Homily for the 14th Sunday after Trinity (23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
We can do no better than our collect for the day (14th Sunday after Trinity) at tying together the various themes from our readings:
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God: give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command…
In 1549 Cranmer translated that collect from the Sarum books, which in turn received it from a much older Roman tradition. In any case it implies something which we all know and experience: the sticky discrepancy between knowing God’s commandments and doing them. But the prayer puts it even more sharply by suggesting that ultimately the question is not so much one of power but of love. And without attempting a whole lecture here on the nature of the will, I will just say that the will, and love, occupy a similar space in the human mind. For to will something is more than a discrete intellectual choice among opposing possibilities: it is the inclination of the mind and heart to some perceived good. And if our loves are disordered, our will is inevitably disordered as well. This remains a great difficulty to the modern mind which prefers to think of love as purely a matter of emotion and will as purely a matter of freedom. But the Church holds that emotion and freedom both have a proper order. There are in fact some goods better than others. Even the most convinced secular person knows this intuitively. The trouble is that such a person also takes for granted that there is little one can know about it beyond such intuitions, so we are left with a world where we are not allowed to discuss what is good and evil, but only to fight over who has the power to enforce their will over others.
I lay out this sketch of contemporary morality as a necessary backdrop for any discussion of how we might apply the call of the prophet Ezekiel to confront wickedness where we see it. The call is to the prophet himself: a reminder that God will hold him responsible if he fails to tell people the truth. This prophetic ministry is central to the hierarchical ministers of the Church, but it has its own form in the whole body of the Christian faithful who receive from Christ the power and responsibility to speak the truth. The Lord’s instructions in Matthew 18 then lay out a particular order for doing this within the Church. But what of St. Paul’s argument in Romans 13 that love is the fulfilment of the law? In fact the confrontation with evil is at root an act of love. Obviously it is possible to challenge someone out of selfish motives, but real love, that desire to hold our neighbor’s good up next to our own, cannot idly watch as someone allows their soul to be corrupted with sin.
We might hear the final result of this disciplinary process — to cast out the brother and treat him as a Gentile and a tax collector — as something needlessly harsh. But here perhaps we should remember the person behind this particular gospel, Matthew… who was a tax collector. Indeed, didn’t Jesus make rather a name for himself by associating with Gentiles and tax collectors? The point of excommunication is not punishment, or even judgment; it is just a recognition that the wayward brother has made himself an outsider. Our love for him requires a different form, an invitation to conversion that requires not merely an external correction but a total transformation of desire. Conversion means a commitment to learning to love what God commands and ultimately desiring it even if we still find it hard to do.
The Lord’s instruction on church discipline leads to some powerful language about unity and fellowship, including a recurrence of the language of binding and loosing that we heard just a few chapters ago in the confession of St. Peter. Here we see that some of the authority given to Peter is extended even further to the apostles. While Peter’s role is unique, it is clear here that the apostles are not merely his delegates or branch managers; they too really share in Christ’s authority. We could probably say much more about that, but what I want to notice today is how all this language fits in the context of prophetic discipline. The fact is that this set of instructions is given very definitely to the Church as an institutional reality. I don’t mean to say that they imply anything about corporate civil law or the organizational procedures of the Roman curia, just that it would be very silly to extract from this passage a vision of the Church as merely a loose association of people who happen to be friends because they believe the same things. There’s a weight here, a witness, that relies on much more than individual faith.
I love how Fr. Simeon puts this in his commentary: “… the deeper urgency that compels Christians to strive for unanimity of witness and judgment derives not so much from a desire to achieve fairness as from the nature of the Church as that locus where the interior life of God becomes manifest for all to see. When Christians strive together for the truth, when they love one another in the truth, thus overcoming all manner of lower instincts that militate in the opposite direction, then the uncreated Father and his beloved Son are loving one another in and through humanity so that we, the church, become the bright dwelling place of the divine Spirit.”
And here I return to my observations about the state of morality in our world. It is absolutely true that we must speak the truth and confront evil, as the Lord commands Ezekiel. But what does that mean for us, exactly? Commenting on Ezekiel, John Bergsma says, “It’s safe to condemn the mafia in Nebraska, but it takes courage in Sicily. Likewise, it’s safe to condemn racism in contemporary America, but it wasn’t in the Old South or in Nazi Germany. And it is not safe to condemn abortion or a host of offences against marriage in the contemporary Church in the West…” I think Bergsma is mostly right, but also a little incomplete, because it is quite safe for me to stand here in the pulpit of a Catholic Church and say Catholic things about the immoral behavior of the world. What is far more difficult is to speak of the many subtle ways that we as Christians, individually and collectively, implicitly endorse or tolerate those things that we would never directly support, or the ways that our hypocrisy and inconsistency dilutes almost anything we might say on those subjects.
Ezekiel’s primary mission wasn’t to the nations but to Israel. Likewise St. Paul, and our Lord in Matthew, speak about the prophetic ministry within the Church. Again I do not suggest that Christians should not speak up in the public square, just that our primary duty is not changing the direction of history but preserving the unity and integrity of the Church who alone can show the world that it is the world, who alone can speak the truth about good and evil. What the world needs is not a little moral correction but conversion. How can we expect anyone to follow commandments if they do not know how to love? We must ourselves become so transparent to the love of Christ that the Holy Spirit will, through our witness, draw those around us to the glory of God.