23 sunday in ordinary time 2011

Homily for 23 Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A 4 September 2011

Today’s Gospel seems to me to be describing the Christian Community, the Church, in all its main aspects and functions. Here we see the Church as what it ought to be, as what it should be- what we should be at our best. A community of love, of prayer and of forgiveness. And when we live as the Church in this way, in faithfulness to God, there is Our Lord in our midst.

Let’s look at how this passage unfolds. It begins with Jesus telling us that if our brother does something wrong, we are to “go and have it out with him”. Does it matter what our brother does? Do we care? One of the first results of the Fall, as we read in Genesis 4 ix, is that we lose interest in our fellow human beings, we cease to care even to the point of killing them- you remember Cain’s great lie when God says to him “Where is Abel your brother?” – “I do not know, am I my brother’s keeper?” Here Jesus tells us yes, we should care, we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Our love for them must be such that we feel able to speak frankly to them when we see them going wrong. And even, maybe, we might need reinforcements- this isn’t supposed to be a kind of ganging up, bullying tactic, this bit about “take one or two others along with you”, or “take it to the whole community”, this isn’t grassing somebody up, this is partly asking us to check our take on things against the opinions of others, thinking with the mind of the Church as we might say today, making sure that we are not getting into anything too personal, too much of our own agenda and so on, and partly because in Jewish law, to make a case stick you needed two or three witnesses (Deut 19 xv says “a single witness shall not prevail against a man for any crime….only on the evidence of two witnesses….shall a charge be sustained”. (Incidentally, this is why Mary Magdalene rushes off to get Peter and John to come to the empty tomb, she knows they will need two or three witnesses to be believed.) And Our Lord does not expect we will always succeed in correcting our fellow human beings- we all have free will after all, and some of us can be very stubborn when it comes to going our own way. If someone just can’t be reasoned with, well, “treat him like a pagan or a tax collector”. Now that obviously means, if someone has deliberately put themselves outside the mainstream of the Christian community, so be it, they will have to be outsiders – but please I beg of you notice that it is the person himself who has put himself out of the community, not the community which has turned its back on him – the decision has come from the person concerned, to be on the outside. And please notice one more thing- a pagan or a gentile, and a tax collector are the examples Jesus gives of outsiders – and yet, earlier in this Gospel Matthew gives us examples of gentiles and tax collectors who actually become people of great faith- you remember the centurion in chapter 8 who wants his servant healed- his words to Jesus are newly restored to our Mass this very day with the new translation- Our Lord says to him “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith” (Mt 8 x) and the gentile woman from Tyre who asked Jesus to heal her daughter (Mt 15 xxviii) makes him say “O woman , great is your faith!” while I am sure you are already thinking of the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee in the Temple, in Luke’s Gospel where it is the humble tax collector who can only bring himself to stand at the back and say ”God be merciful to me a sinner” who receives Our Lord’s approval, “this man went down to his house justified” (Lk 18 xiii-xiv). So, people who have put themselves outside the community for whatever reason may still be capable of great faith- we are not to dismiss them even if they have dismissed themselves.
Part of this love for our brothers and sisters, part of our concern for each other is of course the need we all have to forgive and be forgiven, to let bygones be bygones, to move on, not to be forever shackled to the past. We want our brothers and sisters, however far they may be wandering from the Church, to know that nevertheless they are still in the orbit of God’s infinite mercy- the same unconditional mercy that we are rather hoping will naturally be coming our way! We need to ensure that we are the channels of pardon, not the harsh critics, for these people too. The pardon, of course, that can be fully operational for them, as for all of us, in the sacrament of confession, where the priest hearing our true contrition will loose on earth and loose in heaven our burden of guilt and free us to move on.
So we have had love and we have had pardon. Finally we have prayer, the hall mark of the Church above all- we have to be, to want to be, people of prayer, people who talk to God and let him talk to us, we need our lives to be a long unending conversation we are engaged in with God. Bur personal prayer is not enough, is it, we need to come together with our brothers and sisters in the Faith, as we are here this morning at this Mass, because here we know we can meet Our Lord in the fullest possible sense- when the priest says those words of consecration over the bread and wine, we know indeed that “where two or three meet in my name I shall be with them”. This phrase is –like the stuff about getting witnesses earlier on- also from Jewish law. The Talmud says (‘Abot 3 ii) “If two sit together and words of the Law pass between them, the divine presence abides with them”.
Dear Jesus you show us in this gospel the hallmarks of an authentic Christian community; we ask you to make us at St Saviour’s into a people who see all men and women as our brothers and sisters, worthy of our love, make us channels of forgiveness to each other and as we come together to turn our minds to the things of God, and recognise you in the Host at this Mass may your divine presence abide with us. Amen.