgments are provisional, since we are not God. We can (and should) say that a woman who beats her child black and blue is doing evil. But we cannot say for certain what lies in the heart of such a woman, what terrible demons, sickness, or suffering may be the genesis of her crime, nor what her interior freedom was as she acted, nor what her eternal destiny may be. Instead of setting ourselves up as her superiors and gloating over her fate, we had best be praying for her, warning her away from such evil, taking the appropriate steps to stop her (including calling the cops), and hoping that she will come to know the healing love of God.

Admonishing the sinner, then, is not an act of cold Pharisaic pride but an act of genuine Christian love. It is always ordered toward hoping for the best, even when there is, to the mortal eye, nothing left to hope for. And that is often the case with the prophets. Here, for example, is the rather deflating mission statement God gives to Isaiah at the start of his ministry:

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.” And he said,

“Go, and say to this people:
‘Hear and hear, but do not understand;
see and see, but do not perceive.’
Make the heart of this people fat,
and their ears heavy,
and shut their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”
Then I said, “How long, O Lord?”
And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without men,
and the land is utterly desolate,
and the LORD removes men far away,
and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.”The holy seed is its stump. (Isaiah 6:8–13)

“You will do your best and you will fail!” is not the message we want to hear. But it’s the bitterly realistic message Isaiah received at the inauguration of his work. Being told that the overwhelming majority of your audience is going to ignore you and perish, that the ones who don’t perish will also ignore you and then “be burned again,” and that, finally, some tiny stump will be left—well, that’s not the successful vision statement we normally expect from the divine recruitment brochure.

It is, however, what the prophets of Israel and what the Christian martyrs, following their Lord, signed on for. And the retirement plan?

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11:35–38)

Good times, good times. As the prophets and martyrs testified, by their blood, admonishing the sinner is a fine way to get rejected and tortured to death by the admonished. For it is the nature of pride— that is, the root of all sin—that the more deeply enmeshed you are in it, the less you want to hear from people who are calling you to repent of it.

Conversely, it is the nature of the prophetic office that the worse the sin is, the more the prophet feels a burden to speak out against it. That burden may lead to a more terrible conflict than the one between the admonisher and the admonished. It can lead to the torments Jeremiah described as he struggled under (1) the burden God laid on him, (2) his own frustration at his failures, (3) the hostility of sinners, and (4) his own deepest awareness that God is trustworthy, despite all the torments he might be enduring:

O LORD, you have deceived me,
and I was deceived;
you are stronger than I,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all the day;
every one mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I cry out,
I shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the LORD has become for me
a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say, “I will not mention him,
or speak any more in his name,”
there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.
For I hear many whispering.
Terror is on every side!
“Denounce him! Let us denounce him!”
say all my familiar friends,
watching for my fall.
“Perhaps he will be deceived,
then we can overcome him,
and take our revenge on him.”
But the LORD is with me as a dread warrior;
therefore my persecutors will stumble,
they will not overcome me.
They will be greatly shamed,
for they will not succeed.
Their eternal dishonor
will never be forgotten.
O LORD of hosts, who test the righteous,
who sees the heart and the mind,
let me see your vengeance upon them,
for to you have I committed my cause.
Sing to the LORD;
praise the LORD!
For he has delivered the life of the needy
from the hand of evildoers.
Cursed be the day
on which I was born!
The day when my mother bore me,
let it not be blessed!
Cursed be the man
who brought the news to my father,
“A son is born to you,”
making him very glad.
Let that man be like the cities
which the Lord overthrew without pity;
let him hear a cry in the morning
and an alarm at noon,
because he did not kill me in the womb;
so my mother would have been my grave,
and her womb for ever great.
Why did I come forth from the womb
to see toil and sorrow,
and spend my days in shame? (Jeremiah 20:7–18)

And so, down through the ages, people arise, filled with a burning-in- the-bone sense that they must speak out and admonish the sinner, for God himself requires it. Indeed, he requires it so seriously that if the prophet does not speak, he knows he himself will be held responsible for the sinner should he not discharge his duty:

Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you will have saved your life. Again, if a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die; because you have not warned him, he shall die for his sin, and his righteous deeds which he has done shall not be remembered; but his blood I will require at your hand. Nevertheless if you warn the righteous man not to sin, and he does not sin, he shall surely live, because he took warning; and you will have saved your life. (Ezekiel 3:17–21)

Of course, along with true prophets there are always pretenders shouting about some evil or other, not for the sake of the kingdom of God, nor even for the good of their neighbor, but because they are busybodies, social climbers, political adventurers, or the next tyrant. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to spot the phony. The politician profiled in “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” by the Who, denouncing his opponent only to continue his corrupt policies, is not admonishing sinners but merely playing for power. Likewise, a pundit who gins up panic about the economy and then admonishes his viewers to invest in the gold company for which he is spokesman is a huckster, not a prophet. Similarly, the celebrity who takes private jets around the world to denounce global warming is merely being fashionable.

The busybody, likewise, cares little for the repentance of the sinner, since his true delight is in the impenitence of the sinner. After all, if the sinner repents, what will there be to gossip about? One particularly noxious species of busybody is the Christian who urges us to “pray” for so-and-so—and then proceeds, not to pray, but to rehearse the sins of the sinner with barely concealed delectation.

Another example of false admonishment (though with a somewhat more redeeming quality) is the guy who plays at being bravely “prophetic” as he stays safely cocooned in his little peer group, issuing thundering denunciations of Them (whoever They are). To be sure, there’s sometimes a place for bucking up the home team with reminders about the sins of Those Bad People Over There and the fact that we good guys need to fight them. Allied propaganda that reminded our citizenry that the Axis powers were evil and needed to be defeated was not wrong. But it was not “brave” for a man in an office in Washington, D.C, to write that propaganda, and his writing was not admonishment of the sinner but rather performance art in the service of unit cohesion.

Of which more next time.

(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).