September 28^th 2014.  Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Gospel: Matthew 21:28-32

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL Matthew 21:28-32

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people: ‘What is your opinion?
A man had two sons. He went and said to the first, “My boy, you go and work in the vineyard today”.
He answered, “I will not go”, but afterwards thought better of it and went.
The man then went and said the same thing to the second who answered, “Certainly, sir”, but did not go.
Which of the two did the father’s will?’ ‘The first’ they said.
Jesus said to them,
‘I tell you solemnly, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you.
For John came to you, a pattern of true righteousness, but you did not believe him, and yet the tax collectors and prostitutes did.
Even after seeing that, you refused to think better of it and believe in him.

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . Don Fabio’s homily this week is full of hope for those of us who are dismayed by our natural disinclination to work in the Lord’s vineyard! A father asks his two sons to go and work in the vineyard. One says “Yes sir!” but does not go. The other says “No!” but changes his mind and goes. Both sons make an initial instinctive response, but the real person is something different to the instinctive response. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that our natural responses sum up who we are! We are much more than instincts and sentiments. Life is too beautiful and important to be lived merely as a series of instinctive or reactionary responses. If we take the time to reflect and contemplate on our lives, then we begin to discover a person within us that is not the individualistic, self-oriented character on the surface. We begin to discover that child of God who, on the surface, might instinctively refuse to work in the vineyard, but deep down is a loyal and willing servant of the Lord. The Pharisees refused to consider that they might be in need of conversion. We must act like the son who is not afraid to reconsider his response to the Lord. Our instinctive reaction to the Lord’s call is not the primary thing. What is important is the more profound response that emerges from us when we take the time to contemplate things. This is the response that unveils the kind of person that we really are. The Father is asking us to enter his vineyard! Don’t worry about our initial sentiments and reactions! Let us take the time to reflect on this call and make the greatest response that we are capable of!

Is the Lord unjust if he makes the effects of sin reverberate in a person’s life?

It is important to understand the first reading and the Gospel in their proper contexts. Otherwise we risk missing some important aspects of these texts. In the first reading, the Lord answers those who claim that his ways are unjust. The passage which recounts the giving of the Decalogue had said that the Lord visits the fault on the unjust man’s descendants to the third and fourth generation. This sounds terrible to our ears and makes us question the justice of the Lord. But the passage does not say that the Lord punishes the unjust man’s descendants; rather he visits the fault on the man’s descendants. To “visit” in this sense means to make the fault present. And we cannot doubt that the effects of sin have reverberations that make themselves felt in the unjust man’s family and environment. Situations of deceit, sin and destruction have profound effects on our children and on our spiritual children.  God wishes to break this cycle by which the repercussions of sin multiply themselves. Even the most private of sins lead to our degeneration and impoverish our relations with others. Sometimes the discomfort and trouble that our sins provoke is the medicine that impels us to consider the state of our lives. This chain reaction by which the effects of sins are transmitted from generation to generation is well recognized by psychologists, but the issue is how to break the chain. We must welcome God’s visitation of the effects of our fault into our lives! This visitation attempts to awaken us to reflect on the state of our lives and stimulate us to change. The theme of the Gospel is all about this life-transforming change. Sometimes we refuse to go and work in the vineyard of the Lord, but the reverberations of our refusal makes us change our mind and go.

It is important not to limit ourselves to the natural responses that arise in our hearts. When we take time to reflect and contemplate on our lives, we become capable of loyal, willing responses to the Lord’s call.

