23rd Sunday of the Year - A
Ezekiel 33:7-9 Romans 13:8-10 Mathew 18: 15-20
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
A drunk decides to go ice fishing; so he gathers his gear and goes walking around until he finds a big patch of ice. He heads into the center of the ice and begins to saw a hole. All of sudden, a loud booming voice comes out of the sky. "You will find no fish under that ice." The drunk looks around, but sees no one. He starts sawing again. Once more, the voice speaks. "As I said before, there are no fish under the ice." The drunk looks all around, high and low, but can't see a single soul. He picks up the saw and tries one more time to finish. Before he can even start cutting, the huge voice interrupts. "I have warned you three times now. This is not a lake and there are no fish!" The drunk is now flustered and somewhat scared; so he asks the voice, "How do you know there are no fish? Are you God trying to warn me?" "No," the voice replied. "I am the manager of this ice hockey rink." Today’s readings are about correcting our brothers and sisters with loving concern for the temporal and spiritual welfare of the community.
The common theme of today’s readings is the impact of our membership in the Church on our “private” lives. Being a member of the Church means we belong to a community of brothers and sisters in Christ. We are, therefore, the “keepers” of our brothers and sisters, for each one of us is important to all others in our faith community. That is why we have to be meaningfully present to, and take responsibility for, other people. Inhuman behaviour against defenceless people, like child abuse, elder abuse or spouse abuse, is something about which we need to be really concerned, to the point of taking appropriate action to protect the victims. This individual responsibility in a Christian society includes, as today’s readings remind us, our responsibility for each other. Perhaps the most painful obligations of watchful love are fraternal correction and generosity in forgiving and forgetting injuries.
Matthew expands a saying of Jesus, originally concerned primarily with forgiveness (compare the shorter version in Luke 17:3-4), into a four-step procedure for disciplining members in the new eschatological community of the church. In the seventeenth century, the great Anglican priest and poet John Donne reminded us, “No man is an island, entire unto himself.” In today’s gospel, Jesus instructed his disciples about relationships among members of the church, because through baptism we assume a serious responsibility for our fellow-believers. Suppose a son or daughter, friend or acquaintance, relative, neighbour, even parent or teacher, does “something wrong,” whether the sin is of commission or omission. By outlining a four-step process of confrontation, negotiation, adjudication and excommunication, Jesus tells us how to mend a broken relationship within the Christian fellowship.
1) Confrontation: The worst thing that we can do about a wrong done to us is to brood about it. Brooding can poison our whole mind and life, until we can think of nothing else but our sense of personal injury. We mustn’t gossip either. Hence the first step proposed by Jesus to the one who has been wronged is that he should go to meet the offender in person, and point out lovingly, but in all seriousness, the harm he has done. This first stage is designed to let the two people concerned solve the issue between them. If it works out at that level, that is the ideal situation. "You have won back your brother."
2) Negotiation: Suppose the first step does not resolve the situation and the person refuses to admit wrong, continuing in a behaviour bad for him or her as well as others. This creates a problem, for example, among young persons where a friend steals or shoplifts, uses drugs or drinks excessively, hangs around with a bad crowd, plans to run away, contemplates suicide or abortion, or just "goofs off" in school. Here, the second step is to take one or two other members of the church along with the wronged person to speak to the wrongdoer and to act as confirming witnesses. The taking of the witnesses is not meant to be a way of proving to a man that he has committed an offence. It is meant to assist the process of reconciliation by emphasizing and explaining calmly the gravity of the situation. Nowadays, we call that an “intervention” and the group may also include a qualified third party - counsellor, teacher, priest or physician. The Rabbis had a wise saying, "Judge not alone, for none may judge alone except God."
3) Adjudication: If the negotiation step does not resolve the situation either, the third step is to have the whole church or community of believers confront the wrongdoer. The case is brought to the Christian fellowship because troubles are never amicably settled by going to a civil court of law. Further, the Church provides an atmosphere of Christian prayer, Christian love and Christian fellowship in which personal relationships may be righted in the light of love and of the Gospel. Finally, in matters of honour and shame, the community is the final arbiter, for the community as a whole suffers from the wrong.
4) Excommunication: If the offender chooses to disregard the believing community's judgment, the consequence is “excommunication.” This means that if none of the three steps has brought a resolution of the situation, then the wrongdoer should be treated like "a Gentile or a tax collector." That is, the wrongdoer should be put out of the church with the hope that temporary alienation alone may bring the erring person to repentance and change. The sinner is expelled because every obvious case of un-repented sin denies the Gospel's power and the Church's mission of reconciling sinners to God and to the community. But the excommunication should be carried out with genuine grief (1 Cor 5:2), not vindictive glee over another's "fall" or self-righteous pride.
Jesus concludes the action plan by stating that all his disciples have authority to “bind or loose,” that is, to settle conflicts and legal cases between community members. In addition, Jesus gives the assurance that when the Church community gathers in Jesus' name, in the spirit of prayer, to hear a legal case, Jesus is there to guide and ratify the procedure.
LIFE MESSAGES:
1) We are our brother’s/sister’s keeper. Modern believers tend to think that they have no right to intervene in the private lives of their fellow believers; so they pay no heed to the serious obligation of encouraging an erring brother or sister to give up his or her sinful ways. Others evade the issue saying, “As a sinner, I don’t have the moral courage or the right to correct someone else.” But Jesus emphatically affirms that we are our brothers' keepers, and we have the serious obligation to correct others in order to help our neighbours retain their Christian faith and practice, especially through our model Christian lives. Have we offered advice and encouragement to our friends and neighbours and coworkers when it was needed, and loving correction in private where that was possible? Let us admit the fact that a great degree of indifference to religion shown by our young men and women is due to lack of parental control, training and example. If the children of Christian families grow up as practical pagans, it is mainly because the Christian faith has meant little or nothing to their parents. It is a well known fact that when parents are loyal to their faith in their daily lives, their children will, as a rule, be loyal to it.
2) Gather in Jesus’ name and work miracles: Today's Gospel reminds us of the good we can do together, and of how we can do it. Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” If any group of us will gather, work, and act with the Holy Spirit guiding us, we become much more than simply the collective number of people we are. Two becomes more than two, and three becomes more than three. The sum of our individual ideas, resources and abilities becomes much more because of the synergy that God’s presence provides. In our faith community, we act together so that we may help one another in God’s name, thereby multiplying our resources and ability to do what God calls us to do. Today, Jesus makes it clear how important we are, one to another. Through our links to one another in Christ, there is a capacity in our community which enables us to use God’s power to make healing and life-giving love more effective among His people. We come together, we stay together, we work together—in our Lord's name, bringing to focus the presence of God and unleashing the power of the Spirit – to transform our lives and the lives of all God’s children.
We do gather in Jesus’ name and invoke his presence, and that makes him a part of us and of what we do. That is what we experience at each Eucharist—we in him and he in us.
Fr Chris...
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