http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/01/a-problem-as-old-as-saint-paul-and-the-corinthians/
By now I trust people know that I'm not actually Eastern Orthodox. However, thanks to the late Internet Monk I was introduced to the blog Orthocuban, which I very much enjoy. Here Father Ernesto looks at a few contemporary events and connects them to a passage in 2 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians Paul nad urged the church to discipline a man who was found to have his father's wife, something even the pagans considered a terrible thing. Paul rebuked the church. The church, apparently, responded to Paul's rebuke but went so far in establishing church discipline that Paul had to write them AGAIN to urge them to not overdo the church discipline. As Father Ernesto put it, just as the sin of the man opened him up to attacks from Satan while he didn't turn from it so a refusal to welcome the man back once discipline had had its effect would open the man up to unbearable sorrow and ALSO open him up to attacks from Satan.
If their unwillingness to discipline gave ocassion to Satan, so their unwillingness to forgive once the discipline had worked its purpose also gave ocassion to Satan.
Now if this is true even in cases where church discipline is warranted how much more true is it the case when the church discipline was in any way an abuse of authority. It is possible for someone to be subjected to a formal disciplinary action that is undeserved either because the person has done nothing wrong (such as girls who are subjected to the rituals of church discipline because they were impregnated by a church member who raped them; or a woman who was brought up for failing as a wife because her husband left her) or because is merely perceived as somehow been guilty of a sin because leaders have issues of their own (see the aforementioned, and also include cases where people are cut loose from churches not because of any sexual or moral failure as such but because they ran afoul of bureaucratic changes in a system; or because of genuine disagreements between two God-loving parties who have irreconcilable differences).
In such cases people can be treated as though they were bad guys when there is not much of a warrant for it. Even in cases where the basis for church disciplinary action is entirely warranted we, as Father Ernesto puts it, have a lengthy history of overdoing what church discipline would actually involve. We talk about the forgiveness of God while not living out in any way what forgiveness would actually look like.
I would put it like this--we talk about the forgiveness of Christ in the abstract so that we do not have live out the cross we would have to take up of living it. We can profess the importance of Christian community while cherry-picking our idea of Christian community so that we scrupulously avoid having to consider anyone we don't want to consider on the team as being in Christ. And then we "treat them as you would a tax collector". The fact that one of the apostles was a tax collector when Jesus called him doesn't allow for much of an non-ironic shift in which we can say Jesus is saying to shun tax collectors, does it?
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