In the Gospel parable, a father asks his two sons to go and work in the vineyard. One says that he will not, but later changes his mind and goes. The other says “Yes sir!” but does not go. The human being always has the capacity to change. Often we respond with immediate impulses that are individualistic and self-directed. But it is the “second” response we make that is often more significant and life-changing. These responses are made when we have digested the situation more fully. Such responses unveil the sort of person we are at the core. We often say “Yes sir!” because we are anxious to please others, but when the going gets tough we can easily falter. Chapter 7 of Matthew’s Gospel tells of those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not do the will of the Father. When we follow a path, what counts is where the path leads to. We can have a certain attitude towards something, but the important thing is our resultant behaviour towards that thing. Before responding to something, it is often better to reflect at length and to make a response that is consonant with what we are actually going to do with respect to that thing. Life is not something that should be responded to impulsively. It is important not to be dominated by our instinctive mode of reaction. Spontaneity and sincerity are very important qualities in many situations, but it is not true that I as a person can be equated simply with those impulses that occur naturally in my heart. I am not just instinct: I am also reason and spirit. I am my authentic self when, repentant, I go into the master’s vineyard to work. Let us not limit ourselves to our impulsive responses! Let us seek the greatest response that we are capable of! This requires reflection and calm. Quick, frenetic responses to life’s situations are not the best way to go. In reflection and calmness, we can discover the true selves that lie deep within our being. We can discover the loyal and willing child of God in our hearts that is far different to the impulsive and faltering person on the surface.

The son who says “No!” but then goes into the vineyard, is a son who is open to conversion. We too must open ourselves to conversion by delving more deeply into the profundity of our hearts, refusing to be dominated by natural impulses.

The context of the Gospel was the questioning on the part of the Scribes and Pharisees of the authority of Jesus. In response, Jesus asked them to say where the authority of John the Baptist had come from. John the Baptist was the prophet who had proclaimed the Lord’s radical call to conversion. The Pharisees and Elders had refused the Lord’s gift to them of John the Baptist because they didn’t accept that their lives required conversion. The son who first refused to go into the vineyard but later changed his mind, is a person who manages to do what the Pharisees were unable to do.  He looks at the state of his own life and asks himself what needs to be changed. We must never make our own thoughts and reactions absolute. We must not give undue prominence to our instincts and sentiments. When we delve more deeply into the profundity of our hearts, we become capable of the response that is appropriate for the profound, hidden mystery that is God.

September 24^th 2014. Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Gospel: Matthew 20:1-16

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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GOSPEL:                                   Matthew 20:1-16

Now the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner going out at daybreak to hire workers for his vineyard. He made an agreement with the workers for one denarius a day, and sent them to his vineyard. Going out at about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, “You go to my vineyard too and I will give you a fair wage”. So they went. At about the sixth hour and again at about the ninth hour, he went out and did the same. Then at about the eleventh hour he went out and found more men standing round, and he said to them, “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” “Because no one has hired us” they answered. He said to them, “You go into my vineyard too”.

In the evening, the owner of the vineyard said to his bailiff, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, starting with the last arrivals and ending with the first”. So those who were hired at about the eleventh hour came forward and received one denarius each. When the first came, they expected to get more, but they too received one denarius each. They took it, but grumbled at the landowner. “The men who came last” they said “have done only one hour, and you have treated them the same as us, though we have done a heavy day’s work in all the heat.” He answered one of them and said, “My friend, I am not being unjust to you; did we not agree on one denarius? Take your earnings and go. I choose to pay the last comer as much as I pay you. Have I no right to do what I like with my own? Why be envious because I am generous?”

Thus the last will be first, and the first, last.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . The first reading from Chapter 55 of Isaiah tells us that God’s ways are utterly different to our ways. We find that again in the parable from the Gospel. A landowner hires workers at different times of the day, but gives them all a full day’s wage, even those who only worked for one hour. Is the landowner unjust? No he is not unjust, for he gave those who worked all day long a full day’s wage. The landowner is simply someone who gives gratuitously and unconditionally. Human logic works according to the principle of the little weighing scales that we all have inside our heads. If people are mean to us then we should be mean to them. If people ask us for something, then they should be willing to do something for us. But this is not the logic of God. And neither is it our logic when we follow the way of the Lord. Good spouses, parents and friends do not follow the logic of the weighing scales. They bestow love on those who have done little or nothing to deserve it. Sometimes we feel envious of people who convert at the last minute and are “saved”. We feel aggrieved that we have worked all day in the vineyard of the Lord and end up receiving no more or no less than this salvation. But this bitterness arises from the fact that we are thinking according to human logic. Do we really think that we are working diligently for the Kingdom? How wrong we are! We do little and what we do is done badly! We are all like the workers who work for only an hour and are still given salvation! And how wrong we would be to feel bitter for being hired early in the vineyard of the Lord. Just as it is a joy for a father to have employment and bring home bread for the family, so it should be a joy for us to know the Lord early and to discover the meaning of our existence. And, anyway, do we think that the Lord can give a lesser type of salvation to those who convert on their deathbeds and a more substantial salvation to those who convert early in life? The Lord cannot give a half denarius! He cannot half love us, or half save us! Blessed be the Lord who loves us wholly and gratuitously no matter how little we accomplish in his vineyard!

