Walking away sad

A woman I will call “Lucille” came to me in distress about a relationship. She was a lonely person who had suffered many losses in her lifetime and feared she was about to lose another. This certain friend of hers (I’ll call her “Rebekah”) was so dear to her that my strong impression upon listening as Lucille poured out her complaint for literally hours was that I had not seen such emotion except in lovers. Yet this friend was not a lover, and there was no question of homosexuality in the mix.

Indeed, Lucille was distraught because of Rebekah’s entanglement with a married man, now in its fifth year. Lucille told me she had stuck by Rebekah all this time, the only person in Rebekah’s circle of friends who always spoke truth to her when others either turned a blind eye or enabled her. In spite of this fidelity on Lucille’s part, Rebekah was often thoughtless and even cruel.

After I had heard the whole story I said, “Lucille, if I could show you in black and white from the Scriptures what God says to do, would you do it?” “Yes!” she replied. “I would.” For she didn’t know what to do, and expressed a desire to know God’s will. So I turned to a page in one of Paul’s letters and asked her to read:

“But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).

Immediately I felt the mental scrambling begin. Lucille had been brought face-to-face with a plain word commanding to cut off association with someone “who bears the name of brother” who is engaging in sexual immorality. Lucille had told me early in the conversation that Rebekah considered herself a Christian and indeed often liked to evangelize.

Like a bird with its leg caught in a net, first Lucille began to pontificate to me that not everything in life is black and white, and that I, not knowing Rebekah in person, had no way of understanding the subtleties and nuances of this complex situation.

The next evasion was exegetical in approach. She pointed out that the verse I had directed her to commands us to pull away from all self-proclaimed Christians who are guilty of greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, and swindling. Paul could not have meant that, Lucille said. When I disagreed and said that Paul does mean it and that we ought to raise our standards to God’s and not lower God’s to ours, Lucille said in that case there would be no one left in church to associate with. I responded that if the verse can be watered down to mean nothing at all, Paul needn’t have bothered to say it.

I thought of the young man who came to Jesus one day and expressed a desire to follow Him, and how he ended up walking away sad when Jesus told him to give up what he cherished most:

“When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19:22).

Lucille’s third dodge from the command was this: I am the only person who speaks truth to Rebekah. If I stop meeting with her, there is no more light, only darkness.

Sometimes the command of God is plain but we make it confusing because we are unwilling. Sometimes we think we know better than God. Who knows what God could have done with Lucille’s obedience five years ago? But for now, Lucille, armed with excuses and fearful of the implications of obedience, is following her desire and suffering the slings and arrows of the disobedient.