Homily for the twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
One of the most important works of Italian literature is a collection of 100 short stories supposedly told by a group of people from Florence who were locked down in a country house during the Black Plague. They didn’t have Netflix, so they told stories. Some of the stories are really just off-color jokes, but since they’re more than 600 years old, now they’re considered literature. One of those stories deals with a problem that’s at the heart of today’s Gospel.
There were two merchants, one Christian, one Jewish, living in Florence, and the Christian was always trying to convince his Jewish friend to convert. One day, the Jewish merchant announced that he had to go to Rome for business, and his Catholic friend despaired. You see, the fourteenth century was the low point of Church corruption, and he knew that if his Jewish friend went to Rome he would see the pope and the cardinals using the Church to enrich themselves, their relatives, and their illegitimate children. And the Catholic merchant thought, “Now he’ll never become a Christian.”
So he was shocked a month later when his friend returned from Rome a devout Catholic. He tried to ask delicately, “But didn’t you see anything wrong in Rome?” And his newly baptized friend said, “Oh, it’s a swamp. But if that is how the Church is run, and it’s still here after 1300 years, it can only be God who is keeping it going.”
The problem in both this story and in the Gospel is that our Church is full of sinners. This makes sense for the same reason that hospitals are full of sick people. In the sacraments, the Church has the medicine to heal us of sin, and in her moral teachings she has the spiritual therapy to help us regain our strength and stay healthy. But the disadvantage of offering the remedy for sin is that those who need it are by definition flawed. I had a theology professor who liked to say, “If you find a church without any sinners in it, don’t join because you’ll ruin it.”
This all might be easy to accept in theory: sinners are easy to love in the abstract; they are less easy to love when they sin against us. But sooner or later this happens, and we encounter sin, injustice, and conflict within the Church. This is something Jesus knows and anticipates. As the Gospel shows, it’s also something he takes very seriously because if we don’t deal with these conflicts in the right way, they will tear the Church apart, and then we’ll all be sick and have no hospital to treat us.
Just as in a hospital, there are certain protocols to follow so disease doesn’t spread—we know them well, handwashing, masks, disinfectants—so too Jesus gives us some practical advice to help us contain the damage caused by sin. Today’s Gospel reading is one of those protocols. Jesus’ first piece of advice is talk to the person directly. Don’t talk about the person. Don’t write about the person on Facebook. Don’t threaten to call the bishop. Don’t bottle it up inside until you have a little hydrogen bomb of bitterness and resentment. Talk to the person. Jesus tells us to do this because it doesn’t come naturally. Talking to people with whom we don’t see eye-to-eye has never been easy, and perhaps is even more difficult today when, because of technology, we live increasingly in virtual cocoons. Our skills of patience, listening, and empathy have eroded.
Talking to others also means giving them benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming that they have the worst possible motives for what they are doing. To pick an example from our current social mess, it is amazing how over the past ten years or so, we have become so quick to accuse people with whom we disagree of racism. This is a serious charge because racism is a serious sin. But slander also is a serious sin, and if I accuse someone else of something terrible but I don’t really know what I’m talking about, then I’m the one who’s guilty. And, frankly, it seems to me that careless accusations of racism actually make the problem of racial conflict a whole lot worse.
Another protocol that I might suggest for containing the contagion of community-destroying conflict is thinking twice before attacking another person’s motives. Have I seen every angle of the issue—or the video—before I jumped in with my damning judgment? Because if not, then there is a very real possibility that I will be judged and damned, that the gasoline I was pouring on my neighbor’s house will ignite in my own hands.
Turning to the second stage of the protocol Jesus gives us today, we know that sometimes even if we do our best to resolve our problems directly, we can’t quite manage. And in that case, we need to ask others for help. This might take the form of professional help: for example, a couple going through a rocky period in their marriage seeking the help of a counselor. Seeking such help is what Jesus advises. We might find ourselves not very skilled in explaining what needs to be explained and so we seek the help of someone who is. Also included in this stage, I think, is seeking advice from others. It can be helpful to talk out a problem with someone we trust, someone who won’t gossip about it. That’s different than going to someone we know will respond, “Oh, yeah, I hate that person too.” The key point in this second stage, is that by bringing other people into the conflict we are trying to resolve it, trying to win over the other person, not trying to beat him up. The point isn’t scoring points; it’s preserving a community.
Unfortunately, Jesus acknowledges that there is a stage three. Just as not all diseases can be cured, not all conflict can be resolved, and not all sinners will acknowledge their wrongdoing and take the medicine. Sometimes, we realize we won’t be friends with someone else; this doesn’t always mean that he’s a bad person or I’m a bad person; it may just mean our personalities don’t mesh. In that case, our challenge is simply to treat the other person with respect and fairness when we do interact.
The Gospel and the first reading also allude to the special role some people have of safeguarding our Church from particularly dangerous forms of spiritual sickness; these are the “watchmen” Ezekiel speaks about or the authorities Jesus has in mind when he says “if he refuses to listen to them tell the Church.” No community can survive when its members contradict what that community believes in serious ways; a Ford dealership where the employees were always telling the customers to buy Chevys would not stay in business long. And so the final, most serious stage here involves the emergency quarantine measure known as excommunication, the goal of which is to protect the community from those who through their words or visible actions bear false witness about what the Church believes and therefore put everybody—particularly the most vulnerable who may not know any better—at risk. The hope of this particular emergency protocol is that it will also cause the person in the wrong to come to his senses and seek forgiveness. Fortunately, God has given the Church an unlimited supply of forgiveness.
I’ll end with a word about vaccines. Since I too seem to have a recurring case of sinfulness, this past year on my retreat I read a short book by a priest and a psychologist about forgiveness. And he wrote that psychologists have found that two characteristics make it easier to forgive other people—gratitude and empathy. So cultivating these two characteristics in our daily lives can make it easier to deal with conflict when it arises and can give our hearts a bit of protection against the bitterness such conflict causes. It’s not always easy living in this hospital. Our own diseases are constantly acting up. Sometimes the watchmen don’t do their job or don’t do it particularly well. The other patients can be cranky and make us want to run away without taking our medicine—a decision that could prove fatal if it lasts. But the good news is that the medicine and the spiritual therapy is sometimes slow acting, but it works. Better still is that, even though we’re in here with a bunch of other sick people, the head physician is really, really good.
Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20
St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church
Rapid City, SD
September 5, 2020
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 