The key to looking anew at the state of our lives: the way we do things is not God’s way of doing things

The first reading is the beautiful passage from the fifty-fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah.  “My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways; as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways above your ways”. What a marvellous key for gaining a new perspective on our lives! We are inclined to think that it is right and normal to follow our own ways. If someone somewhere decides to follow the ways of God, then we think that this is a sort of optional “extra” that we may or may not wish to embrace ourselves. But this is simply a wrong way of looking at things. We were made to follow the ways of God and we will not be happy if we continue to follow our own ways. The Lord created us that we might open ourselves to faith and grace. The ways we customarily follow are ways in which God is fundamentally ignored. These ways lead to emptiness and futility, if not directly to evil itself. It is almost worse if they do not lead to obvious inconsistencies, because then we can fail to realize that such paths go around in circles and lead nowhere.

The landowner in the parable is strange, but he is not unjust

The radical difference between God’s ways and our ways is an interpretative key for understanding the Gospel parable of the workers in the vineyard. This peculiar landowner begins by acting in a normal way but finishes by behaving in a way that is almost incomprehensible. He hires workers at different times of the day, even an hour before sunset, but in the end he pays them all the same wage! It seems absurd to us that people who worked vastly different hours should receive the same pay, and this injustice is expressed by the grumbling of the workers who were hired from the beginning. But the word “injustice” is actually incorrect here. As the landowner himself says, the problem is not that he has been unjust with the first group of workers – they still received one denarius each, which was the classic wage for a day’s work. The problem is that the landowner went beyond the dictates of justice and gave the others more than they deserved.

Human justice works according to the logic of perfect balance. But genuine relationships do not follow this logic at all

This fact overturns our system of logic which is based on the notion that a person should be given what they have earned. We have no natural concept of going beyond what is just, what is earned. We evaluate everything in life using the little scales that we have in our minds. And in fact the image of a scales is a symbol of human justice. Everything must be balanced out evenly. Accounts must return perfectly. “To each what he deserves” is an adage found in many human societies. This is how things work – or is it? God’s way work according to grace, that which is unconditionally given. And we function according to grace as well, when we are implicitly following the Lord. If a friendship was based upon each partner in the friendship giving only that which he had received from the other, then the relationship would not last very long. Genuine human relationships require bestowing on each other a benevolence that is undeserved. Imagine a marriage in which the spouses only give to each other that which is earned, in which one spouse says, “If you do this for me, then I will do that for you.” Imagine a parent who responds to a child with merely that which the infant has merited. Parenthood demands filling a child’s life with undeserved benevolence, surprises, treats, presents, things that are given gratuitously. Otherwise how can the child come to know the meaning of love, acceptance, tenderness? Who among us can live without this “something more”, this extra that is undeserved? The ways of God do not involve weighing up the person and giving him what he has earned. God is not a distributor of goods in a communitarian fashion. He is a father who brings history along according to the principle of generosity.

Do we think that we are working diligently in the vineyard of the Lord? How wrong we are! We are all relatively idle! All of us are like the workers who do only one hour and still get the full reward.

