“Brooding about bad churches,” a Presbyterian friend of mine wrote — because his church world has as many problems as ours — “I was reminded of Phil 1:18. Wicked motives can’t strangle Truth.”
My friend quoted St. Paul for comfort, not excuse, but in my days among the evangelicals, some invoked his Letter to the Philippians as a reason not to worry about the ministers who’d gone wrong. The sermon worked almost magically to excuse them. As long as they “preach the Gospel,” who cares why they do it or what they do otherwise?
Later I found many Catholics saying the same thing, although applied to the Church. As long as priests and bishops intended to do what the Church did, especially as celebrants of the sacraments, we didn’t need to worry too much about how they lived their lives.
Catholics behaving badly don’t make the Church less of a divine institution, but they do — we do — make the Church less effective in the world. Because we don’t love God as much as we should, the Church doesn’t do the good she could and thereby hurts the world she’s supposed to help.
The character of the minister matters to his work. And each of us, in the way we live, is a minister to others, whose words and actions preach well or badly.
Paul’s famous words
St. Paul tells the Christians in Philippi that his imprisonment — he was probably under house arrest in Rome — had only spread the Gospel further and encouraged most of the brethren to preach more boldly (Phil 1:12-14).
Unfortunately, as young as the Church was, some in the congregation already wanted to take the pastor’s place or just make his life worse. Some of these people, the apostle explains, preached “from envy and rivalry” (15). Others “proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment” (17).
Then he says the famous lines my friend invoked. “What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice” (18). He shrugs off the critics and points to the good they do. He doesn’t react to how insiders treat him because he cares only that outsiders hear about Jesus.
He saw that believing Christians who preach “from envy and rivalry” can preach Christ in a way people hear, especially if they’re preaching to would-be and new Christians.
But motives do matter
But we, in our situation, can’t leave it there. A pastor’s motives matter when he’s preaching to a congregation. (Motive I take to be an expression of character and therefore affected by private sins.) A bad motive can’t strangle the truth, but it can twist and deform the way a person shares it.
For example, an envious pastor — perhaps a pastor envious of clerics more successful than he, as those in Rome were jealous of Paul — will tend to define his work in relation to the people he envies and not in relation to the people he serves.
As a result, he might say things that make him more like those he envies and avoid saying things that make him less like them. He will copy their brand, since their brand works. He won’t say everything his people need to hear, or won’t say it with enough force, if it will cost him approval.
Alternatively, such a pastor might set himself in opposition to those he envies. He may call himself a dissenter or a traditionalist or even a “radical centrist.” But, again, what he says will be determined by what they say, not by what his people need to hear.
Either way, his envy keeps him from speaking the full, specific, concrete, direct Christian truth. He may say nothing bad, but he won’t say everything good he’s been given to say or say it strongly enough.
Our sins come out in what we say
This applies not just to the shepherds, but to us sheep, who preach in a different way. What we say about almost any topic is a form of preaching to people who know we’re Catholic, and our private sins come out in some way in what we say.
If we talk about someone we envy, especially if we’ve indulged that envy, we may speak the truth, but in a way to put them down. We may not even know we’re doing it, because we don’t easily see our private sins, but people will notice the unkindness.
We may well say something that needs to be said, but we won’t say it as it needs to be said. In speaking enviously, we won’t have strangled the truth, but we will have throttled it.
