The Audience Of One: Kerdaino, the Grudge, and the Person You Gain

Here is a sentence from Sunday's gospel that describes something almost nobody does anymore.

"If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone."

When the two of you are alone. Not to your sister first. Not at the dinner table, in the version where they come off badly. Not to your spouse in the car on the way home, forever, until it hardens into a fact about that person. Alone. Just the two of you. First.

I read that this week and had to admit I could not remember the last time I did it that way. And once I looked at what Jesus actually built there, the order of operations and the direction it runs, I do not think we have stopped following it by accident. I think most of us have arranged our lives so that we never have to.

Same three readings as Tuesday: Exodus 12, Romans 13, Matthew 18, Proper 18 in Year A. On Tuesday I wrote about how small God works. A lamb sized for one household. A debt owed to whoever is nearby. Two or three people in a room. That is the scale. Today is about the habit that makes that scale nearly impossible to work at.

Kerdaino: the merchant's word Jesus uses for a person

Matthew 18, verse 15. Read the whole thing and watch where it lands. "If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one."

That last phrase is the one to slow down on. You have regained that one.

So here he takes the profit word and uses it for a person.

You go and have the hardest conversation of your month. If it goes well, there is no apology on the record. Nobody sees you be right. There is no moment where the room agrees you were wronged. What you get is him. He is the profit. The gain is a person you did not lose.

The procedure is built to end at step one

That reframes the whole passage, and it surprised me. I had always read Matthew 18 as church discipline, a process of escalation. Step one, step two, step three, and at the end of it you have grounds.

But if the win condition is gaining the person, then every step in the sequence is designed to give the thing its best possible chance of ending at step one.

Look at the direction it runs. One person. Then two or three. Then, only if it has to, the whole church. It starts at the smallest possible audience and expands with obvious reluctance. Each widening is a failure. The last one is a tragedy.

How a grievance actually moves through a family

Now think about how a grievance moves through a normal family.

It starts wide. You feel wronged, and within the hour you have told somebody who was not there. By dinner it is a story. By the holidays it is a thing the family knows about her.

Ask around any family you like and you will find a grievance that has been told to every single person in it except the one person it concerns. The person actually involved may never hear it directly, not once. Some of these go all the way to the funeral without ever being said to a face.

We have inverted his order completely. Jesus says start with an audience of one and grow only in emergency. We start with everybody who will listen and shrink only if we are forced.

And I do not think that is because we are worse people than they were. Talking about a person has always been cheap. Talking to them has always cost the same, and it is a lot. So the complaint goes wherever it is easiest to put it, and the easiest place has never once been the person's face.

The private conversation is protecting his exit

I want to name what actually gets lost here, because it is not just politeness.

If you take it to the family first, you have made the conversation unwinnable for him. By the time he hears about it there is an audience. He is not deciding whether you are right anymore. He is deciding whether to be the one who was wrong in front of people who already know the story. Nobody chooses that. So he digs in, and now he is defending a position he might not even hold.

You did not gain him. You made gaining him impossible, and then you concluded he was unreachable.

The private conversation is not a courtesy. It is the only setting in which a person can change their mind and not lose anything. That is what "when the two of you are alone" is protecting. It is protecting his exit.

Romans 13 and the grudge that keeps perfect time

Then Paul, in Romans 13, describing our exact condition without knowing it. "Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep." Then: "the night is far gone, the day is near."

You know what time it is. That is a strange thing to say, until you notice that anyone carrying a grievance knows exactly what time it is. You know the date. You know how many years it has been. You can name which Thanksgiving, who else was at the table, and what she said word for word. We keep very good time on the people who have hurt us.

What we have lost is any sense that the clock is going somewhere.

Paul is handing them a direction, and a direction is a different thing from information. The night is far gone. The day is near. You are at a particular point on a road that ends. A grievance does not have that. A grudge is all present tense, forever. It is very good at keeping the wound current and completely incapable of near. The thing happened, and it keeps happening, and nothing is arriving.

That is the sleep he is talking about, and it does not feel like sleep. It feels like being extremely awake, alert to every slight and every anniversary of the thing. That is the trick of it. You can be fully awake and going nowhere.

Meanwhile the person is getting older. So are you. There is not an infinite number of Thursdays left to have the conversation on. That is what "the day is near" does to a grudge. It puts a clock on it.

Make no provision: the grievance as a pantry item

Then the last line of the reading, which I had never really heard until this week. "Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

Ask yourself honestly whether the grievance you have been keeping is a provision. Whether it is something you have stocked, in Paul's plain sense, so that the appetite to be the injured party, the appetite to be right, never has to go hungry.

A retold complaint is a pantry item. You put it up years ago and you take it down whenever you need to feel justified about somebody. I am not going to preach at you about it. I am just saying the man has a word for it, and the word fits.

In a hurry versus on the way

Which sends me back to Exodus 12 one more time, from a different side than Tuesday. "This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly."

A meal eaten standing up. Shoes on. Bag packed. Hurriedly. I used to read that as tension. Now it reads to me as the opposite, and here is why: they are hurrying toward something. There is a door, and a desert past it, and a country past that. The hurry has a destination, which means it will end. Somebody in that room is going to sit down again someday, in a place of their own, and take their sandals off.

Compare that to the hurry most of us live in. Standing up. Shoes on. Constantly ready to move. And there is no door. It is just the posture. We have the urgency of the exodus and none of the exodus.

That is the difference between being in a hurry and being on the way.

Three things to do before Sunday

They are small, and every one of them costs something.

First, take one grievance out of circulation. There is a complaint about somebody that you have told more than once. You know which one. It has a shape now, and it gets a laugh in the right room. Retire it. Do not tell it again this week to anybody who is not the person it is about.

Second, run step one. Pick the smallest live thing you have with somebody near you and have that conversation alone, in person if you can manage it, on the phone if you cannot. Not in writing. Writing has an audience even when it does not, because it is a transcript, and people say things differently when they know it is being kept. Go in wanting the person, not the point. That is the whole test. If you come out of it having won and lost him, you failed at the only thing Jesus was measuring.

Third, do the arithmetic Paul is asking for. Take the oldest live grievance you have and count how long you have been carrying it. Then count something else: how old that person is now. Paul says you know what time it is. Prove it. Then ask whether the night is far gone on this one too. Usually what shows up at the end of that math is a name.

That is the week. A lamb eaten standing up. Paul saying wake up, the day is near. And Jesus describing the most expensive conversation there is and telling you the payoff is a person.

Kerdaino. It goes in the ledger as profit. Go get one back.