God has a coin to give us at the end of the day, and that day is our life. The sun will go down and the Lord will give out the coin that is his Kingdom, his goods, his reward. If one of our brothers and sisters turns to God at the very end of their lives, then God will save them. Does this bother us? We must look at things according to the paternal viewpoint of God. Think of the workers in the parable who are assumed at the end of the day. Their response to the landowner when he asked why they were doing nothing was “Because nobody has hired us.” For a father of a family to be left without work meant to return home without the denarius necessary to buy bread for the family. By giving a full denarius to those who had been assumed for only part of the day, the landowner gave these workers the possibility of feeding their family properly. Today we are all too conscious of the dramatic tragedy of unemployment. But as far as the Kingdom is concerned, all of us are relatively underemployed. We work little in God’s vineyard. The work we do is all too inadequate. But God rewards us anyway even for the hour that we do. God is knocking at the door, offering us this precious work. When we cease to be lazy with regard to his will, then life becomes beautiful and we are rewarded with the Kingdom of Heaven.

God cannot give a half denarius. He cannot give us half his love or half the kingdom, even if we only do half a day’s work in his vineyard. God always gives wholly and completely

God cannot give us less than his entire love. He does not half love us, nor give us half of his Kingdom, nor quarter of his Kingdom. When he gives, he gives completely. The challenge for us is to work in his vineyard and to begin working as soon as possible. If we end up working all day, sure, there is the heat. But we have found a position doing the work that we were made to do, just as the father of the family rejoices when he has found the employment that will put bread on the family table. When we work for the Kingdom then we are blessed for we have found the Lord, we have found the meaning of our existence.

September 14^th 2014.  The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Gospel: John 3:13-17

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL John 3:13-17

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

No one has gone up to heaven
except the one who came down from heaven,
the Son of Man who is in heaven;
and the Son of Man must be lifted up
as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so that everyone who believes
may have eternal life in him.
Yes, God loved the world so much
that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost
but may have eternal life.
For God sent his Son into the world
not to condemn the world,
but so that through him the world might be saved.

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . The forty years that Israel spent in the desert represents the spiritual journey in which I cease to be the reference point of my own existence and entrust myself to God. In the first reading, the people of Israel follow their own path and end up in a region of serpents. We too follow serpent-infested paths when we go our own way. How are we to undertake this journey away from a focus on ourselves and towards a life oriented utterly to God? It is the Cross that teaches us to abandon ourselves to the Lord. Often it is the incomprehensibility and pain of life that becomes the occasion for us to entrust ourselves to Jesus. It is in moments of desolation that I am challenged to either reject the existence of God or make him the meaning of my existence. When we give ourselves into the hands of God in our tribulation and pain, He is able to work wonders. The Cross becomes the scalpel with which God forms us into a new creation.

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross brings the centrality of the Cross into relief

This year the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross falls providentially on Sunday. Most years it falls on a weekday and the majority of the Catholic faithful do not have the opportunity to celebrate it. The Cross is a central element in our faith. Without a shadow of a doubt, we cannot hope to understand the nature of salvation if we do not pass through this gateway of the Cross. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross was instituted in order that we might bring the importance of the Cross into central relief.

The forty years in the desert represents the journey in each human heart towards total entrustment to God

The first reading comes from one of the first five books of the Old Testament, the Book of Numbers. The book narrates the events in the desert after the people of Israel escape from Egypt. This period of forty years in the desert had paradigmatic status for the Israelites: it became emblematic of the interior spiritual journey of the person. The time in the desert was a time of transformation and it has lessons that must be applied today to our daily existence. The escape from Egypt required little time, relatively speaking, and consisted in the unfolding story of the ten plagues, the night of the Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea. The Hebrew teachers used to say that just one night sufficed to take Israel out of Egypt, but to take Egypt out of the hearts of the Israelites took forty years. And that is how it is with all of us. It is easy to change our external circumstances, but a much more complicated thing to change our hearts.

The period in the desert represents the process of conversion. How can we escape from the prison that consists in the fact that we have made ourselves the focus of our own existence?

The time in the desert is filled with tests and temptations. Forty years represents an entire generation in chronological terms. In Old Testament times, forty years was the period required not only to reach adulthood, but to become a grandparent and to enter the stage of life when one became dependent on others. During the forty years in the desert, most of those who had escaped from Egypt would have died, and only their children would have entered the Promised Land. The time in the desert thus represents the transformation from the “old man” to the “new man”, the person prior to baptism and the person after baptism, the person before conversion and the person afterwards. What must the person prior to baptism overcome in order to change the old man into the new? What is required if one is to become a child of God who knows how to live in the Promised Land? The person must overcome the limits imposed on him by the self-referential nature of his prior existence. He must escape from the prison that consists in the fact that the person has made himself the measure and goal of his own existence.

