No More Dividing Lines: A Reflection on Abba Bessarion 7

The other day, we saw again the importance of humility and remembering one’s own sins in times when others’ faults are under the spotlight. Today’s will continue on this theme, but from a different angle. It will be a concise post for a concise Saying, which goes like this:

A brother who had sinned was turned out of the church by the priest; Abba Bessarion got up and went with him, saying, ‘I, too, am a sinner.’ (Abba Bessarion 7)

Once again, we have no idea what this monk did to be cast out. All we know is that in his time of loneliness and exile, Abba Bessarion was there to comfort him. And he used his awareness of his own sinfulness as a well of compassion and empathy.

This is one more reason why self-righteousness gets us no where in the life of faith. It marks a line in the sand, with us on the ‘good’ side, and others, ‘sinners’, on the ‘bad’ side. But by acknowledging and remembering all the ways we too fall short and fail to show up for God and others, it puts us all on the same side of that line. Where self-righteousness divides, humility and recognition of one’s own sins unifies.

It doesn’t matter if our sins are of a different kind or magnitude. It’s sort of the flip side of how we talk about marginalization in society. It does us no good to compare traumas or ways we’re marginalized in some sort of victimization Olympics; the point is to use our own experiences of marginalization as a source of wisdom and compassion. And the same works with sinfulness. Understanding that we are all sinners allows us to act like Abba Bessarion and sit with others in grace and compassion instead of standing over them in judgement.

Like it or not, we’re all in this together. That’s kind of the whole point. And that’s why Jesus always had compassion on ‘sinners’ and spent his ministry tearing down self-righteousness and the belief systems that fueled it. There are no dividing lines between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘sinner’ because, to paraphrase Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that line runs through all of our hearts, hearts which God loves and for which God has acted in and through Jesus, and which God has empowered for faithfulness.

Amen!