23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the First Reading for this Sunday Ezekiel pictures himself as a watchman on the city walls, on the lookout for danger. However, he is God’s watchman, with a duty to bring people to a recognition that they are at fault in the eyes of God. In the Second Reading Paul expands on the theme of the ‘living sacrifice’ he outlined in last week’s reading. It is love above all that must guide the followers of Jesus; blessing those who persecute them, feeding the hungry and so on. Love is at the heart of the commandments.
In our Gospel passage for this Sunday St Matthew recounts Jesus’ instructions to the disciples about how they should deal with a brother who does something wrong. This passage is very different from those of the two previous Sundays. They were dramatic stories, marked by deep emotions and implications for the people involved. This is a very practical common-sense teaching on that most common and most prosaic of community problems conflict. It is a great wisdom teaching which continues to be valid for us in our own time. Management has become a science today, and Jesus’s teaching stands for us as a model of how to “manage” conflict in any situation. We are told It is the duty of the disciple to point out the error even if our correction might not be well received. Matthew wants to let the Christians in his community know how to deal with those who drift away from the teaching of Christ or blatantly contravene the commandments. Matthew chooses those words of Jesus which most stress the authority and the competence of the Christian community, the Church, to deal with these cases. However, there are some safeguards built into this teaching on reproving those who go astray. Jesus says that first of all you must have it out with him alone. This might lead to a speedy solution and the person’s good name is preserved.
Yet it seems from the gospel reading that the only sanction is that the person be excluded from the community of the Church. But in considering such matters we must be very careful; for getting all worked up about the behavior of someone else can frequently be a sign of something else, something much closer to home. Encountering the truth about another person and ourselves is daunting because it makes us face up to the weaknesses that are part of us and all we are. We may try to make others a function of our egos, but it fails. Rather than enter the struggle, in many cases we ignore it. In a society where individualism prevails, people usually “mind their own business’: But together all of us form a community of faith and love. That spirit of love, concern, and caring characterizes the members of Christ’s Church. Our human relationships mirror our relationship with God sometimes good often times not so good. And this is why the Lord tells us today that when we make the decisions that ultimately matter about how we are going to use the lives we have been given, we must trust, not in the authority of men who believe they know God but, in the wisdom, and the authority of the Christian community as a whole. We have to open our hearts and our minds as we listen to the voice of the Lord as He speaks to us.We should not be afraid to encounter the truth about ourselves and others as we deal with the world around us these day’s knowing that Jesus is making the journey with us
Fullerton T 