As soon as we begin to follow our own paths, then we enter the region of serpents

In the first reading, the people do not understand why God has made them undertake this arduous journey and they begin to grumble. This account, which might seem rather archaic at first sight, has much to tell us about our own situations. When we begin to make our own vision absolute, failing to entrust our lives to God’s providence, then we too are bitten by the serpent. We are eaten alive by something that takes us into a kind of death. As soon as we begin to trust our own intelligence above that of God, presuming to tell God how one should journey through life, then we find ourselves with the burden of our lives upon our shoulders. The Sinai desert is composed of a series of identical hills, one after the other, and it is difficult to find the way through them because you can go around in circles a thousand times. The people of Israel decided to follow their own path and ended up among serpents. As soon as we begin to rely on ourselves for the direction we take in life, then we finish up among serpents.

The people are saved when they raise their eyes to behold God’s solution to their predicament

The act by which the Israelites are saved is genuinely strange. Moses raises a serpent made of bronze. The people must renounce their own intelligence, their own sense of which direction to take, and raise their eyes to gaze on the very thing that is afflicting them. In this way the Israelites are challenged to gaze upon the work of the Lord, on the thing that the Lord commands them to look at, and as a result they are saved.

The Cross is the place where we learn to entrust ourselves to God, where we decide that God exists and is the meaning of our existence. When we entrust ourselves to God by embracing the Cross, then we are transformed by him into a new creation

All of this becomes concrete in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are saved through the absurdity of the Cross. We go around in circles trying to avoid the Cross, but it is the place where we learn to entrust ourselves to God. The things that we find incomprehensible, the things that crucify us, these are the concrete situations of our existence where we consign ourselves into the hands of God. The Crosses that present themselves to us are the places where we decide whether God exists or not, whether the Father is the one to which we must entrust ourselves or not. If we abandon ourselves into His hands as Jesus did, then we allow ourselves to be formed by Him. The Cross is often the scalpel of God that transforms us into new creatures. When we give ourselves into the hands of God in tribulation and pain, He is able to work wonders! This is not something that we can justify rationally. Either we decide to entrust ourselves or we do not. Either we abandon ourselves into His hands one day, or we continue to follow our own paths that are infested with serpents. The love of God for us is only comprehended when we entrust ourselves to Him totally. Jesus loved us to the extent of delivering himself into our hands. He awaits until we do the opposite – entrust ourselves to Him and experience what He can achieve with our lives.

September 7^th 2014.  TWENTY THIRD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: Matthew 18:15-20

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL Matthew 18:15-20

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves.

If he listens to you, you have won back your brother.

If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you:

the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to sustain any charge.

But if he refuses to listen to these,

report it to the community;

and if he refuses to listen to the community,

treat him like a pagan or a tax collector.

‘I tell you solemnly, whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.

‘I tell you solemnly once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven.

For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . The Gospel passage gives us various strategies for correcting a wayward brother or sister. We are firstly to talk to them in private. If this doesn’t work, speak to them in public. If this fails, the wayward person is to become for us like the pagan or publican. Does this mean that we ostracize them or cast them out from the community? No! The ultimate goal of all of this process is to gain back a lost brother or sister, not to cast them out! In Matthew’s Gospel, the pagan and the publican are the very ones who are to be loved unconditionally. The Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. Do we think that Jesus died for everyone except the pagan and publican? Jesus asks us to try firstly to win back the wayward person through dialogue. If this fails, then we are to be silent and love the person unconditionally. Sometimes we proceed in the opposite manner! We demand that the wayward person conform completely to our rules and regulations before allowing them into “communion” with us. Salvation, communion are made conditional on conformation to rules and rubrics. Love is given conditionally when certain formulae are met. But rubrics do not save anyone! It is love that saves. Regulations must be in the service of the spirit that seeks communion. How often people in our church do things that seem objectively good but these things are done in a spirit that goes against communion! God sees the love with which we do things. The material fact of our actions is of secondary importance. What Christ yearns for above all is that his Church should be a beacon of love and communion for the world.

