Our readings today are not warm and fuzzy or comforting. They do not tell us a heart-warming parable. Instead, our readings today challenge us about sin, about how we are to help our brothers and sisters confront the sins they have in their lives, and about how we are to help them through a process of reconciliation.
Confronting the existence of sin in our world, helping our brothers and sisters face their sins and overcome sin in their lives: these are not topics that we normally want to address. Often, in modern America, we either want to judge or condemn others for their sins, or we want to brush their sins under the carpet and not deal with them at all. In seminary, we were encouraged to help our brother seminarians deal with problems or issues with which they struggled. Well, I remember once when a seminarian friend of mine started skipping mass for no apparent reason, and I confronted him with it. Boy was he angry at me . He yelled back at me: “How dare you talk to me that way. Who do you think you are? My guardian? My watchdog? Mind your own business.” I responded to him that as a brother seminarian, as a friend, I felt that it was my duty and responsibility to point this out to him and to help him along his journey of faith in that way. I told him that I wasn’t doing this to be mean or judgmental; I was trying to help in trying to discern his vocation to the priesthood. Obviously, he did not have the same perspective.
It is interesting that this seminarian asked me if I thought I was his watchdog, because in a way I was. We hear the Lord tell the prophet Ezekiel that he is a watchman, a lookout, a sentinel, who is to warn the people of the ways they’ve strayed from their faith, to call them out for their wickedness and to bring them back to the straight and narrow. The Lord tells Ezekiel that it is his responsibility to speak out, to give the people warning. God will hold Ezekiel responsible if he does not fulfill this role.
Yet, we are not to be a watchman out of arrogance or self-righteousness. We do not do this out of a desire to make ourselves look good or to boast like the Pharisees did. We are to do so out of love and compassion. St Paul tells us that we are to owe nothing to our neighbor, but what we do owe them is love. The love that is at the heart of our faith is to motivate us, just as it was the foundation of Jesus’ ministry and his proclamation of God’s kingdom.
In our readings today, St Paul and Jesus ask us to help each other out in reconciliation, to help each other look at the sins that exist in our lives. Paul sees the love of God and love of neighbor that we live out in our lives as the fulfillment of God’s law, while Jesus presents us a detailed schematic of how to help our neighbor address the sin in his life, especially when he sins against us. If we take this commandment to love seriously, that love will not remain disjointed and abstract in the shadows, but instead that love will become an integral part of the reality around us. In our everyday lives, in the call we receive from our faith, it’s our responsibility and our calling to decide how we’re going to love our neighbor, and this is a great responsibility indeed. This may sound simple on the surface, but in the messiness of daily, in the dynamics that exist in our human relationships, this is not easy at all. Just being nice and being politically correct aren’t going to fulfill this responsibility. Sometimes we will have to be very courageous. Sometimes we will have to confront our worst fears and those things that make us most uncomfortable in life. Sometimes the choices are make are very tough; sometimes none of the alternatives are to our liking. The road of faith is not always easy. Yet, if we truly proclaim God’s kingdom here on earth, this is what we’re called to do.
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