Pip: There's a sermon on Candle in a Cave that opens with Shakespeare, detours through a shrew the size of a penny, and ends with a butcher knife in a teenager's hand — and somehow it's all about forgiveness.
Mara: Fr. John's recent writing takes us into the hard territory of reconciliation — what the Gospel actually asks of us when someone genuinely wrongs us, and why the answer isn't what we'd prefer.
Pip: Let's start with the sermon itself.
What Reconciliation Actually Costs
Pip: The Gospel passage at the center of this sermon sounds, at first read, like permission — Jesus telling us to go confront the person who wronged us. The question the sermon presses on is what motivation we're actually supposed to bring to that confrontation.
Mara: The setup begins with Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew — a character whose fury is her defining feature. The sermon draws a line from her to what it calls the grouch and the shrew in all of us, and then lands here: "It's as if Jesus is giving us permission to be the grouch or the shrew we know we have every right to be."
Pip: Which is a fair read of the text — until it isn't.
Mara: Right, and that's exactly the pivot the sermon makes. The cockroach exercise is where it gets concrete. A dozen teenagers, a paper box with a cockroach image taped to the lid, and a butcher knife. They shred the cockroach completely — and underneath is an image of Jesus, also shredded. The outrage is immediate.
Pip: Probably not the pastoral risk assessment form they teach in seminary, but the lesson lands.
Mara: The sermon draws the theological line directly from that image: "Whatever you do to them, you do to Jesus." And it holds that against the Gospel's one sentence that's easy to skip past.
Mara: That sentence is: "If the member listens to you, you have regained that one." The sermon reads that as the whole point — the motivation isn't vengeance, it's reconciliation. Paul's letter to the Romans backs it up: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'"
Pip: So the upshot is that the passage isn't a license to build a team and stock up on ammunition — it's a call to want the other person back.
Mara: And the sermon is careful about what reconciliation doesn't require. It doesn't mean forgetting, pretending you weren't hurt, or allowing the offender back into your life. What it does mean, as the sermon puts it, is you release the desire to go stab cockroaches — you refuse to let someone else's sin dictate who you become.
Pip: The closing image is the early martyrs who had no great words, just a simple reply when told to renounce their faith or die.
Mara: "I am a Christian." The sermon offers that as the thing to say to yourself in the moment anger tips toward vengeance — not a denial of the harm, but a refusal to be ruled by it.
Pip: And the final line reframes the familiar "where two or three are gathered" — not a formula for a small meeting, but a description of a reconciled community.
Mara: The through-line here is that reconciliation is the shape of Jesus' entire ministry — and the sermon asks whether we're willing to let that be the shape of ours.
Pip: Even when the cockroach really had it coming. More from Candle in a Cave next time.
Candle in a Cave 