Ezekiel is asked to speak forthrightly, but this is with a view to bringing people to salvation

In the first reading the Lord appoints Ezekiel as a sentry to the house of Israel. This means that if the Lord asks Ezekiel to say something, then that thing must be said. If a wicked man faces death, then Ezekiel must tell the wicked man that he is going to die. This gives the wicked man the chance to convert. If he refuses to convert, then that is his own problem. But if Ezekiel remains silent, then the fault lies with Ezekiel.

Rules and rubrics will not bring the wayward person to salvation, and the priority of this passage is to bring the wayward to salvation

This passage gives us a good key for reading the celebrated account in Matthew’s Gospel on fraternal correction. “If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother.” This is the theme to the passage – the effort of winning back a brother or sister. We are not told to unleash on our brother all of our reserves of ecclesial acidity, an element that is very common in our sacristies. There is often a tendency to point out rules and regulations; to state that things must be done in a certain way. But precision and exactness have no real role to play in the business of reconciliation. Norms and rubrics do not provide salvation for anyone and they have no value unless they are in the service of the spirit of gaining back a brother or sister.

All of the strategies in the Gospel are strategies for winning back a wayward brother or sister. This Gospel gives us no justification for ostracizing those who do wrong

Why should we go to speak to a brother who has done wrong? In order to bring him to justice? In order to make him understand? In order to correct him? No, we speak to him so that he will be brought back to life. A brother or a sister is something that I cannot lose without great loss to myself. And the Gospel gives us a series of strategies for winning them back. First we must speak to them alone, then in the presence of other people. If they still will not listen then they must become for me like the pagan and the publican. Does this mean that they are to be ostracized by the community? No! In the Gospel of Matthew the pagan and the publican are the very ones that we are to give our lives for! The Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us. If the various strategies of speaking to the wayward brother or sister fail, then at that point we are asked to love them, full-stop! This text cannot be used to justify the doctrine of excommunication. Various passages from St Paul speak clearly of the practice of excommunication, which is a sacrosanct procedure aimed ultimately at bringing the brother to his senses and winning him back. The parable of the lost sheep tells us that the wayward person must always be sought out. The point is that there are various ways of seeking him out. There is the road of dialogue and then there is the road of loving him simply for who he is. The business of changing the heart of another is the most difficult of all things to obtain. In the end, communion is the goal that we must yearn for. We must built a church that is one only, not a series of separated perfectionisms. The church is not a communion of individual parts that are unable to dialogue with each other. Often we foment and perpetuate divisions by taking positions that seem reasonable and correct in themselves. It is easy to divide and fragment but it is an almighty task to build and to heal.

If the wayward person refuses to come to his senses, then we must simply love him unconditionally

When Jesus says that the wayward person is to become for us like the pagan and the publican, then he means that we are to give our lives for him. Do we think that the Lord died for everyone with the exception of the pagan and the publican? This is the Gospel of Matthew in which the very publican is called by Jesus to follow him! The pagan and the publican are the ones that must be loved for what they are in themselves.

God looks at the love with which we perform our actions, not the material fact of the actions themselves

This Sunday we are asked to consider all of our fraternal relationships in the light of one priority: communion. If we are not in communion with our brothers and sisters then everything else is of trivial significance. The fixations I have about the material changes that are needed for reconciliation are often best left aside. It is better to work from the little thread of communion that still exists between us. We are still brothers and sisters of the same Church and children of the same Father. It is much easier to feed the poor than to be reconciled with a brother or sister! It is easier to do great acts of charity than to overcome our pride and accept the offences of others! Sometimes people in our church do things that are objectively good but they do them with a spirit that goes against communion. God sees these things very clearly. What God looks for is the love with which we perform our actions, not the material fact of the actions themselves. That the Lord will grant us this Sunday to attain the thing that is of the greatest importance: union between all of us. This is what Christ yearned for most of all, that his Church would be a beacon of unity for the whole world.