The Trail We Leave: A Reflection on Abba Moses 2

A few years ago now, I wrote a couple posts about how contentious the question of forgiveness has become in our society. And I think things have even become more heightened since then. There is, rightly and necessarily, a renewed focus on accountability and justice in a lot of our culture, but this is accompanied by a marked lack of grace. People on all sides of the political spectrum seem to want faultless heroes and clear villains, for everyone to be defined by their worst moments, and for even neutral actions to be interpreted with the worst possible motivations in mind. This is of course far from the Christian ideal, which joins a desire for accountability and justice with an equal focus on grace and forgiveness. Not that Christianity ever did a great job of holding to that balance; at times, it has been just as vindictive and graceless as our present moment; at others, it has focused on teaching forgiveness to the exclusion of justice-making and restoration, turning a beautiful teaching of forgiveness into a tool of oppression. The incident from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers upon which I’ll be reflecting today involves these questions but doesn’t really answer them. What it does, however, is provide a helpful reminder of a truth we’d all do well to remember when these questions come up in our own lives.

The story involves Abba Moses, a figure whose was famous for his grace and forgiveness. Sadly, the culture of Desert monasticism being as it was, he was often intentionally put to the test by those who found his graciousness hard to believe. And, in a very sad example of ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same,’ one of the tools leveraged in this tests of Abba Moses’ grace and forgiveness was what we’d today call Anti-Black racism. For he was among the few Desert Fathers to come from Sub-Saharan Africa and therefore to have a darker complexion than what was the norm in the Eastern Mediterranean world. At any rate, Abba Moses passed all these tests (see Abba Moses 3-4), gross as they may have been, and his fame only increased. But the story I’m focusing on today is not about racism, but about how Abba Moses was able to be so gracious and forgiving:

A brother at Sketis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The elder said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.’ When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him. (Abba Moses 2)

When summoned to a meeting to discuss some fault of one of the other monks, Abba Moses first refuses to go. When he’s pressed, he comes, but brings along an object lesson: a leaky jug, which leaves drips of water all the way from his cell to the meeting place. When asked about it, he explains that just like the trail of water, so too has his life left a trail of sins behind him, a trail he cannot see unless he turns back to look. How then can he judge his brother’s sins? In the story, this is enough to pop the monks’ zeal to judge the brother and all is forgiven.

Is this a happy ending? We have no way of knowing what the brother did. The language is so ambiguous that it could have been anything from murder or rape to taking an extra piece of bread. We don’t know if there was a genuine victim here, or whether it was simply a matter of community rules, or even nothing at all except the pressures of community life coming to a head. But I don’t think we need to come to a conclusion about this — about whether justice was done or not in this case. Because what we have is a wonderful example of how we should carry ourselves when there’s cause for judging others: to remember the trail of sins we’ve left, both ‘harmless’ ones and ones where we’ve harmed others, and to judge by the same standards against which we’d like to be judged. It’s a helpful image that reinforces the message from Abba Epiphanius that we looked at last week about the remembrance of sins.

This is very much in keeping with the teaching of Jesus. He urged us to remember the ‘plank’ in our eye before complaining about the ‘speck’ in someone else’s, not to rush to judgment lest we too be judged by others, and to treat others as we’d hope to be treated. Grace towards others is ultimately grounded in recognizing our own need for grace, from others and from God.